So we are now around 6 weeks into potty training and I thought a potty training update was overdue.
For us it has certainly not been potty training in a week it has been a much longer process. We had immediate success with wees as long as I prompted him but poos have been another story and one that still does not always have a totally happy ending!!
Apart from the poo debacle, which I will come back to in a minute, the main struggle for us has been getting our little monkey to tell us when he wants to do a wee. If I remind him he is at the point where there would be no accidents, but leave him to his own devices and it can be messy… My advice to anyone just starting would be to try to give them that responsibility quickly. I think I was too keen to avoid accidents so I reminded too much and now he just waits for me to ask and if I don’t he just carries on until he is in a puddle! However, he is starting to get it and I think that is now down to us repeatedly explaining what he should have done when he has an accident. He also started to get sore bits and pieces when he was having accidents and this encouraged him to avoid having wee in his pants. I couldn’t understand for ages why he never seemed to ask me to use the potty but was apparently asking his daddy and nanny regularly and this week I finally cracked it… He has been asking me to but for some reason has decided an explicit ‘mummy I need a wee’ would be too straight forward for me so he prefers to just give me a hint which is ‘mummy you are going to need to change me’ it’s more like giving me fair warning really and it makes me giggle that this is my only clue, but now I know that we haven’t had any accidents for days!! Woo hoo!!!
So if I was excited when I worked out the wee wee guessing game imagine my delight when one day he gave me the secret signal and not only produced the wee but also a surprise poo. A poo in the potty not in his pants IN THE POTTY!!!!!!!! I nearly fell over. I mean I was a little mortified as we had just quickly popped the potty down on the street (in the corner, but nonetheless in public) as he needed to wee, but I was also beyond excited and so very proud. He was so delighted with himself too that I thought that was going to be the end of poogate, but alas this was not the case and the battle lines were firmly redrawn with him even stating he would not be doing any more poo in the potty. He then did not go for another 24hrs. He is nothing if not singleminded 😉 Yesterday thought a truce was reached and for once I believe I am the victor… He not only did a poo in the potty but asked twice in the day to try to do a poo by sitting on the potty for a while. Now for those of you who are wondering how we won him over I would like to say it was though gentle persuasion, continuing patience and understanding, but I would be lying; it was pure unadulterated bribery! A Spider-Man toy sat on a high shelf in the playroom with a promise it would be his if he did his poo in the potty. I admit I am not proud of this and I don’t have much of a follow up plan as I can’t give presents for every poo, but I hope that it is enough of an incentive to get him started and that this will them continue. Honestly I felt there was no other choice. Even our nanny had exhausted all her excellent childcare professional techniques and he was resisting them all. For now bribery has won the day and I spent a whole day without having to wash poo out of clothes so here’s hoping I haven’t made it all a hundred times worse and that it will continue and that potty training the horror film will be over.
Kx
