Toilet Talk

I didn’t want to write about this too soon, for fear that I would jinx it…but I think we’re almost there….so I feel okay about proclaiming that Max is almost potty trained!

The journey has not been hard, just interesting. I’ve been putting him on the toilet for a few months. And he would pee no problem. But he would never poop. Insisting that it hurt. And even when I “caught” him in the act and put him on the toilet, he would stop immediately and wait until his diaper was back on.

Finally one day, knowing he had to poop, I just let him walk around the kitchen with no pants or diaper, until he couldn’t wait any longer and had no choice but to go in the toilet (well, I guess his other choice was to go on the floor, but he knew better). And he did it! And he finally realized that it didn’t hurt!

So I just put the underwear on him. And unless he’s going to sleep, or we’re going someplace where there’s no toilet, in which cases we use pull-ups, then he’s sporting his Diego undies! (He would probably prefer pink Dora ones, but we won't go there).

Here are some toilet talk tidbits from the past two weeks:

As he was sitting on the toilet, not able to go: “Mommy, it’s not working!”

The first few times he climbed up on the toilet to pee, he ended up peeing straight out of the toilet, so I always had to remind him to hold his penis down. One time I was using the bathroom, and he said to me, “Mommy, don’t forget to push your penis down!” To which I had to chuckle that I didn’t have a penis. He responded yelling, “Let me see! Let me see!” A couple days later he was changing the diaper of one of Ella’s dolls and I heard him say to her, “You don’t have a penis!”

One day he was on the toilet for a while. I asked him, “Max? How many poopies do you have?” He took this as a literal question and his response was to slide off the toilet and start counting.

One time he was looking at his poop and said, “Ew, that one looks like a snake. And the other one looks like broccoli!”

Although I am thrilled about being able to do away with the diaper expense, there is one little snaffu in our excitement. Max has figured out how to use his toilet training as a bedtime stalling technique. Last night, after I thought he was in bed sound asleep, I discovered him standing at the top of the stairs, completely naked. "Mommy! I did potty. I need a new pull-up." About 20 minutes later, he came out the exact same way. And about 15 minutes after that he came out again (except still clothed this time), proclaiming his need to use the potty again.

That little boy will do anything to avoid sleep!