AdventureDad

Last night when I walked into the bathroom I laughed my ass off.  I immediately told wife to come and have a look at my funny son.  There he was, sitting on the potty doing his thing.  But he had also found a pack of female Maxi Pads, or what he proudly calls "band aids", and proceeded to glue them to his chest.  Not just one, the whole package.  And he had this big smile on his face, like he was really proud of what he had done.   It was so adorable I wasn't even close to getting angry.  That more or less sums up our potty training period, fun and relaxed.  The whole "project" has taken roughly 8 months and it has been a breeze.  If I discount the fact that my wife can't stand the smell of poop.  I'm quite sure we could have done the potty training in 8 weeks instead of months but we wanted to take it easy. We simply felt no hurry to finish the training quickly since it was so effortless.

There are a few different posts about the whole process here, here, and here. Friends and all articles and forums on the Internet  mentioned the danger of possibly traumatizing the child.  A stressed out parent bitching to a child about having to clean up poop can quickly lead to bad confidence I imagine.  What worked best for us was to keep it simple and cheerful.  It's important that the potty is a fun place for your child.  That might mean a nice Winnie the Pooh potty or perhaps an adapter so your child can use the regular toilet.  Whatever it takes, make sure it's a fun place. We were never big believers in awards for a job well done but have always offered lots of encouragement.  Even when things didn't go so well.

That out son loves the potty is obvious.  He can sit there for 20 minutes without any problems.  He sings, plays with some toy, relaxes, and comes up with imaginary games by himself.  The trickiest part is the night time routine.  Daniel would many times prefer to stay up a little longer than 8 pm and then simply told us he needed to poop.  When you're potty training a child it's tough to say no to that even if the sudden urge to poop at bedtime sounds suspicious. Sometimes he really needed to go and many times he was just stalling.  We learned to live with that without much frustration and it now rarely happens.  Now I just need to remember that he's still sitting on the potty when I get caught up doing something else.  The other night I thought he was a sleep when I suddenly remembered that he was still on the potty. 30 minutes had passed and he was happily still on his seat. Now I'm only waiting for him to bring the latest toy catalog with him for his long visits.

Categories: Daniel
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