The exhausted dad: Big toilets – a kindergartner’s nightmare

Parents of 5 and 6-year-olds know the challenge of the first weeks of kindergarten. These new little learners do so much during a full school day that by the time they get home, they often have zero energy for, well, anything.

After his first day of kindergarten, my son sprinted up to me with a giant smile on his face. He hopped into the car with aplomb, raced off a few incomprehensible words and we reversed out of the parking lot.

It takes approximately three minutes to get home from the school. By minute two, my son couldn’t keep his eyes open. We got home a minute later, and, after wrestling his near-lifeless body out of the car, he stood idle in the driveway as I walked up to the front door.

“Let’s go inside, buddy,” I called to him from the porch, which is, at most 20 feet from where he stood in the driveway.

“I’m too tired!” he said, before flopping to his knees and grunting out an extended moan.

My son stopped taking naps around age 3. But for probably half of the first two weeks of kindergarten, he’s passed out on the living room floor for multiple hours after school.

Being a new learner comes with so many new challenges, and thankfully, my son’s teacher is a miracle worker. I don’t know how any of these teachers manage so many clueless children about these basic tasks (forming a line, carrying a backpack that’s bigger than their entire tiny bodies, etc.). How schools don’t lose a few of these aimless little people on any given day is seriously impressive.

Unfortunately, my son’s teacher can’t help my son face every challenge at the school. For example, she can’t abandon the rest of her classroom just to help my son conquer the big toilets in the boy’s bathroom.

Look, my son is a young 5, and a skinny little bugger to boot. He uses a potty seat at home, and anywhere else he requests the arms of a parent to use as a handle so he can keep his butt from splashing down into the public toilet water.

While the bowls at his school certainly aren’t truck stop-sized toilets, the holes are considerably larger than the one on his potty seat at home. When we showed him the toilets at his school orientation, he asked if he could pack his potty seat in his backpack to class every day.

If that wasn’t enough, the toilets at the school flush automatically in a manner most adults would classify as extremely loud and terrifying. Why do they need to be so powerful? It’s not a truck stop bathroom, after all.

You might ask, “What about the urinals?” Well, that’s a literal no-go for now. In fact, the kid has yet to pee standing up even once in his short life, unless you count the diaper years. Am I supposed to teach him about urinals? I didn’t see a reference to that one in the parent manual.

Not surprisingly, our son lost his first battle with the big toilets on the first day of school.

Despite going into the bathroom a few different times during the day, he later admitted that he never made it past the sink. He didn’t want to deal with those loud toilets, and he thought he could hold it for the entire day.

Did I mention that his teacher is an absolute saint? Anyway, she worked some magic and made this little accident just a tiny blip of an incredible first day of school.

That being said, my son needed some more coaching. So his mom took him to school early just to practice slaying the big toilets. (I was unavailable… I swear!)

The key takeaway of big bathroom training: Halting the premature screams from the automatic flusher. Turns out, you can block the sensor with a sticky note or even a carefully applied sheet of toilet paper. I don’t know all the details, and I apologize if such behavior goes against big bathroom protocol, but my son now knows how to keep the toilet beast from yapping its bone-chilling mouth.

The various successes of the school day, however, give rise to new challenges at home. One afternoon, he collapsed onto the entryway stairs and began to moan.

After asking him multiple times to form words, he finally mustered, “I need to go potty, but I’m too tired!”

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student and parent to four kids, ages 5-11. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.