Pee Pee Poo Poo

(And other things I read this week.)

 

If you give a group of first and second graders colored chalk at the end of a long school day, because the teacher left playdough for them to work with, but you know that the playdough will most likely end up in people’s hair and then will be turned into balls that get tossed around the classroom and ground into the carpet and since you do not want to give the frazzled custodian extra work, you are grateful that another teacher takes pity on you and loans you a box of beautiful sidewalk chalk. If that happens, then you can rest assured that someone in the group will stealthily write “butt,” “butt,” “butt,” all over the school courtyard when you are not looking, on the day before the fall open house. Someone else will write, “Pee pee poo poo.”

(This is not funny)

(Maybe it is a little funny.)

So then you will take the graffiti writers aside (The second grade equivalent of a graffiti writer, anyway), and you will have a talk about what words are appropriate for the school courtyard on the day before open house. Then you will frantically run into the classroom to search for a bowl, or cups, or anything to fill with water so that they can splash water on the sidewalk and wash away the inappropriate words. You might also hope that the other teachers who have rooms facing the courtyard will be so involved in their lessons that they do not notice the ruckus your first and second graders are causing.

While this is happening, another group of kiddos will wander around the school courtyard (right under the windows of the other teachers’ classrooms, of course), exploring like they’ve never been there before. Somehow they manage to find a plastic egg that has a peppermint inside of it, left over from a past Easter egg hunt?  Probably! Who knows how long ago? Someone else catches a tiny cricket and wants to put it in the plastic egg for a little cricket house, because the egg has breathing holes in it so it will be fine and it is my new pet!

If this happens, you will say, “No. No. No. Let’s not put the cricket in the plastic egg. Let’s not eat the wrapped candy in the egg (although it might be too late for that). Let the cricket go so he can live to sing another evening.”

Somehow, remarkably, they agree to that.

After the cricket is released into the bushes (“But I can keep the Easter egg because I found it!”), you finally have a chance to unearth plastic cups from the teacher’s supply cupboard.

(Because, remember? Open house! And “Butt. Butt. Butt” and “Pee pee. Poo poo,” still gracing the courtyard.)

When you bring out plastic cups of water, you can be sure that the students who were not involved in the discovery of the Easter egg or the catching of the cricket, the ones who have been happily drawing on the pavement, pictures of rainbows, unicorns, and pathways that lead from “my house” (at one end of the sidewalk) to “your house” on the other: you can be sure that all of them will want plastic cups full of water.

“I want a cup with water! I want one! I am thirsty! It is hot!”

(They are right about it being hot.)

“No,” you say again. (You say that a lot these days)

“No. No. No. The plastic cups are for water to cover up the inappropriate words. If you want a drink, you can go in the classroom and use the drinking fountain.”

Then you can be sure that the whole group of little ones will ask, “What were the words?”

And then you will sigh very deeply and look at the clock on your phone and wonder how is it possible that all of this has transpired in less than ten minutes, and there is still half an hour until the end of the school day.