Don't Dance on the Toilet: and Other Things I Never Thought I'd Say to My Kids

By Teralyn Pilgrim

"It's very wrong to put soap in Mommy's contacts case."

"Who colored on the puppy with a highlighter?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Savage Ink
• Release date: Jul 16, 2025
• ISBN: 9798349470349

Teralyn Pilgrim

Teralyn Pilgrim is the author of Don’t Dance on the Toilet and Other Things I Never Thought I’d Say to My Kids and The Heart Project Challenge Book. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Western New England University and a BA in English from Brigham Young University. 

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Introduction

Get your toe out of your eye.

I used to think common sense was something you were born with. Then I became a parent. Turns out, common sense must be taught.

For example: when my daughter Rose was three, she liked to touch her eyeball.

I don’t mean she would close her eyelid and touch it. She would put her finger on the white of her bare eye and just hold it there.

I made every effort to get her to stop. I didn’t know if touching her eye would damage it or not, but that was beside the point. Touching eyeballs is creepy. But there was something so appealing about the texture of her eyeball that for years, she would not be deterred.

Of all the quirky habits in the world, Rose touching her eye for no reason, just because she liked it, had to be one of the weirdest.

Then she took the weirdness up a notch. She put her toe in her eye. It was so gross that I just about lost it.

Rose! I cried. "Do not ever, ever, ever put your toe in your eye."

I’ve wanted to have kids ever since I was a kid. I used to fantasize about being a mom like Maria in Sound of Music, singing Raindrops on Roses and skipping through meadows. In my mind, my children and I would have exciting adventures full of imaginary play and cognitive development. We would do arts and crafts, science experiments, and outdoor excursions every day.

I thought I’d always have the energy of a teenager, and that running a household wasn’t much more work than the chores I was already doing. I washed dishes twice a week, occasionally kept my room clean, and enjoyed babysitting. How hard could motherhood be?

In all my years of planning what kind of mom I would be, I never – not in my wildest dreams – imagined that one day, I would tell my child not to touch her bare eyeball with her toe.

I posted about it on Facebook. I love it when people use hashtags as punchlines to their posts, like #isitFridayyet and #mamaneedsavacation, so I decided to do one, too.

The post looked like this:

Get your toe out of your eye.

#thingsIneverthoughtIdsaytomykids

My followers and I had a good laugh and then I moved on, thinking I wouldn’t use that hashtag again. Little did I know that only a few days later, one of my children would again be told something that should not need to be said:

Do not lick the walls of the doctor’s office.

Soon, I said another bizarre phrase to my children:

Don’t eat the vomit off your pajamas.

And another:

Who put dog food in the dishwasher?

And another:

I sat you on the potty for you to pee in it, not for you to stand up, look at the potty, and pee on the floor. 

I kept posting what I told my children not to do, or say, or eat, or lick. Sometimes, I’d post as many as three quotes a day. It got to be a little embarrassing.

The posts were set to private, so they didn’t get shared a million times and break the internet or anything, but my friends and family loved them. I even had a friend say they were the funniest thing on the internet…which really just tells me he doesn’t spend much time online. It was still nice to hear, though.

People who didn’t even know my children still liked my quotes. My husband was out with some friends, and one of them was on his phone when he burst out laughing.

I love your kids, he chuckled.

Andrew was puzzled because this friend hadn’t met our kids yet. The friend showed him his phone. He had just read one of my posts.

The story went like this: My day had been pretty rough. I was potty training my youngest, my kids were fighting over every stupid little thing, and I hadn’t sat down all day.

Exhausted, I finally decided that I was going to make myself a cup of herbal tea, and I was going to sit down. No matter what happened, no matter what my kids did, no matter what they said, I would not be distracted from my few minutes of relaxation. Someone would have to be bleeding or on fire to make me move.

With my cup in-hand, I sank down into a kitchen chair with a happy sigh…

…and sat in a puddle of urine.

