Monday, July 10, 2006

One step forward, two steps back

Caution: Description of poop included in this post.

I'm sure you're all hanging on the edges of your seats (all two of you!) wondering how the potty training is going.

Well, after not speaking to the boy Thursday night and part of Friday, he didn't poop at all on Friday. I knew we were in for it on Saturday. So, Saturday morning, I began the process of monitoring every "quiet moment" the boy took. Suddenly, he looked up from his toy and said, "Mommy, I need to go poopy." I thought in the background that I heard angels singing, but in my haste to get him into the bathroom, I couldn't fully confirm it.

The boy sat there and pooped. It was soooo cool. And I thought we might have finally made it over the hump. I made sure to be extra-super-duper happy and give him all kinds of praise and hugs and attention for the rest of the day, just to try to make sure he would want to do it again.

It didn't work. Yesterday, he pooped in his pants twice. I told him after the first time that if he did it again, he couldn't go to his little friend's birthday party. He told me he didn't want to go to the party and he did it again.

I'm once again at a loss. Today, the husband and I are attempting the approach of not asking him if he needs to go. Maybe he just really needs to feel like he's completely in control of the situation. ??? Maybe he's just a little bit too much like his mother and doesn't want anyone to tell him what he should and shouldn't do? (Oh, why couldn't I have been a little more repentent about all my bad behavior earlier?....)

In an attempt to create either synergy or peer-pressure (whichever works), we switched the girl over to underwear yesterday, too.

Get this - she pooped on the toilet yesterday morning. I was amazed. However, she got a little freaked out by looking down there and seeing it coming out. She looked at it and said, "Penis!" At which point, I laughed and told her that it wasn't a penis - that girls don't have penis', only boys have penis' and girls have vaginas.

But then she freaked out because it was stuck there and wouldn't drop into the toilet. She wiggled her way off the toilet and was trying to run away when I managed to get ahold of her, dig the poop out, show it to her, and drop it in the toilet.

I was able to get her back on the toilet to see if she could go some more, but she couldn't bring herself to make another "penis". (she was really kind of scared at that!)

I'm headed home at lunch today to see how everything is going. I'm a little hesitant to go...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just two viewers? Give yourself more credit! I've been spying after I was referenced from your brother's blog. As an engineer with a 4 year old girl and baby boy, I can relate.

Sara said...

Ok, THREE viewers! :)

Chris said...

Just to let you know that you're not alone, we had a hell of a time getting both our kids out of diapers. It seemed complicated at the time, but it was probably simple...they're both willful perfectionists, and potty training was something *they* were going to do, not us, and neither girl was willing to deal with a period of mixed results. Our input/rewards/consequences, while amusing or annoying to them depending on the approach, didn't really seem to factor in much. In both cases, we tried and failed a few times, and then one day they announced that they were going to wear big kid undies, and neither of them had many accidents after that. It was pretty late in the game.