Well, my boy is finally potty trained. Actually, he attained the Nirvana level of “Trained of the Potty” several weeks ago, but I didn’t write about the accomplishment back then, because I feared he’d regress to un-potty trained after I posted this, thereby making me a liar—and I take my ThunderJournal reporting integrity and credibility quite seriously.
When we started on the journey of potty training our boy many, many, MANY months ago, my wife and I took it all as an extremely important undertaking, reading as much as we could and listening to the advice of friends and family members. After about three months of our boy steadfastly refusing to consider the wonders of the commode, I started to envision sending him off to college with a box full of custom-made diapers, because it honestly seemed to be an easier and more plausible outcome.
When you have more than one child wearing diapers, the added expense can be considerable. Every time I change a diaper, I swear I can hear the soft “Ka-Jing” of a cash register as I deposit the soiled mass in the diaper receptacle. So, potty training at least one of our two little poop factories was very important to me just from a financial standpoint. My boy, however, seemed to relish his role as a financial diaper burden.
After exhausting all the advice of the “experts” online and in parenting magazines—which are, in my opinion, just page after page of guesses and lies—we finally opted for the advice my mother gave me about how she potty trained my brother and me. Specifically, she just let us run around naked from the waist down until nature and shame took its inevitable course.
It may sound severe, but we were out of options, patience and diapers, so we allowed our boy to treat our home as his own personal nudist colony. While he genuinely seemed to enjoy the freedom nudity provided him, whenever nature started knocking, he’d begin screaming and demanding a diaper. The urge to give in to his full volume demands was intense, but we held firm. Unfortunately, so did he. While he never deposited a loaf anywhere in the house, his digestive system apparently decided to put everything into an indefinite holding pattern. Such was his determination against serving the bowl.
So, now we had a constipated nudist on our hands. We therefore had to resort to Miralax and a variety of poo-inducing foods. Still, days crept by, and each time we directed him to the porcelain throne, he reacted as if it was a sacrificial cistern of no return.
Finally, the day arrived when the packing of his digestive musket simply had to be discharged. He was playing Nintendo Wii at the time, standing on the Balance Board, when I noticed an escapee trying to break free. I quickly snatched him up and planted him on the toilet seat. He looked up at me with a defiant glare, but the glare quickly softened to a sort of Zen acceptance. That was followed by deep, throaty grunts, at which point I left him alone in the bathroom to complete his triumph.
And a triumph it was!! After about ten minutes, he came hopping, HOPPING, out of the bathroom, yelling “I DID IT! I DID IT! I DID IT!” Of course, all household participants were required to hover over the bowl and inspect his handiwork—which, following three days of constipation, was humongous—and exclaim such accolades as “THAT’S AWESOME!” and “YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW!” and “WOW, THAT’S AMAZING!”
And that was pretty much the end of the stalemate, although there was some resistance to performing a second act. But, when the time came, he knew what he had to do. He looked up from his coloring book, and did a slow, determined “Green Mile” sort of march down the hall to the bathroom. To his credit, he even closed the door behind him, which is something even I fail to do on occasion. Once again, we were treated to a round of “I DID IT!” And, he’s been fairly. . . er. . . regular, ever since.
Now, his younger sister, on the other hand. . .
Posted by Ryan at October 1, 2013 12:43 PM | TrackBack
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