Bursting... with... stuff...

You will remember from this post, potty training is not our strong suit.  You definitely can't claim toilet training proficiency when it took the intervention of a dog with the IQ of a quail suffering from a brain injury to teach your daughter how to use the potty.
Enter Malakai.

He is a delightful young man in incalculable ways, but one of his more frustrating traits is that he is, in the grand tradition of children in our family, adamantly against anything that we feel strongly would be beneficial in easing the financial burden of a herd of children who eat like a camp of lumber jacks.  As such, he was profoundly anti potty training.  We thought confidently of his fixation on candy and decided that we would cave as we did with Meron and give him candy every time he uses the bathroom.  This was unsuccessful at first for two reasons: first, we don't like to clean pee off of the floor or poop out of underwear and second, we had a teen age nanny all summer long who was lovely, but not as committed to the potty training quest as we were.  So, after a highly unhygienic and incredibly disgusting experience of cleaning poo out of a pair of swimming trunks, I admitted defeat and retreated.
But lately, Kai has been showing unmistakable signs that he is ready. Interested in the potty, staying dry for long periods of time, etc. We decided to leap in again.  And he did great. Yay for Kai.  Except... he was scared to poop on the toilet. Not like, concerned about it. Terrified. Like a giant alligator would appear the moment the deed was done and bite his suspended tush.  We begged. We pleaded. We bribed shamelessly.  All to no avail.  Until he saw the truck. Oh, the truck.  Malakai is fascinated by fire trucks.  While wandering the aisles of a dollar store, Malakai saw this truck and his eyes literally popped out of his head. It wails. It beeps. It makes... all sorts of horrible screechy noises that are unidentifiable to me, but make him leap with glee.  So, we did what any terrible parents would do and promised him a fire truck if he would poo on the potty.  He ran desperately to the potty in the store, but with no satisfactory result.  He was disappointed, but determined.
The next evening while everyone was enjoying some post supper crazy time, Malakai suddenly disapeared. We didn't notice right away (do you need me to reiterate that we aren't great parents?).  He came out of the bathroom, sans pants and announced that he had produced "kaka."
I looked at Nathan. Our eyes met in mingled hope and disbelief.  Nathan sprinted to the bathroom to find said kaka in the toilet.
Now, I imagine that in finer homes, the discovery of poo in a toilet after the emergence of a child would be proof of depositor. Not so in our home. We have three small children, all of whom often forget to flush. We had been fooled before when Malakai claimed a kaka that clearly wasn't his (don't make me go into how we figured out who it belonged to).
Nathan frantically began interrogating the girls and I. "Is this yours?! Did you do this?! WHO DID THIS?!" I read it as excitement, but the girls apparently read this behavior as "Daddy has finally been pushed off the deep end by poop." and began to slowly back away while shaking their heads.  He advanced on me next, but I proclaimed  innocence ignorance.  He ran to Malakai who was standing proudly by the toilet and flipped him upside down like a rubber duckie flipped by a carny and roared with ecstasy "IT'S HIS! HE POOPED IN THE POTTY!!!"  Nathan then proceded to hoist him into the air ala Simba in "The Li0n King" while the girls jumped around in circles cheering and clapping. And then Nathan gave him an entire bag of jelly beans.
I seriously laughed so hard I fell over. I love them so much. And we're all proud.

Especially this guy.