Ok, ladies, let’s chat.  I know we all have experienced a very unpleasant phenomenon, at one time or another: pee on a public toilet seat.  So, so gross.  To be fair, I suppose men have experienced this, too, but I somehow don’t think that it’s as frequent an occurrence for them.

Just this past weekend, while at my kids’ dance recital, I took advantage of an intermission to visit the ladies’ room.  After waiting in line, I finally got a chance to duck into a stall, only to find it speckled with urine.  My eyes rolled back into my head, I grumbled for a few seconds, and I did what I normally do in this situation: made a heavy duty toilet paper mitt, wiped down the seat, then built a lovely tp nest on which to sit.  Had I taken my purse to the restroom, I probably would have wiped the seat down with a Clorox cloth as well; but  hey, desperate times call for desperate measures, as I only had five minutes.

After my very bird-like nest building urges subsided, I began to wonder, as I do every time: who on earth pees all over a toilet seat and thinks it’s ok to just stand up and leave?!?  Ew, ew, ew.  C’mon, ladies, you’ve all seen it.  Perhaps you’re guilty of it; it happens, whatever.  But the real crime is leaving your mess for someone else to potentially sit in.  (I’m dry heaving just thinking about it.)  Would it really kill you to take a moment to check to make sure you’re business actually made it to its intended destination?  It’s your urine.  Be a woman, make a tp mitt like I do, and clean it up!

My most recent experience with this has also made me realize why ladies’ rooms are constantly out of toilet paper.  Apparently, I’m not the only one cleaning up toilet seats and building nests to sit on.  If we would all agree to sit down when we visit the potty, as opposed to using the “hover technique” (which a lot of you need practice with, since you’re constantly soaking the seat), we wouldn’t need to fashion the tp mitt before sitting down.  I would totally still build my nest, though, as I will do everything in my power to avoid coming in contact with fecal matter.  (Dry heaving, again.  This is not the blog I planned to write today.)

That brings me to a lovely nest-building anecdote, one worthy of being reenacted by Liz Lemon or Christine Campbell (if we could still enjoy new episodes of 30 Rock or The New Adventures of Old Christine).  While I was pregnant with my third little duckling, I took the other two to our local water park for an afternoon of swimming.  Being pregnant, and having to pee every three minutes, I obviously visited the restroom right when we arrived, to avoid having to drag a two- and four-year-old out of the water too soon. Yes, I built my nest.  The restroom trip seemed pretty uneventful…until I got home.

Because the kids were so small, and we had season passes, we were only at the water park for a little over an hour.  When we arrived home, I went to change out of my wet bathing suit, and to my absolute horror, found that my tp nest was still stuck to my backside.  I had stood in the baby pool, for that long, with a giant wad of tp stuck to my ass and back of my legs…and nobody told me!!  The hot, sticky weather had caused the tp to stick when I sat down, and I just assumed it went down with the flush.  I could not have been more wrong.  It hung out for the whole time we were there that day.  Now, after almost five years, it’s hilarious, but I was so mortified after it happened, and I couldn’t believe that not one other mom in that pool had the nerve to tell me that I had toilet paper hanging out of my suit.  Fan-freaking-tastic.

Lesson learned: when you build a tp nest, make sure it gets flushed.  The next lesson learned: if you see a poor mom struggling with two small kids in a pool, and she has tp stuck to her ass, TELL HER.  Same goes for boogers hanging out of noses, but that’s another blog for another day.

Ladies, we need to look out for each other.  We’re all going through a lot of the same stuff, and if we can stop and help by (tactfully) pointing out something embarrassing that could be easily remedied, DO IT.  If you can save the next user of a public restroom some frustration by wiping your own urine of the toilet seat, DO IT.  It won’t make the kids stop screaming, or take away the piles of laundry, or make the bills go away, but you’ll be making someone else’s day just that much better.

Thanks, in advance.  xoxo