Thursday, July 31, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Potty Time
This morning, for the first time, I heard those three little words that every mother of a toddler yearns to hear: Mommy, go potty!
That’s right. It’s official. We’ve entered the Potty Training Era.
I figured it was coming. Over the last year, we’ve had a few false starts into the PTE as Fletcher flirted with the idea of potty use without fully embracing it. Of course, the second he showed the slightest flicker of interest in bathroom goings on, we jumped all over it. After crawling, walking and uttering a few choice words, PT is the Next Big Thing in toddler milestones, and I was amped up and ready to go, so to speak. I did some basic potty prep and bought the oh-so-grating Once Upon A Potty book, which came with a teeny plastic potty and an anatomically correct boy doll -- which we promptly christened Potty Pete -- to put upon it. And whenever I’d have to go, which is quite often, since I have a teacup of a bladder, I’d sing out, “Come watch Mommy go potty!” The idea (the fervent hope really) was that Fletcher would get the hang of the bathroom thing by watching me and then be ready to pee solo in no time. You can stop laughing now. Really. Stop. Right. So, back on earth... that was never going to happen. What has happened, though is that Fletcher seems to be picking up PT piecemeal. He quickly grasped the process of unrolling all the toilet paper and stuffing it into the bowl. And flushing. He loves flushing. That boy could stand in the bathroom, pushing the handle down and watching the water swirl round the bowl all day long. Which, come to think of it, may explain our enormous water bill. Though, I actually counted my blessings over that one, since the flushing noise scares lots of kids, and then you have to let things sit there and remember to go back later and flush when they’re not around. And believe me, with everything else you have to keep track of, and with the very real condition of “mom brain” in which anything really important that you try to remember, like Did I snap the baby carrier into the car seat base before I left ... or just leave it and the baby in the driveway?, just leaks out of your brain like store-brand sauce through a colander and ... what was I saying? Right, with everything else going on, it’s unlikely you’ll remember any time soon. And when that shit just sits around, it gets really gross.
But back to PT. My multiple potty training books and the numerous magazine articles I read on the subject suggested Fletcher would be more invested in the PT process if he had a hand in picking a potty of his very own. So one afternoon, Stewart took Fletcher on a daddy-son potty bonding shopping trip to Target.
That was our first mistake.
Fletcher’s clearly inherited his father’s gadgetphilia. In our house, we’ve got more redundant time-saving, snazzy-looking gizmos than I know what to do with -- the motorized grill scrubbing brush, the battery powered milk frother for cappuccino, the auto-softening ice cream scooper, the iPod nano that sits unused at the bottom of one of my dresser drawers, the radar detector languishing in my glove box. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when they came home with the Mac Daddy of baby potties, fully loaded with everything a toilet-training tot would need ... except maybe a built-in plasma screen and iPod docking station.
“He picked it out,” Stewart shrugged when I raised an eyebrows at the thing when he started assembling it.
At first I thought the gimmicks -- a faux paper roll that sings when you spin it; a seat that issues congratulations when sat upon, the lid that announced “up,” “down” as you moved it -- would encourage Fletcher to hunker down and take care of business. But we soon discovered, a talking, singing, whistling, whooping potty doesn’t help at all. In fact, it’s a major distraction from the task at hand. Why pish when you can play? Fletcher would amuse himself lifting the seat and putting it down, unfurling yards and yards of real toilet paper, stuffing it inside the play potty, which would then chime You used the potty! Yea!
It wasn’t exactly on message.
Obviously, we were putting the cart waaaaay before the horse. Fletcher was more interested in the potty for its entertainment value ... and as a place to display stickers, since we rewarded Fletcher with them if his tush so much as brushed the potty seat for more than two seconds. But he never expressed any desire to use the potty for what it was originally designed for.
In the hopes of rekindling his interest, I even relaxed our limits on TV time to let Fletcher watch Elmo’s Potty Time DVD over and over and over and over. Fletcher loves Elmo. In fact, we credit this fuzzy red puppet with getting Fletcher talking. Around the time that Fletcher (again) stubbornly refused to say anything other than Mama, Dada and duck (at least we hoped it was duck), and our pediatrician was expressing some mild concern about his reticence, we’d taken him to see Sesame Street Live! and gotten him a helium-filled Elmo balloon. Coming down the stairs the next morning, Fletcher pointed right at it and said, unprompted: “Elmo!” After that, the words flowed like a Midwestern river. Best eight bucks we’ve ever spent. So, I figured, if Elmo couldn’t influence Fletcher to use the potty, well, he very well might be going off to college still in pull-ups. We watched that thing so many times, I woke in the night with Gordon’s voice crooning “Grownups do it/Oh yeah, we do it/Folks all around the world do it/You’ll do it/You’ll use the potty” ringing in my ears. After the umpteenth viewing, it was making me a little crazed.
