Posted by hippiehousewife on November 23, 2008 · 5 Comments
We’ve had a few more dry diapers and pees on the toilet over the past couple days. I need to get out and buy a smaller seat to put on the toilet, as he (understandably) doesn’t always seem comfortable being held on the big toilet seat, and then we’ll start giving him access on a regular basis. So, I guess we’re starting potty learning!
Annie at PhD in Parenting shared her opinions and experiences with potty learning. Here’s a snippet:
Just like with infant and toddler sleep, there are a lot of misconceptions out there about what is normal. The generation before us prided themselves on getting their babies toilet trained before the age of two (I’m guessing the fashionable question at the time was “Is she toilet trained yet?” instead of the “Is she sleeping through the night?” question that we hear so often these days). Elizabeth Pantley has a great quiz to help you assess your child’s readiness for potty training: Potty Training Readiness Quiz.
So we’ll see how it goes. I don’t intend to make a huge pressure-filled deal out of it and turn him off of the idea altogether; we’ll just take him to the bathroom every hour and give him the opportunity to pee if he needs to.
As an amusing little side note, I turn on the tap every time I set him on the toilet so that the sound of running water sort of helps him along (Is that cheating? I don’t know.). So far, every single time, my husband has said, “Great…now I need to go!”
Posted by hippiehousewife on November 19, 2008 · 6 Comments
Yesterday – out of the blue! – we had three dry diapers and two pees on the big toilet.
Shock and amazement!
I don’t know whether this will continue, and I admit I’m not holding my breath in case it was merely a fluke, not to be repeated for many more months, but perhaps it really was his first steps towards potty learning.
I admit it – I sniffled a little bit. They grow up so fast, it catches you by surprise sometimes. My husband said yesterday that while it’s always been neat to watch him learn new things, it’s like a switch has flicked recently and he’s kicked things into a higher gear. It’s true, and is it ever fascinating to watch.
I wasn’t planning on starting potty learning for, goodness, another year-ish. It wasn’t something I wanted to push him towards before he was ready, so I planned to take a slow and casual pace. Maybe he has different plans – they do say, after all, that kids in cloth diapers learn to use the potty earlier than kids in disposables, since you can feel the wetness in cloth diapers while disposables whisk it all away.
And besides, isn’t that the core of attachment parenting – working with your child, recognizing their cues, adjusting your approach to fit an individual child…knowing them, building a relationship with them, walking along beside them? And parenting just wouldn’t be parenting if it weren’t always evolving, plans revised, nothing ever quite the way you expected – and so often, much much better than you could even have imagined.