Six months ago…
Two hit us at the end of April and that meant I couldn’t put it off much longer.
It was time to begin potty training.
Booooooo.
Or, more accurately, poo.
Conveniently, my son’s birthday came along and we requested a training potty, so my sister-in-law, being the wonderful aunt that she is, searched high and low on Amazon until she found this: The Hot Wheels Training Potty. Cue squeals of little boy excitement.
I began researching how to potty train and the first thing I learned was that you have to teach your child to communicate their needs–more specifically, to let you know when they need to go to the bathroom and to understand when you’re asking them if they need to go to the bathroom.
All of a sudden, pee pee and poop became regular parts of our vocabulary. Still, with my husband at work all week, myself at work three days a week, and myself also nursing an infant and therefore confined to the sofa semi-regularly, the training potty sat in the corner of the living room and was used occasionally as an extra seat for the little guy.
Then one sunny afternoon, my two year old ripped off his diaper which a gusto I’ve only seen rivaled when yogurt is presented as a snack.
PEE PEE! he cried, and ran to plop on his potty.
I’m pretty sure I almost cried in relief. I wouldn’t have to do much after all; apparently, he would potty train himself. We sat together for a while and I read him a book, then I got bored and walked into the bedroom to fold laundry while my son stayed dutifully on his red car potty, chattering to himself about pee pee. Less than a minute later, I returned to find a very proud little boy and pee pee all over the floor in front of the potty.
I guess he missed, but I didn’t care! He had peed (over) his potty!
We happy danced for a while and I gave him yogurt and smothered him in kisses and told him he was awesome. Then I promptly…forgot about potty training…and left him in diapers for another week…
Until one day he did it again! But this time, no pee. Still, I celebrated the fact he recognized he needed to pee and then went to sit on his potty, all without any kind of prompt. It happened a few times–no pee though–until one happy morning he again ripped off his diaper, yelled pee pee, and started running towards the toilet.
He didn’t make it, poor kid, and started peeing on the hardwood only half way to the bathroom. It didn’t phase him at all and he continued his mad dash, slipping in his own pee and wiping out with a thud, sliding across the slick floor.
We went to the potty anyway and he sat there excitedly, disregarding the fact he no longer needed to pee. His diaper returned to protecting my beautiful cherry floors but five minutes later, it was abandoned on the sofa once more.
Back to the potty it was, and this time I left him with a book to do his thing in private and came back to a little voice yelling “Ah (all) done!” The tile was dry. My son had peed in the living room only eight minutes ago. I figured this kid was crazy. So I picked him up, gave him a kiss, and went to put the diaper back on the fifteenth time in an hour.
And that’s when I saw it.
The most perfect, rounded, glistening puddle of lemon-pulp yellow. Only it wasn’t lemon juice. And every single drop was in his potty.
My mom-pride bubbled and spilled over, turning me into a crazy jumping, squealing, you-can-have-anything-you-want-forever mess of a human. Finally! I didn’t have to hardly do a thing and my genius spawn had figured it out on his own!
He was basically potty trained at that point, right?
Wrong.
Eight days later, he’s still only peed on the potty on a handful of times, although in his defense he sure does spend a lot of time sitting there, often much to my chagrin.
“Hey buddy, time to put your shoes on.”
“Pee pee!”
“Come eat another bite of your dinner, please.”
“PEE PEEEEE!”
“Are you ready to go to bed, sweet boy?”
“Pee pee, mama! Pee pee!”
Hmm. It seems potty training has become an avoidance mechanism, and a very effective one at that. How long do I let him sit there, putting off doing something he doesn’t want to do, before I tell him it’s time to get moving? Or what if he actually does need to go?
So we wait. We wait by/on the potty until he’s unraveled the entire roll of toilet paper on the floor and gotten up and sat back down 938 times and we wait until he’s read three books and bed time was 30 minutes prior.
We’ll get there one day, right? Someone remind me he’ll at least be out of diapers by 16.
And there I stopped writing–for half a year–because the first part of the post was about how ridiculously easy it had been to potty train my son and by part 2, he was very clearly not potty trained…so exactly where was I going with this post? Great question. I had become cocky and the answer was nowhere.
Now, six months after this post was started, it’s time to finish because: We have a happy ending!
Stay tuned!
Potty training chronicles part 2: how I potty trained in two days–coming tomorrow.