Potty Training

There are things you never understand until you’re a parent. For instance, cheering over piss. My littlest is 3 years, 9 months old. We started seriously potty training him last week. There’d been earlier efforts, but, being the most stubborn of our brood, he resisted and won out.

I took him to Sprawl-Mart last week and let him pick out a potty chair. That was the first mistake. He picked one with a built-in splash guard — you know, the little shield that allows a boy to sit to pee, redirecting the pungent fluid into the bowl of the chair. Trouble is, the built-in splash guard wasn’t tall enough. So, after the first day, in which he wet himself many times, he would hold his pee as long as possible before letting someone drag him to the chair. Then he’d squirt all over his feet, the floor, the rug … anything in a remarkably impressive range. That ain’t gonna work.

We went to Target over the weekend and got another chair with a decent splash guard. This one also plays music. Seriously. It has a laser inside the bowl area and whenever something breaks the beam it plays a royal fanfare. That freaked Jake out at first. Now, however, he loves it. He’ll pee a little bit, wait for the music to stop, pee a little more, and so on. (Girls, apparently, can’t really stop the flow of pee once it starts. Peeing and talking do have a lot in common …)

Everyone has to clap when the music plays. Oh yeah. That pee makes me a happy camper. Diapers ain’t cheap. And they’re nasty. In the past 14 years we’ve only had a short interval of maybe just over two yeas where we had no kids in diapers. And now the youngest is leaving them behind. It’s good, but also a little sad. He is the baby, and this is even more of a sign that he’s growing up than his ability to use the DVD player.

He won’t willingly poop in the chair yet. Somehow he’s gone to skipping days, holding it in. He skipped yesterday. My hope is that he’s letting that stuff go this morning, while Kim’s home with him. Yeah.

Does this relate to writing? Of course! Ordinarily, my work-at-home day is filled with interruptions as I feed those insatiable children. Yesterday, add to that running to the bathroom to cheer every time I heard music from the potty chair. Yes, I applaud for pee.