Mama Tried

Potty Training Part Two

Today was our first accident-free day! I wouldn't go so far as to say Nathan is potty-trained, but he is very, very well on his way.

I find that hard to believe since for literally the first six days, he only peed in the potty maybe twice? It was accident after accident after accident, and I sincerely questioned whether he was "ready."  But once it clicked, it clicked, and while I still have to keep one eye on the clock (which also reminds me of the newborn days, and which I hate) at all times, he sometimes tells me on his own he has to go.  

I have developed a few opinions about potty-training now that I am an expert and all.  I am sure none of this will apply to the next child so am not about to go write a "How to Potty Train Your Two Year Old Boy" book, but am putting it down because I found reading about other's potty training experiences very useful.

-the checklists for "readiness" are to be taken lightly.  Nathan didn't have a lot of the so called signs (he could not pull up and down his own pants, which one woman I know INSISTS is a potty-training must; he was not dry after a nap or in the morning and I suspect will not be for a long, long time; he did not seem to notice at first that he was peeing or he needed to pee) but I had a feeling he was probably still ready.  I think if you wait til your kid meets every sign on every list, they will be practically potty trained on their own already. I also think if you want to wait that long, that is fine, but knowing Nathan, that time would be closer to 4 than 2 for him, and I was highly motivated to get him trained a)before the new baby gets here and b)while he was in a fairly agreeable stage.  A lot of the "potty readiness" signs were things he did not pick up on until after a solid week of potty training, but he is starting to pick up on them.

-a lot of potty training advice should be ignored. I mean, probably not all of it, but the stuff that doesn't work.  When I was trying to get Nathan to just pee in the potty already, everyone kept telling me not to keep him on the potty too long but to just put him on frequently. So I was putting him on for 1-3 minutes, every 20 minutes, or every 10, or 5.. and he would have accidents without fail on his off time. Ignoring all the advice about not keeping them on for a long time was what finally worked- I just kept him there for half an hour and once he finally did it, he got it.  

I guess that's really only two opinions. But I am very grateful that my new potty problems are a)teaching him to point it down and b)that he takes so freaking long to pick out his Thomas reward sticker.  I am especially glad that the stress of that first week is gone and we are back to having fun, because he is so hilarious.  Especially when he passes his new insights on to the dog- "No, Buster! Pee pee in potty!"  

Potty Training

I have started and stopped about a trillion posts about potty training because I really don't think most people care about Nathan's progress (except you know everyone who follows me on Twitter. I cannot help it, I tell Twitter EVERYTHING) and also while I know this blog is nothing but oversharing, and is only read by mostly friends and family, I still feel like I should try to maintain Nathan's privacy about some things.

All that said, potty training is turning out to be very, very difficult and hard on me. Nathan is enjoying it (he asks for his choo choo underpants first thing each morning) and there are signs of progress, but it's not fast enough for me. I do not like spending mornings going to the bathroom with him every freaking 20 minutes and just want this to be over and done with.  

I've narrowed down my potty training issues to two things. First of all, there is a boatload of conflicting advice out there about when and how to do it. Some of the stuff you read says this would have been a piece of cake if we had just done it six months ago. Some of the stuff you read says two is the perfect age and this should be a piece of cake. (That stuff is wrong.) Some stuff says you pretty much just wait until the kid figures it out on his own. (And that stuff is very tempting to believe some days.) So if you talk to people about it, they either think you are potty training way too early or way too late and the problems are always either that a)Nathan is Not Ready (he is) or b)I am Not Ready (possible).  I think the answer is c)Potty Training is Hard Work.

And that is my second, major issue. For quite a while now Nathan and I have been coasting and just having lots of fun- we have adventures, we go to the park, and it's playtime 99% of the time. The only real parenting I've had to do is work on keeping him from tossing his plate on the floor when he is done with a meal.  And now suddenly I am back in Intensive Parenting Work Mode, and I am not wild about it. It's also very Isolating Work Mode as you are doing so much of it in a bathroom alone with a toddler.  So it has been stressing me out a lot.  

Fortunately, one of Nathan's friends is also potty training, and I actually even left Nathan over there this afternoon when I had a doctor's appointment, and his friend's mom said working with two kids who are potty training is Way Easier than one, because they egg each other on to sit on the potty.  So tomorrow we are headed over there for the morning, because I think not only will it be fun for them, it will be so nice for me to spend a few hours potty training but with an adult to talk to.  The weekend was good but then Jeff had to go back to work and it all kind of fell apart this morning for me, just thinking about it. Potty training takes a village, is my one piece of advice. I don't know that the village helps with the actual training, but it helps keep the trainer from losing their mind.

