The other day I discovered an unflushed toilet in the bathroom nearest to the girl’s bedroom. When I had a free moment I pulled Clara aside so I could remind her the importance of flushing the toilet.

“Clara, I need you to flush the toilet when you are done using it, okay?”

“Yes, daddy. But, I don’t do it because I don’t want to wake up Lydia.”

“I understand that, Clara. But I think it will be okay. Unless Lydia is actually sleeping in the bathroom, you can just flush the toilet and she will probably not notice. If you are worried about waking Lydia up from a nap though, you can use the bathroom downstairs.”

“But she will still hear.”

“She won’t hear.”

“She will. Because if I flush the toilet downstairs, it will flush the toilet upstairs too.”

“That will not happen, Clara.”

She explained, “Once I was on the potty, and Momma flushed downstairs and it flushed my potty upstairs too.”

“No Clara. I don’t know what you are talking about, but that didn’t happen.”

“Yes, it does happen. The toilets are connected through the air. Remember, like you were saying about the computer. If you flush downstairs the flush will travel through the air and it will flush upstairs too.” She was very adamant about this fact, and repeated it several times in various ways. I realized at this point what a dangerous weapon I had given my 4 year old when I had tried to explain how phones work a few days prior.

“Clara, our toilets do not have Wifi. You can not flush our toilets remotely. That just doesn’t happen. There would be no purpose for that. You do not have to worry about this ever happening.”

“But it does happen Daddy. The internet will flush the toilet upstairs and Lydia will wake up and I will get in trouble.”

By this point my palms were pressed firmly against my eyes. “Clara, just obey daddy and flush the toilet when you are done using it, okay?”

She agreed, but I could tell that she still thought I was wrong. I secretly wish we did have a toilet that could be flushed from the other room, because that would be a fun prank to pull on visitors. Also, we could access our toilet’s control system from an online interface and flush it while we were away from home. This would give me a lot of piece of mind for those times when I am standing in line to get on a plane to leave for vacation and can’t remember if I turned the iron off, or closed the garage door, or flushed the toilet. Maybe Wifi toilets are the future and my daughter is a time traveler.