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March 11, 2008
A Rebuttal, and a Re-posting...
In the post I am re-posting below, I notice that my wife called me stubborn. To that, I will reply in the coming weeks, months, or years. (I'll probably forget.) In the meantime, please enjoy yesterday's post as I have no ideas for posts tonight, and Jonah beginning to potty train is a big deal for us. (But, not yet for him.)
For the past twenty four hours I have been giddy. I have been ecstatic and excited and insanely happy. What could make a mother so happy, you ask? Well...I'll tell you.
Jonah is a really sweet kid. He's funny and caring and surprisingly gentle when he chooses to be. He does have one flaw though...he is extremely stubborn. Now Jon and I go back and forth about where he got that from, but we all know it's really Jon who is the King of Stubborn. ;) Anyway, one of the areas where Jonah has been particularly mule-like is the subject of potty training. He has patently refused to discuss it or entertain the idea since we started bringing it up about a year ago. Encourage him to sit on the potty and try? Nope. Attempt to generate excitement about being a "big boy"? Uh uh. Put him in big boy underwear to see if that motivates him? Uh, no...just spent a lot of time cleaning the carpets and his clothing. He just didn't care.
At first I was pretty sure that he just wasn't ready. He would pee anywhere at any time with no thought. But lately he's been saying things like, "I just pee-peed in my diaper" which leads me to believe that he is now ready to potty train. But still, he has been completely uninterested.
So, last night as we were getting ready for a bath, he announced that he wanted to get in the bathtub so he could pee-pee. Um...NO. So I required that he sit on the potty rather than pee in the bathtub. For the first few minutes he raged at me...he cried, he screamed (I think I'm still deaf), he carried on like I was killing him and I'm just so grateful that we don't have a neighbor right now or I'm sure the police would have shown up at our door. But, then, he calmed down. We discussed the mechanics of peeing in the potty versus a diaper. We speculated on why the pee wasn't coming out. He assured me that he wasn't mad at me (I didn't actually ask him this, he just wanted me to know). Eventually the conversation drifted to a non-pee related topic, as conversations sometimes will. And as we talked there at the potty...the familiar sound of pee hitting the water began.
"Jonah, you're doing it! That's wonderful!" Big grin. "Yeah, Mom, I'm doing it!" (Yep, he has recently left behind the babyish Mommy and Daddy in favor of Mom and Dad) And that, my friends, is all it took. He wore underwear successfully all day long.
Needless to say we have been making an INSANELY big deal out of this. And we have joined the ranks of thousands of other parents out there for whom true blissful happiness comes in the form of the most mundane things. The idea of buying diapers for only one child, for example. Or the fact that I will change half as many diapers each day. Or the idea that this milestone makes the difference between being a baby and being a kid. Hmmm. Maybe it's not such a little thing after all.
Posted by Jon at March 11, 2008 10:16 PM