Still, every morning, I’d ask, “Do you want to sit on the potty?”
“No,” he’d respond with the irritating stubbornness typical of toddlers everywhere.
I decided to chill for a while. Just as a watched pot won’t boil, a heckled todder will refuse all entreaties to do as you ask. Meanwhile, I checked with my girlfriend Lara, who we share a nanny with, to see how she was progressing with her two-year-old’s training. She and her husband had decided to take the Evelyn Wood approach. In anticipation of an extended trip home to the Middle East, they were taking a week off from work to give their son a crash course in correct toilet use. “I. Am. Not. Packing. Diapers,” Lara told me with firm conviction. With the extra costs for baggage these days, who could blame her? But, see, I don’t have that kind of determined focus ... and wasn’t facing hundreds of dollars in baggage fees to motivate me. I could barely keep track of Fletcher’s diaper output when he was an newborn and I needed to make sure he was getting enough breastmilk. I couldn’t see myself sticking long to a plan that required me to poise him on the potty every 30 minutes. Besides, if I ever do get a few days off, I don’t want to spend them chasing my toddler with a mop and carpet cleaner when I could be doing something meaningful like watching Jungle Book 2.
So lacking the discipline for potty training boot camp, I figured the path of least resistance (certainly for me) was to wait it out. Though our pediatrician seemed surprised that we hadn’t started PT by 18 months, everything I’d read told me that little boys in the U.S. typically get the hang of the whole potty thing around 3 to 4 years old. So I figured we had at least six months before I had to panic. In the meantime, I told myself -- a common practice among moms concerned their wee ones aren’t hitting those milestones according to our timetable -- that, Elmo notwithstanding, it really was unlikely Fletcher would go off to college in pull-ups. (I plan to use, or rather cling to, that same logic when we get ready to kick the binky habit, but more on that later.)
Sure enough, backing off paid off. A few weeks ago, Fletcher started asking to sit -- just sit -- on the potty at nursery school. Other kids (older kids) were down with the potty thing. He wanted to do it too. Finally, an upside to peer pressure. While I hoped that this desire to enthusiastically follow the pack wouldn’t lead him into crystal meth later one, potty-wise, I glommed onto any motivating factor I could.
Hoping to capitalize on this new found PT interest, we headed to Target the next day where Fletcher picked out his first big boy underwear -- Elmo (natch) and Thomas The Tank Engine. We also grabbed a Go, Diego! Go! potty seat. It had none of the bells and whistles of his first potty, but we hoped Diego’s exhortations would at least encourage Fletcher to “go” as well. And a day or so later, it did ... which brings us back to those three little cherished words. It was just Alicia, our nanny, and me at home then when Fletcher announced he wanted to go. Quick as we could yank his diaper off, we hoisted him onto his Go, Diego! Go seat, turned on the faucet for encouragement and after several very long minutes. Then ...Eureka! He did it! There were cheers and hugs and high-fives all around. Alicia quickly drew up a “potty chart” to track his progress. I phoned everyone I could tell without embarrassment that Fletcher!!!! Used!!! The!!! Potty!!! The next morning, Fletcher got to tell his preschool teacher all about it, earning yet another sticker and another high-five for his stellar efforts. Yessiree ... we were on our way.
Then, faster than you can say Flushed away!, the whole mission sputtered to a standstill. Sure, since his initial triumph, Fletcher’s spent lots of time on the potty -- his nursery school teachers tell me he loves to sit on the potty at school. But we’ve yet to experience a repeat performance at home. And no matter how many times I ask Do you want to go potty?, I’m met with a flat Uh, No. The other day, his nanny sat with him for 20 minutes while he played and sang, stuffed paper in the toilet, flushed ... basically did everything except what he was there for till she finally threw in the towel herself. Again, I thought we were close a few nights later at a family dinner. Toward the end of the meal, Fletcher bolted from his seat and loudly proclaimed, “Go potty!” so that everyone within earshot, which is to say, everyone in the restaurant, was instantly privy to his intentions. I dutifully took him to the bathroom, put him on the seat and actually sat down on a public restroom floor to await the Second Coming. Ah, I’m sure Beckett must have been potty training his two-year-old when he wrote Waiting For Godot. I feel like one of the characters, waiting by that lonely tree for pee that never arrives.
Because that’s the thing about PT. It’s a series of false starts; one pish forward, three poops back ... and we haven’t even gotten to overnights yet. At the moment, we’re back to regarding the potty as a toy and going to the potty -- and shouting it out -- as an amusing game. So, I expect that, unlike my pal Lara, we’ll be plateaued here for a while. But I will say this, with all the playing around he’s doing, he has mastered one more piece of the potty puzzle that undoubtedly will be appreciated by future girlfriends and eventually his wife: He’s had a ton of practice putting the seat down.
