Rant about Public Bathrooms

We've got a huge dilemma going on in the house. My 3 year old is potty trained now (finally!) but the husband won't let him sit on a public toilet seat. So when we go out, he wears a pull-up so in case he needs to go pee pee, and the public toilet is gross as hell, he can pee in his pants. Yeah, I think it's weird too, because it confuses the poor kid. But since he's a recent convert to the toilet and still wears pull-ups at nap and bedtime, he doesn't seem to have a big problem with it. The only exception is poop. My son only does that in the toilet. If he needs to poo, and we are outside of the house, I take him the ladies room and line the seat with a liner or toilet paper before he is allowed to sit down and do his business. Then I meticulously clean him up and wash his hands and open the door for him with a paper towel as we are leaving. I may sound really neurotic and obsessive compulsive, but I just don't want him to get sick or come in contact with other people's nastiness. I think if we as a public were cleaner about our bathroom habits maybe I wouldn't need to be such a germ phobe, but the public bathroom situation is truly disgusting. Many people would like to just blame it on the janitorial staff, but I think the problem lies with the people who use and abuse public bathrooms.

Just take my recent experience during the drive back home from New York this weekend. We stopped at a McDonalds to eat and use the bathrooms (and change diapers for the girls), and the bathroom was just filthy. We're talking ladies room here, the husband already had used the men's room and declared it a "cesspool of ecoli". In the ladies room there were two stalls, one handicapped stall with a Koala Baby Diaper Changer and one regular skinny stall. In the handicapped stall, someone had their period all over the seat, and in the skinny one, there were splashes of urine on the seat and floor. The question raised in my mind is, what kind of women do it all over the seat? Missing the mark is a guy thing, but women have to sit to do everything, so why such mess on the seat? A friend of mine once told me that some women "squat and hover" to avoid touching the seat, but then end up ruining it for those of us that simply line the toilet seat with paper and sit down. Yuck. I wish the hovering bitches would just line the seat and sit their fat asses down or at least clean up their mess with a disinfecting wipe. It's a shame how some people use the toilets outside. I wonder, is this how they treat their bathrooms at home?

You can bet I definitely didn't let my son use the toilet. Good thing he was constipated and didn't need to poop. And the girls....we were lucky we were only about an hour and a half from home so they didn't have to sit in their soggy and poopy diapers for much longer. I was not going to change their diapers on a dirty change pad in the same stall "Bloody Mary" had just trashed. Since I didn't have the luxury of a pull-up diaper, I had to line the seat in the skinny stall and use it, but the minute we all got home, everyone got a shower.