About a week before Kenney's first birthday he decided he was ready to potty train. It was a total shock to me as #1 I'm not a big fan of the whole potty training process - it's a necessary evil and #2 Cole didn't potty train til age 3 so it was not even on my radar in the very least. (Note - do you like my use of #1 and #2?! - haha)
So how did I know it was time - one evening as I cooked in the kitchen Stan came and asked me why Kenney was naked. I had been cooking so responded that I didn't know. So Stan went ahead and put a diaper on Kenney - unsure of where the other one had ended up - of course we planned to find eventually. Well about 5 minutes later I walked out of the kitchen and past the boy's bathroom. It smelled like poop, but as I looked in the toilet saw nothing. As my eyes tracked around the room I saw Cole's old potty chair that was being stored in the corner with a load of poop in it. Kenney had taken himself to the bathroom. We were shocked.
On the one hand I was so proud of his brilliance, on the other hand I was thinking I was not ready to go through this process. But it was undeniable the kid had an interest so I steeled myself for the coming weeks of training.
I used the half naked kid technique and had the potty chair out where he could easily used. Kenney was a boy on fire. He had like one accident the first day and was doing great. The amazing thing was he would go on his own without my prompting or asking him. He was also delighted to dump the contents of potty chair in the toilet and flush. My biggest issue was trying to catch him on the dump mission before anything sloshed out! We went a solid 5 days like this and he was 100%. At that point I was hanging about the house quite a bit. I would take him out to get Cole from school and just ask him while we were walking if he needed to go. He would happily try anytime I asked and was again successful. I could hardly believe this - it was too good to be true...
The next week we went on vacation to Thailand. We found ourselves having to use diapers on the plane and here and there. Kenney regressed a bit, but we couldn't allow him to run around naked all the time. I think the underwear confused him a bit and because he was so young he wasn't very adept at undressing.
By the time we got back to China, it was like we were back to square 1. The chair was out, he was able to roam half naked again, but i guess the thrill was gone. He was having all kinds of accidents all over the house. Boo!
I spent a week trying to regain footing, but it was completly gone. Kenney started preschool about a week later and they said they would support helping him use the bathroom at school. I decided that was sufficient for now. He's in pull ups or diapers for most the time. Occasionally I can catch him when he needs to go and occasionally he does. So the dream ended and I have a sometimes potty user. I think I'm gonna let him get a little older before I attack full swing again. And so for now, the potty train has left the station...
No comments:
Post a Comment