Sesame Street - Elmo's Potty Time (DVD, 2006)

It's too bad that DVDs can't be flipped over like phonograph records, because Toilet Training is a subject just naturally seems to be most easily discussed in a #1/#2 format.

Please remember that as a parent, you are going (so to speak) to have to watch this, er, crap until your eyeballs turn yellow and brown. So your Number One AND Number Two criteria for selecting any multimedia toilet-training material(s) is how effectively your kid's water-closet curriculum also serves to amuse and/or distract (or distract and/or amuse) the average adult.

How will you know when your little darling is ready to make the move(ment) up to big-boy pants/big-girl panties? When you no longer find anything even remotely funny about the Diaper Genie, then it's time for Junior/Juniorette to begin learning to mind their P's and...poos. Because by now, YOU certainly do.

If you have sadly outgrown your capacity to laugh at 3rd-grade bathroom humour, then Elmo and his overanimated posse of Sesame Street puppets will help you -- as well as your child[ren] -- to sing and dance, wipe-flush-and-wash your way through this psychologically fraught phase of life.

For those of us with a more gleefully perverse turn of mind, it's kind of creepy (if not downright disturbing) to watch these ambiguously gendered characters of various unspecified species obsess over "having to GO."

Speaking as a Baby Boomer whose Mommy had to toilet-train us kiddies the old-school, low-tech way -- i.e., 5 miles to and from the bathroom, uphill in the snow both ways -- Elmo's Potty Time (2006, DVD) would be only my number-two choice.

Butt if urine the mood to brush up on your personal-hygiene habits, then it's your potty. OK? Go!

*[p.s.\Please Note: This Review is written with tongue-in-cheek as a light-hearted "Public Service Announcement" for stressed-out parents...so please ReaD and RaTe it in the spirit of CoMiC ReLieF with which it was written. LBNL, don't forget to wipe, flush and wash~{{;>}~Thank you!!!]