My Boys are Filthy, Filthy Animals

As most of you know, I have two sons. They are boys, so they are gross. They are getting better in some ways (helping with chores), but also getting worse in other ways (puberty-related body odor). 

We did an extensive home renovation almost three years ago. One component was turning our downstairs half-bath into a full bathroom. We have one downstairs bedroom, so converting the bathroom makes sense for folks who want to have a nanny/parent sleep in that bedroom and have their own shower. Unfortunately, we were pressed for space. We were able to get it done, but it required a tight shower space. My wife decided on sliding glass doors into the shower, located right next to our toilet. And that's where the trouble started. Because the glass doors are where the urine splatters land. 

Our sliding glass doors look like Jackson Pollock paintings, if Jackson Pollock painted with pee pee. The pic above shows it. Thankfully for all, it doesn't show up that great in pics. Maybe it would show up better if I put more effort in, but nobody needs that sorta effort on this sorta project. 

Like most of us, I have done the occasional middle-of-the-night pee where you start letting it go, and then hear a sound that sounds totally incorrect because you're peeing against a wall, onto the tile floor, into the garbage can, or some combination thereof. So I'm not preaching from a place of elite urethral acuity. But this is something different. It's like my kids swing their dorks around like sprinklers when they are whizzing. 

This whole scene is bad and embarrassing. I think my boys make splatters every time they go. I bark at them. I make them clean it up with wipes. But I can't keep up with it. It's our only first-floor bathroom, so everybody in the family uses it multiple times a day. We have housecleaners that come every few weeks, and I can't just leave it that long and have them deal with it. In fact, I feel bad about leaving that for them at all, so I give a couple cursory wipes before they come. When I remember. Which is sometimes. 

I wanted to capture the injustice of this issue to make a point to my kids. I took photos, and I took out a tape measure to measure splatter distance. I felt like the forensic investigator from The Staircase. Thankfully for you all, the photos don't capture the grossness of what is an otherwise lovely washroom. But the tape measure provides scale. The pic above shows the closest possible splatter one can leave. It is 10" from the inside edge of the latrine. So that's the CLOSEST a splatter can be. But it gets worse. Much worse. Look at the picture below. I measured the FARTHEST splatter mark. It is a whopping 23.5" from the edge. And to make it worse, it is almost behind where you should stand. It's about 135 degrees off. How does that even happen? 

I don't know what to make of all of this. I'm afraid to check right now, even though the cleaning ladies were here y/day. I'm sure there's grossness there. Sigh.