That’s right. It’s official. We’ve entered the Potty Training Era.
I figured it was coming. Over the last year, we’ve had a few false starts into the PTE as Fletcher flirted with the idea of potty use without fully embracing it. Of course, the second he showed the slightest flicker of interest in bathroom goings on, we jumped all over it. After crawling, walking and uttering a few choice words, PT is the Next Big Thing in toddler milestones, and I was amped up and ready to go, so to speak. I did some basic potty prep and bought the oh-so-grating Once Upon A Potty book, which came with a teeny plastic potty and an anatomically correct boy doll -- which we promptly christened Potty Pete -- to put upon it. And whenever I’d have to go, which is quite often, since I have a teacup of a bladder, I’d sing out, “Come watch Mommy go potty!” The idea (the fervent hope really) was that Fletcher would get the hang of the bathroom thing by watching me and then be ready to pee solo in no time. You can stop laughing now. Really. Stop. Right. So, back on earth... that was never going to happen. What has happened, though is that Fletcher seems to be picking up PT piecemeal. He quickly grasped the process of unrolling all the toilet paper and stuffing it into the bowl. And flushing. He loves flushing. That boy could stand in the bathroom, pushing the handle down and watching the water swirl round the bowl all day long. Which, come to think of it, may explain our enormous water bill. Though, I actually counted my blessings over that one, since the flushing noise scares lots of kids, and then you have to let things sit there and remember to go back later and flush when they’re not around. And believe me, with everything else you have to keep track of, and with the very real condition of “mom brain” in which anything really important that you try to remember, like Did I snap the baby carrier into the car seat base before I left ... or just leave it and the baby in the driveway?, just leaks out of your brain like store-brand sauce through a colander and ... what was I saying? Right, with everything else going on, it’s unlikely you’ll remember any time soon. And when that shit just sits around, it gets really gross.
But back to PT. My multiple potty training books and the numerous magazine articles I read on the subject suggested Fletcher would be more invested in the PT process if he had a hand in picking a potty of his very own. So one afternoon, Stewart took Fletcher on a daddy-son potty bonding shopping trip to Target.
That was our first mistake.
Fletcher’s clearly inherited his father’s gadgetphilia. In our house, we’ve got more redundant time-saving, snazzy-looking gizmos than I know what to do with -- the motorized grill scrubbing brush, the battery powered milk frother for cappuccino, the auto-softening ice cream scooper, the iPod nano that sits unused at the bottom of one of my dresser drawers, the radar detector languishing in my glove box. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when they came home with the Mac Daddy of baby potties, fully loaded with everything a toilet-training tot would need ... except maybe a built-in plasma screen and iPod docking station.
“He picked it out,” Stewart shrugged when I raised an eyebrows at the thing when he started assembling it.
At first I thought the gimmicks -- a faux paper roll that sings when you spin it; a seat that issues congratulations when sat upon, the lid that announced “up,” “down” as you moved it -- would encourage Fletcher to hunker down and take care of business. But we soon discovered, a talking, singing, whistling, whooping potty doesn’t help at all. In fact, it’s a major distraction from the task at hand. Why pish when you can play? Fletcher would amuse himself lifting the seat and putting it down, unfurling yards and yards of real toilet paper, stuffing it inside the play potty, which would then chime You used the potty! Yea!
It wasn’t exactly on message.
Obviously, we were putting the cart waaaaay before the horse. Fletcher was more interested in the potty for its entertainment value ... and as a place to display stickers, since we rewarded Fletcher with them if his tush so much as brushed the potty seat for more than two seconds. But he never expressed any desire to use the potty for what it was originally designed for.
In the hopes of rekindling his interest, I even relaxed our limits on TV time to let Fletcher watch Elmo’s Potty Time DVD over and over and over and over. Fletcher loves Elmo. In fact, we credit this fuzzy red puppet with getting Fletcher talking. Around the time that Fletcher (again) stubbornly refused to say anything other than Mama, Dada and duck (at least we hoped it was duck), and our pediatrician was expressing some mild concern about his reticence, we’d taken him to see Sesame Street Live! and gotten him a helium-filled Elmo balloon. Coming down the stairs the next morning, Fletcher pointed right at it and said, unprompted: “Elmo!” After that, the words flowed like a Midwestern river. Best eight bucks we’ve ever spent. So, I figured, if Elmo couldn’t influence Fletcher to use the potty, well, he very well might be going off to college still in pull-ups. We watched that thing so many times, I woke in the night with Gordon’s voice crooning “Grownups do it/Oh yeah, we do it/Folks all around the world do it/You’ll do it/You’ll use the potty” ringing in my ears. After the umpteenth viewing, it was making me a little crazed.
