Bedtime for my three-year old, Athena,  is never complete without her poopoo book entitled “Everyone Poops”.  That’s on the top of her reading list.  With her crude speech she does her best to read along with me. When I turn the page to her favorite line she holds her hand up as a signal for me to stop and then she’d  slowly and laboriously recite  ”A one hump camel makes a one hump poop. A two hump camel makes a two hump poop.”  Burst of laughter. I chuckle along with her.

I saw this at a store last year but I never bothered with it.  Its very graphic treatment of  bowel movement  made me snicker and put it down. It had pictures of butts, genitals, and shit of all kinds. Last February, my aunt, Tita Rory,  gave the book as a present to my daughter on her birthday. These days, whenever she sees me lying down on the couch or on the bed,whether it’s bedtime or not,  she’d rush to look for her poopoo book so I can read it to her. Eventhough I’m so sick of it and often beg her to get another book, I still do it because I enjoy watching her laugh when I make all sorts poop noises for different animals.

On pages 12 and 13 you will see a big whale and the question “What does a whale poop look like?”. This part always awakens my curiosity. It fills me with a strong desire to see whale excreta. Is it long like that of a gold fish? If whales are as big as a bus, how big could their feces be? Is it well-formed or does it disintegrate the moment it hits the water? Such are the intellectual musings that have occupied my mind of late. Obviously it has done something to me. Whether it’s for the better or for the worse, I really can’t say.

My daughter likes to identify with the human illustrations in the book. If she sees a picture of a child, whether girl or boy, she’ll declare that it’s her. An argument starts everytime we get to page 23. She’d point at the picture and say, “That’s Athena, da baby.” I would correct her that the child on the page has a  pitoy (penis) like her brother’s so it couldn’t possibly be her. She’d insist that she also has a putoy. One afternoon, when she saw her brother putting on his pants, she ran toward him asking to get a peek at his putoy. Feeling violated, her brother angrily told her to leave his private parts alone. She merely giggled and answered, “I have a meemew(her term for vagina).” It was at this point when Freud’s psycho sexual theory flashed in my head. Now I understand why Athena loves that book so much. At the age of  three, she is in the anal stage of development. It is a period where her most-important task is toilet-training, a time of gender curiosity.  I  realized I shouldn’t be annoyed even if I have to read the book to her  again and again. I should thank Kane/Miller Book Publishers for the hours of fun that they’ve provided us.  In fact, I’m thinking of  buying two more similar books that they’ve published: “The Gas We Pass” by Shinta Cho, and “The Holes in Your Nose” by Genichiro Yagyu. Just like “Everyone Poops”, I think they’re gonna be a hit with my preschooler.

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