Vide-o de Toilette

You know how sometimes you would give almost anything, like, something important like your left boob (or for you male readers, the alternate body part of choice) just for a few minutes of uninterrupted time to get something done?

To be able to write/cook/take a dump without being poked, prodded, pestered, or otherwise Mommm-meeeeeeeee'd half to death?

Yeah, me too. Which is why I sometimes allow my five-year-old to play with my iPhone. Unattended. I just switch it over to airplane mode, so he can't send or receive texts or calls, and let him have at it. I know it's probably a moronic thing to do and it's only a matter of time before my iPhone dies an ugly death at the hands of my son. But ... quiet time. I mean ... I think you feel me on that one.

One of his favorite things to do is use the iVideoCamera app. He records himself performing video tutorials like the kind you'd see on YouTube. Only it's stuff like "how to knit," wherein he twiddles a piece of yarn between two toothpicks for eight minutes and forty-seven seconds. And then there are the times he just records random nothingness, which goes pretty much like this:

- Shot of carpet
- Camera travels up wall and stops on ceiling for a length of time
- Back down wall, then to carpet. I holler at someone in the background. Cat runs by.

I'm sure there's some really amusing stuff on there, y'all. But enough of those seemingly endless carpet-wall-carpet type videos have soured me to the thought of going through Colin's home-movie stockpile (seriously, there are like forty of them). Still, I got a warning message from my phone yesterday saying that my memory is almost full and that I should delete some photos or videos - so I reluctantly went to erase a few of his more boring uneventful recordings.

At first I just callously started deleting, left and right, without even watching them first. But then my "Mommy guilt" started gnawing at me, in the same way it does when I throw away even the most insignificant paper that Colin brings home from school. (I hate that!) So I decided to start watching at least a few seconds of each one, to try to determine if it was worth saving.

I pressed Play.

The video opened with a shot of Cameron, lounging on the arm of the couch, watching TV ... naked. It was followed by an extreme closeup of Colin's face, eyes and nose only. Then the usual dizzying swirl of carpetwallcarpetceiling (note to self: teach him to at least steady camera). My thumb hovered over the "Delete" option, but then the camera focused in on Colin's feet as they walked quickly down what appeared to be the hall ... and into the bathroom.

I watched nervously as the video captured the toilet lid going up, and then - ever so slowly at first - the trickle of a stream of pee.

Pee. And toilet water. Within the immediate vicinity of my iPhone.

Yeah, I use my phone on the toilet sometimes. If you have a smartphone, you know you do too. But I have been holding onto things for 25 years longer than Colin: that's a whole quarter of a century more experience. If either of us has come close to perfecting the art of not dropping phones into toilets, I'm pretty sure it's me.

Lucky for him, though, he was able to grasp it well enough to not only video himself peeing, but to flush and record the graceful swirl of water down the hole. *shudder*

Then it was back down the hall and back to Cameron, who was still watching TV, but draped over the top of the bookcase this time.

Still naked, naturally.

I'm beginning to think those videos of random nothingness might not be so bad after all.