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The only thing my middle daughter wanted for Christmas was a pooping turtle. The ads for the Little Live Pets Gotta Go Turdle promise “an interactive, toilet-trained turtle who loves to sing, dance, chat back, eat, and poop — on the toilet!” To a five-year-old, that’s a persuasive pitch. For weeks, all we heard was:
Pooping turtle! Pooping turtle! Pooping turtle!
A visit to a hard-of-hearing Santa resulted in some confusion, since my daughter’s residual babyspeak screamed through the filter of a cloth mask made her persistent request sound like “POOPOO TWODDLE,” which, unlike “pooping turtle,” is a silly thing to ask for. To make extra sure, she dictated a letter to the North Pole which, in her mother’s pristine handwriting, unmistakably listed “Pooping Turtle” as the first of only five total items. And so we were obligated to buy her a pooping turtle.
She doesn’t like it all that much. At first, Shelbert (or Lena, as our daughter has renamed her (the renaming plus the inherent difficulty in sexing testudines forces me to guess at proper pronouns (Lena: please forgive me if I have misgendered you))) was of great interest to the whole house. It was not merely scatological curiosity driving Lena’s early popularity. She repeated whatever the kids screamed at her, she made delightfully weird digestive noises, her giant prehistoric neck…