Two Year Doctor Appointment

Nathan's actual appointment was today and I thought it was going to go so well- he played with the big bead maze, and then cheerfully took his toy car and walked towards the door leading to the exam rooms when the nurse called us. 

Then he took one look at the exam room hall, shouted, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" and tried to run away. He screamed the entire rest of the appointment, occasionally shouting "Car car! Car car!" in hopes that I would take him there immediately.

He is 32 lbs and 36 and 1/4 inches tall- that is over 3 feet and in the 95th percentile for height. If his basketball obsession keeps up he may actually have a chance at playing. While the doctor would like me to try to rid him of the pacifier for sleep, she says he can stay in a crib as long as he wants and is otherwise fine. He did have to have one shot and a blood draw (when we got to the lab down the hall, the receptionist said, "Oh, that's who is screaming." Apparently the whole floor could hear him.) but he endured both. He screamed, but didn't try to run away, at least.  

And when the doctor left the exam room he stopped screaming long enough to say "Bye-bye" and blow her a kiss. He likes her as long as she is nowhere near him.  But I still think I will probably leave Nathan at a friend's when I take the new baby in for his appointments.

(Speaking of the new baby, I found out our pediatrician sees the same OB I do. Since it's a different OB than the one who delivered Nathan, and one I've only been seeing since I got pregnant, I'd been a little anxious, but knowing our pediatrician goes to him makes me feel much better.)

Dance Remix

Nathan is about that hilarious 95% of the time these days.

Baby Decorating

Some of you may have followed my dresser agonies in a previous post. I decided that I hated all IKEA dressers (Nathan has the Hemnes, which is pretty sturdy, but whose drawers stick) at all price points and found this one instead.  (There were other reviews of it on ohdeedoh- the review of it at the Walmart site made me worry because the reviewer felt it was "too expensive."  We all have our own price points, I guess, but $150 seemed pretty cheap to me.)  

I also needed a rocking chair for the baby's room- we still read to Nathan in the Ikea Poang I used for him and he likes to climb up in it and read, too, so if I tried moving that out I think he'd pitch a fit. Everything on Craigslist were variations on heavily padded gliders, which I think are ugly (not that Nathan's Poang is that cute, but still) and overpriced.  I was leaning towards this when I ran across this and the price seemed so right, I figured I'd get it instead.  Except of course it was not available for mail order and our local IKEA did not carry it. The nearest IKEA to carry it was in Covina, so yesterday afternoon Nathan and I drove a billion hours to Covina and back.  I felt bad because it meant Nathan spent more or less the whole time between nap and bedtime in a car, shopping cart, or high chair (we ate at IKEA) but Nathan did not seem to mind. (We took along a book about trains and he read it the whole ride, except for when he was calling the overpasses "tracks" and expressing surprise that cars could go on the tracks. I can get Nathan to do just about anything if a train related book is involved.)

I wanted to get the blue chair and do the whole nursery in shades of blue, but Nathan felt the blue didn't go with the blue of the crib and talked me into green. (The green is not as neon as it looks in the picture.) (Actually, Nathan can only really say "geen," so I think it is his favorite color by default.)  Anyway, I think green and blue with these wall decorations will be pretty cute. 

Now I just have to move everything out of this room so I can get it all set up.

We Have A Verb

So Tuesday morning Nathan and I showed up at his doctor's office and the waiting room was totally empty. I signed in, figuring it was because we were there first thing. The receptionist seemed very surprised to see me.  Turns out Nathan's pediatrician is not in on Tuesdays. And they had no record of Nathan having his 2 year well visit scheduled that day, or any other day.

They were very apologetic especially once I produced the card they had written which clearly said "3/31/09, 8:00 AM" and honestly, I was so glad that it was their mistake and not one more detail my pregnancy-fogged brain had messed up, I didn't mind rescheduling one bit.  Also, it meant Nathan left with a very positive feeling about the doctor- he didn't even want to leave the waiting room because of their giant bead maze. 

Plus, it gave him a couple more weeks to start stringing two words together, and today he obliged. Every time he brought me a book he identified what kind of book it was: "Duck boo(k)!" "Choo choo boo(k)!" "Cookie book!"  He did that a lot, but spent most of the day playing with the Thomas engine Jeff got him.  He took Thomas outside. He took Thomas in the car. Thomas ate all his meals with him.  But it was when he took Thomas onto his train tracks that he had a real break through- Thomas' smokestack is a little too tall to fit through his train tunnel without touching the top of the tunnel. Nathan got Thomas through, but then said "Choo choo BONK!" (And then he patted his own head to show me where Thomas bonked. 

He then pushed another train car, the one that looks like a bus, through the tunnel. "'Woun an woun no BONK!" (Followed again by a pat of his head.) I suspect in the next two weeks he'll have more and more near-sentences to tell the doctor about.