Trying to gain potty training traction

The battle has been joined. The Battle of the Diaper Bulge, that is.

Actually, it started several months ago, but with more of a whimper than a bang. See, rumor has it that some people have kids who basically potty train themselves. They hate having a dirty diaper, watch their parents going potty on the toilet, get the idea, and by, like, 18 months, they're basically peeing and pooping in the big leagues. I've even heard tall tales about parents who just let their kids run around naked for a long weekend, and by the end of it, they throw away all their diapers and they're done, period. (I hate to think of what their house looked like - or, more to the point, smelled like - in the interim, but that's beside the point.)

The point is: That's not our Boo.

No, on the contrary, Josh can be walking around for hours with a diaper so full of pee that it drags around his ankles, and he won't care until he trips over it trying to jump off something. Until recently, he would actually fight to hold onto the poopies in his diaper, as though they were something precious and sacred that you'd have to be a heathen to try to take away from him (if memory serves, Freud had something to say about that, but my IQ has dropped too far for me to remember what). He showed no interest in the potty, except as a cool way to make paper (of all kinds) magically disappear. He'd calmly observe as friends his age used the potty, without effect - reasonably enough in Bela's case, since she's been pretty hit-or-miss too, but you'd have thought he would be impressed with Becka, given that she's one of those prodigies who was entirely potty-trained long before her second birthday (and can probably pee on a 1-inch target from 20 yards, blindfolded, knowing Becka - this is the child who was walking at 9 months and talking in complete sentences at little over a year, after all).

But no.

Grandma Kay was supposed to take this on as Her Project while she was here, and to her credit, she came prepared. She figured out the perfect incentive, and came loaded for bear, with about 75 dozen 5-packs of MatchBox cars sent ahead in a shipping container, as many as possible of them (you guessed it) orange. She had us buy pull-ups, she bought books, she inspected our training potty setup upon arrival... I mean, she was a pro. She was da man. She had it down.

One problem: she didn't clear her plan with Josh, first.

Long story short: Josh made one or two pee-pees in the potty, maybe a poop or two, and otherwise was uninterested and remained perfectly happy to load up his diapers to the breaking point without warning, utterly indifferent to the proper uses and benefits of modern sanitation. Given that he's now in Size 5 diapers, and that there really isn't a practical "size 6" without moving on to Depends, it was starting to look a little alarming there.

Plus, he still got all the cars as a reward, which we now have to find a way to garage. Have you ever tried to figure out how to safely stash away 6,213 MatchBox cars in the average American home? Without taking out a second mortgage?

A fair amount of sideline research told me that this isn't terribly unusual, and that there are a few reliable signs that you should look for that will tell you that your child is "ready" for potty training - doesn't like being in wet diapers, can warn you when he/she needs to make a poop or a pee, etc. Most of which Josh just didn't show. The research also said that it does more harm than good to force the issue if your child just isn't ready yet, so we just had to sit by and wait. And wait. And wait.

Well, he started showing an interest just about the time that GRANDMA AND POP-POP ABANDONED ME after getting him all interested in this whole potty-training thing, at which point I kind of sidelined the whole project, given that I had an even less potty-constrained child to deal with. For a month or so, we've only paid attention to Josh's potty training haphazardly, letting him go in the potty when it occurs to us and he tells us he wants to go in the potty, but otherwise letting it slide. (Though Felicia did order some special rewards for him, in the form of some custom-lettered all-orange M&Ms that say "Good Job Boo" on them - you can design your own here, if you have a similar project in mind and nothing better to spend your money on, especially given that moms and aunties alike will wind up poaching most of the damn things.)

Suddenly, though, he's started showing all of the signs at once. To the point where this morning, driving down the middle of the Grants Pass Parkway (a 5-lane road) on the way to gymnastics, he suddenly announced that he'd made a pee-pee and wanted to get a clean diaper - right there, right now, in the middle of the road. I managed to dodge that bullet, barely, and put off the diaper change until we got to gymnastics three minutes later (at which point I could dump the job off on Bubbe, bwaha!), and avoid dealing with any further big-boy bowel issues for another six hours, given that it was Bubbe Day.

But once Josh came home, we had an unprecedented series of Adventures in Bathroom-Going. He made his first-ever (as far as I know) combined poopy and pee-pee in the potty, shortly after dinner time. He did another poopy during bathtime - and, for a first, warned us first, so he could do it in the potty, instead of in the bath. Then he did another pee-pee later. Then, just now, shortly after I put him to bed, I heard him on the monitor, telling Boo Elephant that "I'd better put the pee-pee in the potty, I'll get an enemen" (M&M) - and, yes, he did another pee-pee in the potty, albeit a little one.

(And yes, he did get another enemen, his, letsee, tenth one today.)

Does this constitue critical mass?

On the downside, I am keenly reminded of our friends Meredith and Kelly, who summer before this one just passed, at our vacation on a little lake in New Hampshire, were at a point slightly more advanced than this in potty-training their then-3-year-old, Grace. Kelly spent an entire afternoon hauling Grace from the beach to the cabin (300 yards or so, each way) eight times within a two- or three-hour period when Grace kept telling him she had to make a poopy, with her failing to actually produce said poopy each time. Kelly finally (and rather dramatically, not surprisingly) gave up on the whole process, and left her to Meredith, who promptly took Grace back down to the beach... where she proceeded to poop in the sand.

(Yes, Mere and Kelly, we did notice your pain.)

For the record, I am not looking forward to the "potty emergencies" that strike in the middle of the checkout line at the grocery store, or when I'm stuck at a light in rush-hour traffic (such as we have in Grants Pass), or in the middle of dealing with some little-baby crisis with Ben. Nor am I yearning to clean up the inevitable accidents. But I suppose it's progress, of a sort. No one ever said parenting was glamorous, after all.

Well, except for Angelina and Brad, maybe. But then, I can't just hire an army of super-nannies, either. I am the super-nanny, God help me.

Comments

[grammakay]

So M&M's are a better incentive then Matchbox cars, are they? He is his mother's child. What a unique idea, tho!! Custom made M&M's. I would never have thought of that, as I didn't know you could do that. Glad he is progressing. I know it is a lot of work and disruptive, but in the end he will do it himself. That is what you are aiming for. At least he didn't do a "tubby". Ugh!! Mom

[Jean]

You're doing better than we are! One mention of "potty" and Melissa either bursts into tears or runs the other direction. She is also into the size 5's, and had been for a while.

However... M&Ms have been used successfully by some of our other friends as well, and I haven't tried that yet... LOL

Oh, well. With any luck she won't go to college in diapers. :/