My youngest, Naomi, loves to sing along with P!NK and for quite some time would sing “Trouble.” She doesn’t know all the words to this song. Actually, the only part of the song she knows at all and sings over and over again is, “Trouble now, I’m trouble now.”
(For those who haven’t heard the song, visit this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFu3YzRnyDU)

I would say trouble describes Naomi. Not necessarily in a bad way, but simply in a 4-year-old kind of way. You see, she’s been having some problems in the bathroom lately. Don’t worry, I’m not going to discuss bodily functions here, just want to share a story or two that pretty much all moms and dads will understand.

A couple of nights ago, Naomi headed into the bathroom. We heard her singing loudly, which is not at all uncommon.  A few minutes later I heard her say something, but didn’t hear exactly what she said. Then she said it again. Hubby threw his laptop on the sofa and went running into the bathroom. What I didn’t understand, was her saying, “Sorry I used too much toilet paper mommy.” Wish I would have heard that clearly the first time she said it, because when your 4-year-old makes this statement, it’s time to run. I arrived in the bathroom to see Naomi with her pants down around her ankles, standing on hand towels in the middle of the bathroom, with tears running down her face. I’ve never seen that much water on my bathroom floor and the hand towels she was standing on were not going to lower the water level at all. For a matter-of-fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much water on any bathroom floor and it took about 8 full-size bath towels to clean up the water.

Surely she was traumatized enough to not let that happen again. Yet today she excused herself from lunch and headed into the bathroom. A short time later I hear her saying, “The bathroom flooded.” I ran in to find her standing in the laundry room, pants around the ankles again, crying and water up to the rim of the toilet. Apparently the episode from the other evening traumatized her enough that this time she got out of the bathroom, but not enough to stop her from using so much toilet paper.

I know that she’ll eventually figure all of this out, but at the moment it’s just trouble now.