Adventures in Potty Training

Too many people have told me that boys are hard to potty train, that it won't happen until he's 3 1/2 - don't bother, don't even try. But I'm starting to see that bathroom-y things are pretty much like all the others. It's really hard for someone to tell you what to expect when they spend no time with your child. It seems to me it's like starting solids or realizing they understand almost everything you say - you just sort of know.

So a few months ago I started thinking about how much it was going to cost to have two kids in diapers and simultaneously noticing that Caleb likes order and figured that if he likes things "in their place", he might well grasp that his waste products have a proper place and what could it hurt to try to point him in that direction.

Because Caleb and I rarely go out after naptime, I decided to buy him some cotton training pants and just let him get wet when I knew we would be at home anyway. After a while I discovered if I took him to the bathroom every 45 minutes, he usually needed to go...and if I waited past 45 he wet himself. It's never really been my intent or expectation to have him completely potty trained by the time the baby is born, just to reduce the number of diapers he uses by the time she gets here. Lately, however, he's made some big jumps ahead. Today, for example, he stayed dry all day. He didn't tell me he needed to go, he just waited until I took him - even in the morning when he was wearing a diaper! Also several times lately, he's held it all night. One night he woke up in the night because he couldn't hold it and had a hard time settling back down afterwards. A day or two ago, he wet himself while he was wearing the training pants and he was really upset. While he doesn't consistently tell me when he needs to go, he does sometimes and twice recently he's told another person (other Rob) that he needed to go.

Still it's kind of a lot of work, but I don't want to lose the ground we've gained so far. Right now it's no problem to take him to the bathroom every 45 minutes - that's pretty much my schedule too being almost 37 weeks pregnant! I've kind of looked at as a game we can play when I feel like it and if I'm too tired or busy he can just wear a diaper, but since he held it so long today, I feel like he might be moving from playing a game to genuinely potty training. I don't want him to wait just because I might forget! Well, maybe that will encourage him to tell me more often.

An entire blog about pee. What has becoming a parent done to me!