Summit has been using the toilet for over a year now. Most of the time when I take him, he goes. He likes to flush the toilet so it’s his reward for doing his business in the pot. Recently, I decided to take this a step forward and just get him out of diapers completely. Little did I know what a challenge this would become. For starters, I took him more frequently, yet, for some reason, this backfired and he went in his diaper more. From never pooping in his diaper to 2 poops in his diaper 2 days in a row… strange. So…
I continued to ask him, “Potty???” and do the sign for it. I must have been annoying him. He ignored (s) me more often and I have found just dragging him to the bathroom was (is) the best key.
In an effort to change things up and try another method that has been much mocked in my family… I tried the Ukrainian method. That is, leaving him naked so when I see him go, I snatch him up and run to the bathroom. Perfect! We have a concrete floor with a rug. (my parents rug…) (Ok, that looks bad, the rug is already stained and gross so I didn’t feel a little sterile PEE would be that bad, especially since I didn’t think he’d even have an accident! DON’T JUDGE ME!)
I undress him and he was very excited to be free. He ran around in circles and then laid on the rug and did a bunch of pelvic thrusts. On a quick tangent- he’s a baby. He doesn’t know what he’s doing when he does that… so I don’t know if I should tell him that perhaps that isn’t very appropriate?? I don’t know what to do… So, after the pelvic thrusts, he decided to sit on his butt and watch some TV we put on to distract him for 5 minutes. Yes, it was the Gaithers. Yes, I wanted to shoot myself. Yes, it is really the only thing that makes him still. REALLY. It’s an electric fence for him, he never strays further than 5 feet in any direction as to not miss a moment of the singing. It’s crazy effective.
As he’s watching it, suddenly he starts… to … scoot… on his butt…. in the carpet. Ben freaks out from across the room, “HEIDI, get him! GROSS!” so I snatch him up and tell him no. Ben helpfully suggests (from across the room) to wipe him again, just in case… and to clean up the carpet. I helpfully point out to him that he could be of some assistance but he concedes that I have it all in control because I’m a rock star. Or something like that. So, I decided to try this again. But, once again, after less than a minute, he decided to start scooting across the carpet, butt dragging, like a dog with worms. Ben yells again, startling Summit who looks like he’s about to cry, triggering that helpful maternal instinct that makes us not murder our offspring and I snatch him up, strapping back on a diaper in defeat. We stare at him, frustrated, and he smiles back a wide, wide smile that showed all of his perfectly separated teeth.