My post read:

Finally, I can sit down and relax with a nice cup of tea. What…WHO PEED ON THE CHAIR??? #thingsIneverthoughtIdsaytomykids

Not only did the friend who laughed at my post not know my kids, but he didn’t have kids of his own. I had assumed only parents would read this book. In fact, many of my more avid fans were non-parents who were shocked by everything my children did because they had no idea a little human was capable of so much trouble.

Parents, nannies, and babysitters, on the other hand, know only too well that my children are not unique. We have all been through it. My posts even made readers feel nostalgic, and parents started sending me their own quotes. My favorite was Stop poking your penis with a fork.

Many of my friends begged me to put the quotes in a book.

I brushed off the whole book idea, and I kept brushing it off for years. Sure, I wanted to be a writer. I had written books before, so it’s not like it was a terrifying prospect. Still, a book about my kids was new territory. My Master’s degree was in fictional writing. I had never written anything like this.

Besides, I couldn’t imagine having enough material. Everything in the book had to be 100% true and unexaggerated. I decided this after hearing one of my favorite humor writers admit that some of the stuff he wrote didn’t actually happen. It ruined all of his work for me. From then on, I’d spend so much energy trying to guess what was real that I’d forget to laugh at the jokes. That’s not the kind of writer I wanted to be.

If I couldn’t make stuff up, I’d have to follow my kids around with a notepad, waiting for them to do something funny, until I finally had enough stories to fill a book. No, thank you.

I kept posting my quotes anyway. Three years later, out of curiosity, I counted all the times I had posted the hashtag #thingsIneverthoughtIdsaytomykids.

I had posted it three hundred times.

It still boggles my mind that in the course of only three years, I’ve had to say three hundred weird things to my children. A friend once asked me how I came up with all this stuff. I was starting to wish I had made it all up.

Turns out, I had enough material to write a book. My excuse was no longer valid.

Since I had enough material, and both parents and non-parents liked my stories whether they knew my kids or not…why not write a book?

Thus was the beginning of Don’t Dance on the Toilet: a collection of stories about parenthood and hundreds of things I’ve actually said to my children, but never thought I’d have to.

A Note to Readers: Welcome to a Safe Space

There are so many ways to be a parent. Everyone thinks they know the best way, so it’s hard to talk about parenting without upsetting someone.

Take parenting articles on the internet, for example. How I loathe them. I can’t stand being preached to by someone who doesn’t know me or my kids. Granted, I don’t like being preached to by people who do know me, either. There’s just something about the know-it-all attitude of parenting articles that makes me want to rip out my hair. Or the writers’ hair.

One thing I really hate: how parenting articles rarely specify what age group their advice is meant for.

Let’s say you read this little nugget that I see over and over again: Never punish your children. Only redirect their attention to a positive activity.

I’m pretty sure they mean toddlers. That advice probably doesn’t apply to a five-year-old stealing candy from a store, or a teenager sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, or a ten-year-old boy breaking a lamp with a bat for the fun of it.

I can just see a mother saying, It might be fun to break other people’s expensive things, but how about we play with some Legos instead?

Thanks, Internet. Super helpful.

Even funny books about parenting often make me defensive. It might only happen once, but as soon as I feel like the writer is judging me, the damage is done and I have trouble enjoying the rest of the book.

For instance, I read a book that said any woman who delivers babies naturally, without an epidural, must be a masochist. Funny, right? Except, I delivered both my girls naturally. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was offended – it was just a joke – but I didn’t enjoy the author poking fun at my choices. It gave me a squirmy, uncomfortable feeling like I was being looked down on.

It’s important to me that my readers don’t feel uncomfortable.

I’m not here to make fun of anyone or judge anyone. I don’t care about the choices you’ve made, and I don’t want to debate them. We can argue about all that crap on the internet somewhere.

This book is not a place for me to vent my frustrations or to make myself look clever by putting other people down.

Right now, I’m taking a sledge hammer to my soap box. It’s making a loud crunching sound as it falls into splinters.

We all need a safe place, because all of us have been judged unfairly. Once at a Farmer’s Market, Adalyn was being a total