Adventures in Potty Training

Other possible titles for this post included:

"TMI"

"The Post Wherein I'm Damned For Posting Mostly Naked Pictures of My Child" and

"Yes, I Think It's Cute Only Because He's My Child."

Consider yourself fore-warned.

So....Kaeden has been expressing an interest in understanding what exactly Jeff and I do in the bathroom [See,  TMI.]  Even though he seems no where near understanding the concept, we felt it would be a good time to slowly introduce him to the idea of "potty."

A couple of week ago I bought one of those dreaded training potties, and I literally feared for the day when he actually used it.

Dirty diapers?  No problem.  Stupid dog pooping in my house?  Angers me, but no big deal to clean up.  Child using a plastic bowl to relieve himself after which I must clean?  NO THANK YOU.

We've been working with Kaeden by showing him when one might use the new potty.  We'd sit him on it for a moment before a diaper change or before jumping in the shower, but we didn't have high hopes at all.  Besides I haven't even started to read the bazillion potty-training books I had planned on reading so that I could be the perfect mommy who said, "Potty training?  Psssh!  Peice of cake!" while frowning upon you and your feeble attempts to train your child.  Muhahahaha.  I'm kidding.  I haven't really thought about how I wanted all this to go down, but I imagined it would require some thorough internet searches and book reading at some point.  But for now, it's been all about making Kaeden [and us, I suppose] comfortable with the idea.

For the most part Kaeden thought we had bought him a really cool hat:

And we were left explaining to guests that we were okay with him wearing it on his head, because he'd never actually used it. And then I'd try to ignore their looks that screamed, "Mmmmmhhhmmmmm.  Weirdo."

It quickly got to the point though, that if someone asked him if he needed to go "potty," he'd get excited, pull off his diaper while running to the bathroom [one time he actually perfected the movement and flung his diaper off his leg mid-sprint, leaving it soaring across the room], and come back into the room stark naked holding his potty.

But....that's about as far as it had gone.  Never had he actually put the pieces together and used the potty.  There were a few times he squatted next to and then peed on our floor, but that's as close as we had to success my friends.

That was until last night.

Kaeden looked like he might be trying to work something out, so I simply asked if he needed to go potty.  He ran into the bathroom, and I put him on our regular toilet.

Jeff held him there for a moment, and suddenly, we had success!

Kaeden was really curious as to what had just happened, so he was sure to watch the rest of the process as it carried on.

We of course made it a HUGE deal.

We gave him a moment to admire his work.

I kid.  We gave him a moment to process what had just happened, and then it was time to say bye, bye.

Literally.

The kid gives a sweet salutation to anything going down a drain.

And that was followed by a mini party wherein we all gave numerous High-Fives.

The kid was in heaven.

After all the hoopla, I could tell Kaeden was VERY impressed with himself.  I *think* he kind of understood what he'd just accomplished.  Although I still don't think he is to the point where he'd recognize when he needs to use the bathroom on his own.

With our prodding he's successfully used the bathroom again five times today.

I'm not getting my hopes up, because there is no way that potty training a boy could be this easy.  We've decided to forgo the temporary potty, and just work on getting him used to the regular toilet.  That means that we've put the adapter [so that he doesn't fall in] on one of the toilets in the house.

I am a little bitter that it's in my favorite bathroom to use [because yes, Jeff and I each have favorite bathrooms...on opposite ends of the house], but whatever.