It's All About The Poo Poo

My youngest is currently a bit obsessed with poo. Of the many stages children go through this might be one of the strangest and while I don’t remember my eldest going through it I’ve heard many children do. Fortunately I don’t mean she is flinging poo around monkey style or spreading her excrement on the walls, but rather she is going through a phase where she loves to talk about and pretend to play with poo. She's even shouted the word out at least 25 times while I have been writing this post (she's also watching In The Night Garden, but I don't think that's the trigger).

A public toilet with a child's seat attached


A recent conversation:
“Here you go Mummy” says Little handing over an empty plastic plate.
“Ooo thank you, what is it?”
“Poo poo”
“Umm, great? Er actually I’ve just eaten and I’m a bit full right now” 
“Daddy like it”
“Yes well, he would”
She then tried to persuade me to eat poo for the next few minutes. Little I love you, but I’m not going to eat even pretend poo for anyone.

More recently (as in 3 minutes ago) she danced around the room to Iggle Piggle's song replacing all the words with "poo".

Why? I don’t know, maybe it’s linked to her being more aware of bodily functions and her near readiness to potty train? Maybe there is just something hilarious about poo that as a thirty odd year old woman I can’t fully appreciate.

Wearily I attempted to google “children amused by poo” rather worried about what images or videos might appear in the results. I'm a little concerned that the first page of results included a link to: the play area page of a caravan park, 'How to entertain your children in the holidays', an article about drugging your children on flights and a post about keeping kids amused at weddings with Lego. Either those posts have got some crazy SEO going on or I REALLY don’t want to read them.

Interestingly a post on The Conversation claims that toilet humour is a natural part of children’s development, and in particular their development of humour and language. They also support my theory that it is linked to learning to go to the toilet.

So I won’t worry about my toddler running around, shouting “poo poo” and laughing. As long as there isn’t actual poo being spread around or forced in my face I’ll just try to encourage her to feed me tea and cake and cross my fingers that this 'phase' is one of the shorter ones.

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