We were churning them out like potato chips. And like potato chips, they wouldn't always listen to us. At the time we had three of them, two girls and the smallest one was a boy. The oldest girl was old enough to be pretty self-sufficient. She was an excellent reader, and she liked to play her gameboy. She played piano and she got pretty good by practicing each piece a certain number of times each day. She attained the position of computer specialist in her 4th grade class, which meant that when someone had a problem she knew enough to tell them to try rebooting. This was because we started her early on the computer, an old one that needed rebooting a lot. Eventually it wouldn't reboot, it would freeze up on shutdown, I guess we overdid it, but that's besides the point, cause it was still good advice. So she would stay out of our hair, get herself dressed and even clean her room. She wasn't perfect. She would pick her nose and eat it (she was like I was), and she would fight with her little sister, but she was in pretty good shape.
Her little sister, this was our second potato chip, was cute but distractible (she was like I was). We had to yell at her a lot to get her to get ready for school or to get dressed, or to finish up in her bath, or to brush her teeth or to do her homework, or to run to first base. And if the first potato chip was arguing with the second, it just made it worse and then we had to yell at the both of them or take away their gameboys. She also played piano, but it was hard to make her focus. She liked softball, and dance and gymnastics and karate and Spanish and swimming and tennis and baking cookies. But it was hard to make her focus. She had a lot of enthusiasm, and was cute as a cuddly bear, but she could get mad. Her whining was like a weapon she used against us and it was very effective. Even her little brother would hold his ears and say that it was giving him a headache.
So that brings us to number three in the line of potato chips. The boy. He was happy and go lucky, tough and not overly sensitive. He could charm you with a smile, and he liked to break things. He didn't talk as much as the girls, but he had to put his hands on everything and then he would figure out how to break it. He liked to climb and didn't seem to mind falling. Up until the point at which we took him off diapers he seemed to be doing really fine. But by the time he was four he was still having some pooping issues. Everyone said he would get over it and that you never hear of adults having pooping issues, and all of that.
He would have accidents, and we told him and told him to poop in the potty but he didn't really want to do that, and so we yelled at him for having accidents and then he would try to hold it. He would hold it and he wouldn't listen to us when we told him to poop it out. The only person that could make him poop was his grandma. He wouldn't poop for anyone but her, all she had to do was ask. But she lived in Minnesota, and that was a long way to go for a poop, although as long as he held it we could have sometimes gotten there.
Now listen very carefully to this, boys and girls, because this is an important lesson that everyone should remember. He would hold it until there was so much in him, his poops would be almost too big to come out. And when they did come out they would be so big that you couldn't believe such a big poop came out of such a little boy. We really got worried when they started getting bigger than he was, leaving an emaciated little boy in its wake. And then the inevitable day came when we had to take him into a gas station bathroom after he had been successfully holding his poop inside for weeks. He sat on the toilet and strained and grunted, and was the brave little soldier. When it came time, he was always brave, despite what pain it must have caused. We would tell him to push and to let his poop go swimming and that he had to make the choice to make it come out. We would push the poop button (a little below mid back and just slightly left of the spine) and we would tell him to "be the poop!" (we didn't mean it). He would push and grunt and you would hear him say in his tiny strained little voice, "I'm pooping." But this poop was something. It was so big it consumed him. And when he was done pooping it out, he was gone. And that was the end of potato chip number three. Well, we figured we could make more. This is a stupid story. I strained to poop it out.