Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Happiness is Dry Pants

Stephen is just now getting in from walking the dog (it is so cold that I of course use the term "walk" very, very loosely), so I'll have to pounce on him once he comes in to look at your captions. It takes awhile for things to happen around here.

And that sentiment is not excluded from potty training. As in, it takes our boys awhile to potty train, apparently. We did some preliminary training back in November and December (Who could forget that fateful day before Case Pukefest 2008?), but then my husband brought out the big guns. Today Stephen attempted training Jack using the precise methods from the book Toilet Training in Less Than a Day. You might be delighted to know that we have the first edition copy of this book, published in 1976. It is so very 1976, in every way possible. Lots of funny pictures with outdated hairstyles and outfits. (Our favorite illustration features a daddy, complete with sideburns, floppy hair, and late-70s business suit, squatting next to his toilet training son, with the caption, "Happiness is dry pants." I would totally scan that picture in and show you if I had a scanner. You'll just have to settle with the mental image.) Also lots of assumption that the stay-at-home mom will be doing the potty training, complete with apron (for snacks--evidently pants didn't have pockets back then), and that her husband, the working man, wants nothing to do with changing diapers or helping doing the training. If only the authors knew that, over 30 years later, my husband, the working man, stayed home all day with his son and applied their specific principles to potty training.

We had the highest of hopes. Who wouldn't in our situation? We budget almost $300 every month just for diapers. We are certainly ready.

But I guess Jack isn't so ready. Pretty much it failed miserably. We don't really know what went wrong. Jack should be good to go, according to the book's readiness test (a list of things the child should be able to do in order to show that he is ready for this method), but by the time 5:00 PM rolled around (ALL DAY POTTY TRAINING), he was a wreck. It got to the point that when Stephen would even utter the word "potty," Jack would immediately burst into tears. This sort of trigger isn't a good thing when you're, you know, potty training. You tend to throw that word around a lot.

Despite this set-back, we are tenacious. We will persevere. Jack will get a break for awhile, and next Wednesday (this is the only day every week Stephen can take some time off) we are going to switch it all up so that I can train Baylor and Steve can hide out at my folks' house all day with the other kids, as I did today. We'll compare notes and see what we come up with.

Basically, we're praying for a minor miracle. God's presence needs to be felt VERY STRONGLY in our little bathroom as we attempt to persuade our befuddled sons that they do, in fact, need to take lots of time out of their busy, play-filled days to sit on their uncomfortable plastic potty chairs and pee in them instead of taking advantage of the convenience of diapers.

Again, minor miracle.

Can I get an "Amen"?

7 comments:

Tracy said...

good luck potty training! Take hope in the fact that it is often much easier to train girls- so you'll have a piece of cake with Charlotte. ;) (at least that's been true in our experience.)

Raechel said...
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Raechel said...
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Raechel said...

I'm with you on the uncomfortable chairs. When we did Oliver's boot camp in the fall, he spent a lot of time on the chair (naturally). By the next day, every time we would sit him down to go he would complain that it hurt to sit down. Poor guy!

Raechel said...
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Raechel said...

I accidentally left my comment 4 times. Not sure how that happened. Sorry if you got excited thinking you'd gotten a ton of comments this morning.

Kristy said...

I just wanted to mention something that worked for us. I couldn't get my boys to poop on the potty for what seemed at the time to be forever, but they would pee as long as they could stand up in front of the big potty. They caught on to that really quickly and that cut down a ton on diapers. They would ask for a diaper when they had to poop.
I know everyone has advice, so take it or leave it, I just thought I would pass along another idea.