When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?
I've got 4 small kids (3 boys + 1 girl; only the girls is in diapers). We do a 2 hour road trip down to the grandparents about every other weekend. We always make them go to the bathroom before we leave, but we still have pee emergencies pretty much every trip.
For us, peeing on the side of the freeway is basically a must. If we try to find a proper bathroom, that's easily a 20+ minute detour. Driving to the bathroom is maybe 5 minutes, but then wrangling the problematic kid(s) is much more difficult in a dirty garage bathroom than on the side of the road. (I can't count the number of times I've had a kid wipe their junk on a public restroom toilet and then I have to do a serious disinfection...)
So my policy for side-of-road peeing is:
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It has to be safe to stop.
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There shouldn't be pedestrians around that can see us. (So this means no peeing on non-freeway type streets, and certain sections of freeway are also off limits.)
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There has to be "nature" to pee on. Some amount of grass/dirt is okay, but a tree is best. If we're on the stretch of the I5 in Irvine, where there's concrete everywhere, we won't stop. (This is partly related to pts 1+2.)
I realized on this week's roadtrip that I've never seen another car parked with the kids out peeing. Am I breaking some sort of major taboo here?
I'm also not sure what I'll do once the girl isn't wearing diapers, and whether I'll allow / force her to pee on the side of the road.
PokerPirate
7d ago
It's a blast for the adults too! We occasionally play a game called "hurricane" where I jump cannonballs onto the roof/walls and shake the ship from the outside. 30 minutes of that is a full body workout better than anything I've ever done at the gym... I'll be sore for days after...
When we need to clean it, I'll throw a gallon of bubble juice in. There's air leaking out through seams all over (this is intentionally how they are designed), and this leads to instant bubbles everywhere. Like 3 foot high foam pits covering the floor.
The thing weighs ~500 pounds. (The box it came in says 900lbs, but that includes a trolley and blower.) I can move it by myself, but only barely, and it takes about an hour to pack/unpack. So it mostly stays in the backyard and I use a tarp to cover it when its deflated and not in use. During the hottest months of the summer I usually put it in the garage to make a bit more space in the backyard to play.
We once had a rat eat a giant hole in the bounce house (1 square foot, plus a lot of smaller punctures). Surprisingly, it still stays pretty well inflated with the hole, but it was an easy patch job.
I also have the blower setup about 50 feet away from the bounce house and use ducting to move the air from the blower to the bounce house. It makes the operation essentially silent.
PokerPirate
8d ago
Four years ago I bought a bounce house. A proper commercial grade bounce house. It's shaped like a pirate ship, 35 ft long, 15 ft wide, has a poop deck, a slide, a mast that can be climbed up, and a bunch of fake cannons.
I paid $1000 to get it used off craigslist, and it's the best investment I've ever made.
I've got 4 young kids: 7, 4, 3, and 2 years old. Right now, they're all jumping around and getting their energy out and happy to play together without daddy. It gives me a chance to cook dinner and write this real quick note. And they'll actually sleep tonight :)
PokerPirate
10d ago
I already have the wedding toast all planned out :)
PokerPirate
10d ago
Yeah, there's a scene in The Jungle Book 2 where Balu does a belly flop. They've been obsessed with that movie for the last month or so... acting out all of the other scenes... and they finally learned that cartoons aren't real life...
Two days ago, my 4 year old shouted "belly flop" and then jumped face first from our porch step onto the sidewalk below. The results were predictably gruesome. The main injury was three large gashes in his lips where he bit through the lip, but blood also gushed out of his nose and (more lightly) from his forehead, knees, and elbows.
This is one of my favorite events to happen so far as a father. (And I actually mean that literally.) It perfectly captures for me the idea of just how stupid/innocent kids are (and presumably I once was). I'm also really proud of the little guy for taking his injury in stride. There was lots of crying for 30 minutes or so, but once we got him cleaned up and bandaged, he was back outside playing with his brothers again. He's been showing off his injuries to all his little kid friends and making sure they know not to belly flop in the sidewalk too.
I like to go on walks with my kids. The other day we were walking back from church when we crossed paths with a couple of middle aged men walking their dog. As soon as my 3yo saw them, he shouted as loud as he could, "Gay! Gay! Daddy, look, a gaaaaayyyyyyy!!!"
Gay means "dog" in Korean. We're a pasty white American family, but I'm learning Korean with my kids because of some work I do with North Korea. Oops. At least he's not saying the words "you", "I", or "because"... they all sound just like nigga.
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