Today is a good day. At least it is starting that way. Lately (as all my family, as well as Twitter, Facebook, and meatspace friends can tell you, with tears streaming down their face, and sincere requests for someone to please make me stop talking about it), we have been involved with potty-training our 3yr old son, Logan. It has been a rocky road, (and I ain't talkin' ice-cream either)!
He has got the going "number one" part pretty well figured out. The "number two" part, well, that has been tougher, a lot tougher. We have been trying to be patient, and use positive reinforcements. We were considering purchasing stock in the Mars Corp, makers of the "potty-training success reward of choice" among parents everywhere - M&M's! Then, I researched Mars, Inc, and found out some less than appetizing information about the corporation, including information suggesting that it is a privately held, family owned company that I should be boycotting, not patronizing or investing in. Oh well, I am going to pretend I did not read any of that till after the potty training is over... (yes I have principles, and yes I am compromising them, unless YOU are gonna come potty train this kid, shut up and let me continue). :)
Ok, back to the "good day" part of this post.
Last night my wife and I both stayed up after Logan went to sleep (a rare occurrence by itself), and played video games. I was playing an old copy of Dungeon Siege on my Macbook Pro (and dreaming of the future release of the new Diablo 3), while my wife played Katamari on my daughter's iPhone which we borrowed for the day. (more on why we had Lauria's iPhone in my next post). We both finally remembered our age, and collapsed into bed around 2am.
The next morning, around 7am, our son bounces out of his bed, and into ours, happily trying to wake us up, it is time to "play". We both wave blearily at his room and tell him to go play by himself for a few minutes (I only thought "on the freeway", I did NOT say it), and fall back into a half-awake, half-comatose state of exhaustion caused by trying to pretend we had the video game playing stamina of WoW-addicted teenagers the night before.
I hear cars and trains and lots of friendly "play" sounds as I drift in and out of sleep, then, all of a sudden, I am wide awake. It is silent. Quite as a church. No cars crashing, no "Thomas the Train" chugging on the track, nothing. My heart leaps in my throat. It is NEVER good when the 3 yr old is totally silent, total lack of sound is a harbinger of doom.
I go in Logan's bedroom, nothing, he is not there! I go in the kitchen, not there either. Not in the front room, not in the hall. Then I look in the bathroom. There is Logan. Sitting on the custom handcrafted redwood "bear" potty chair made by his godfather. He has pulled down his PJ's, removed his nighttime pull-up, put it in the diaper pail, sat down on the potty, and made a "number two" that appears, frankly, too big to have actually come from his little body. Totally unprompted. No help. No encouragement. No adults at all. I am beginning to think that we are a barrier to the training process. I am hereby putting Logan in charge of his own potty training from now on. I am just in charge of dispensing the guilt-ridden rewards for performance.
Today is a good day.