Still, every morning, I’d ask, “Do you want to sit on the potty?”
“No,” he’d respond with the irritating stubbornness typical of toddlers everywhere.
I decided to chill for a while. Just as a watched pot won’t boil, a heckled todder will refuse all entreaties to do as you ask. Meanwhile, I checked with my girlfriend Lara, who we share a nanny with, to see how she was progressing with her two-year-old’s training. She and her husband had decided to take the Evelyn Wood approach. In anticipation of an extended trip home to the Middle East, they were taking a week off from work to give their son a crash course in correct toilet use. “I. Am. Not. Packing. Diapers,” Lara told me with firm conviction. With the extra costs for baggage these days, who could blame her? But, see, I don’t have that kind of determined focus ... and wasn’t facing hundreds of dollars in baggage fees to motivate me. I could barely keep track of Fletcher’s diaper output when he was an newborn and I needed to make sure he was getting enough breastmilk. I couldn’t see myself sticking long to a plan that required me to poise him on the potty every 30 minutes. Besides, if I ever do get a few days off, I don’t want to spend them chasing my toddler with a mop and carpet cleaner when I could be doing something meaningful like watching Jungle Book 2.
So lacking the discipline for potty training boot camp, I figured the path of least resistance (certainly for me) was to wait it out. Though our pediatrician seemed surprised that we hadn’t started PT by 18 months, everything I’d read told me that little boys in the U.S. typically get the hang of the whole potty thing around 3 to 4 years old. So I figured we had at least six months before I had to panic. In the meantime, I told myself -- a common practice among moms concerned their wee ones aren’t hitting those milestones according to our timetable -- that, Elmo notwithstanding, it really was unlikely Fletcher would go off to college in pull-ups. (I plan to use, or rather cling to, that same logic when we get ready to kick the binky habit, but more on that later.)
Sure enough, backing off paid off. A few weeks ago, Fletcher started asking to sit -- just sit -- on the potty at nursery school. Other kids (older kids) were down with the potty thing. He wanted to do it too. Finally, an upside to peer pressure. While I hoped that this desire to enthusiastically follow the pack wouldn’t lead him into crystal meth later one, potty-wise, I glommed onto any motivating factor I could.
Hoping to capitalize on this new found PT interest, we headed to Target the next day where Fletcher picked out his first big boy underwear -- Elmo (natch) and Thomas The Tank Engine. We also grabbed a Go, Diego! Go! potty seat. It had none of the bells and whistles of his first potty, but we hoped Diego’s exhortations would at least encourage Fletcher to “go” as well. And a day or so later, it did ... which brings us back to those three little cherished words. It was just Alicia, our nanny, and me at home then when Fletcher announced he wanted to go. Quick as we could yank his diaper off, we hoisted him onto his Go, Diego! Go seat, turned on the faucet for encouragement and after several very long minutes. Then ...Eureka! He did it! There were cheers and hugs and high-fives all around. Alicia quickly drew up a “potty chart” to track his progress. I phoned everyone I could tell without embarrassment that Fletcher!!!! Used!!! The!!! Potty!!! The next morning, Fletcher got to tell his preschool teacher all about it, earning yet another sticker and another high-five for his stellar efforts. Yessiree ... we were on our way.
Then, faster than you can say Flushed away!, the whole mission sputtered to a standstill. Sure, since his initial triumph, Fletcher’s spent lots of time on the potty -- his nursery school teachers tell me he loves to sit on the potty at school. But we’ve yet to experience a repeat performance at home. And no matter how many times I ask Do you want to go potty?, I’m met with a flat Uh, No. The other day, his nanny sat with him for 20 minutes while he played and sang, stuffed paper in the toilet, flushed ... basically did everything except what he was there for till she finally threw in the towel herself. Again, I thought we were close a few nights later at a family dinner. Toward the end of the meal, Fletcher bolted from his seat and loudly proclaimed, “Go potty!” so that everyone within earshot, which is to say, everyone in the restaurant, was instantly privy to his intentions. I dutifully took him to the bathroom, put him on the seat and actually sat down on a public restroom floor to await the Second Coming. Ah, I’m sure Beckett must have been potty training his two-year-old when he wrote Waiting For Godot. I feel like one of the characters, waiting by that lonely tree for pee that never arrives.
Because that’s the thing about PT. It’s a series of false starts; one pish forward, three poops back ... and we haven’t even gotten to overnights yet. At the moment, we’re back to regarding the potty as a toy and going to the potty -- and shouting it out -- as an amusing game. So, I expect that, unlike my pal Lara, we’ll be plateaued here for a while. But I will say this, with all the playing around he’s doing, he has mastered one more piece of the potty puzzle that undoubtedly will be appreciated by future girlfriends and eventually his wife: He’s had a ton of practice putting the seat down.
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