A Certain Ratio

Potty training officially began at 9:37 on the morning of Friday, November 25. By 8:00 p.m. on the evening of Sunday, November 27, the ratio of accidents to successes was as follows:

Accidents: 19.0

Successful uses of potty: 0.75 

The .75 is comprised of .50 a pee that began on the floor and ended in the potty after I rushed the portable Bjorn potty under the kid and shouted "sit down! sit down! you're doing it! you're doing it!" and .25 some sort of tiny pebble of poop that only made into the potty because the kid was on his hands and feet with his butt pointed squarely at the potty. I gave him partial credit for initiating the move that placed him adjacent to the potty and for aiming his tush in the right direction. The rest of the credit belongs to gravity.

We had high hopes for our designated potty training weekend. Changing diapers had become a never-ending and continually-increasing struggle. The kid hated being up on the changing table and did nothing but kick me and shout "don't hold my legs! don't touch me!" from the minute the process began to the minute it ended. And in between were the lowering and the lifting of the buttocks which makes it impossible to attach a diaper to a kid and the flipping over of the entire body which is just annoying. And messy if you haven't gotten rid of the old diaper yet.

The potty talk had begun in earnest over the summer when the kid started day care and noticed all the big kids using the bathroom. As the months progressed and the seasons changed it became clear the that the time for ditching diapers was upon us. There were arguments that at 2-1/2, it was still too early as these days, many boys don't train until 3. And there were arguments that we had already waited too long. But the decision was made based on the fact that I could no longer tolerate getting clocked in the face by a wayward foot and was tired of figuring out how to refasten a cattywampus diaper onto a writhing child.

And so, the excited countdown to "no more diaper day!" began. We made a chart on a poster board. We bought stickers. We talked about the day we would wear big boy underwear (which we'd actually purchased months ago) and the kid was ready. Or at least he said he was ready.

And I thought he was; on the Wednesday before the Friday that had been selected as "no more diaper day," he actually asked to sit on the little potty in the corner of the bathroom. And in the moment before the pee pee came, he stood up, faced the potty, aimed and fired and shot the whole amount right into the potty. And if that weren't enough, without any prompting by Mommy, he picked up the removable pot section, took it over to the toilet (perhaps the word "took" implies that there is actually room to walk in our bathroom. this is not the case. "turned" to the toilet might be a more appropriate description), dumped the pee right in and flushed. I was delighted! Oh my goodness! My son is a peeing prodigy! This is going to be a snap! The kid is going to be like those other children I hear about--the ones whose mothers say "Oh, I just put litte Timmy in his big boy pants and he knew just what to do. We didn't have any accidents. He didn't even need pull ups at night!"

Bully for you, you lucky parents of little Timmy. Bully for you.

As you can tell from the certain ratio of our initial potty training weekend, we are not the parents of little Timmy. We are not following the advice of the books and the parents who exclaim "OMG--do it in 2 days! Don't do that over-several-weeks thing. Nightmare!" Perhaps the nightmare will be our reality. At this point, that looks to be the road down which we are headed. With our lack of any success by Saturday night--the end of that magical two-day period in which every other kid we've ever heard of seems to have *gotten it*--we came upon several methods to try on Sunday: running water, rewards for sitting on the potty for 15 minutes (I was going to go with a sticker, but Stu stunningly upped the ante to 2 new Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars for each sitting. Yeah. You heard me. Not 1 car, but 2.), running around "nakey," and moving the portable potty downstairs after purchasing a potty seat (pictured above) for the big toilet upstairs.

The kid loves his potty seat. He has no qualms about sitting on that thing indefinitely. He sits. He plays with cars. He listens to the running water. He talks about how he's going wee wee and woo woo, which he learned to say from the Elmo Potty Time dvd I rushed out to buy after remembering that some parent had said her child instantly understood potty training after one viewing. We've now had several viewings and the kid was delighted to learn how many ways there are to refer to pee and poop and thoroughly enjoys Grover and Elmo's song about accidents. He's even gone so far as to tell us that he doesn't want any more accidents and that he doesn't like them. But still, we sit on the potty and nothing happens. And when we take him off the potty, everything happens. 

When Monday rolled around, it was clear the kid was not heading off to day care in big boy underwear.  But the kid was also not going to wear diapers and get back up on that changing table. So we've been progressing through the week in pull ups, which seems to please the kid to no end. So he's not a potty training prodigy.  So he needs a lot more practice and it may take weeks. He does some things amazingly well. Other things not as well. And for any kid, that's a certain ratio that's certainly just fine.