I had all these lovely pictures of the yellow and red leaves of our crepe myrtle soaked with rain this morning, which you can see here (look for 10 December Runners-Up), but the real star of the day has been the potty. Really, it's been Kent ON his potty. Either way, this new potty has been central to our experience today.

Since yesterday evening, Kent has peed in his new potty three times. Yes, three times! Yesterday evening, it was right before his bath — lately, he's started peeing as soon as he gets into the tub, so I asked him when he was naked and looking at his tub if he wanted to pee, and he said "mm-hmm", then started to pee right there on the floor. I quickly picked him up and put him in front of his potty, then made a big deal about how he had peed in his potty (standing up, no less). I was very proud and had dreams last night about him peeing in his potty.

Today during his nap, I read Katie Van Pelt's short potty training book from the library; she takes the approach that it's never too early to start talking about and sitting babies on the potty, though you shouldn't expect self-sufficiency before 18 months to 2 years. This is basically in line with what I've had in mind, though certainly people can wait longer if that works for them. I'm just eager to see how Kent will do now, and I think it'll be easier now than having a big emotional thing with a strung-out three-year-old. This book helped me to develop more of a plan about taking him to the potty regularly (especially right after he wakes up), so we went to the potty right after his nap, armed with Once Upon a Potty, one of his new favorite books. I had read it with him one and a half times when he started to pee, and after my gleeful reaction, he smiled and kept peeing. When he was done, I showed him what he had done, told him I was proud of him, then emptied it into the toilet, flushed, cleaned the potty, and went on with our day. We tried a couple more times this afternoon with nothing coming out, which was fine, because he sat there for a while to read with me. We're having a good time with it. Tonight, just after dinner, we tried again, and he peed in the potty again. W00t! He smiled as soon as I did my now-characteristic squeal of delight and kept congratulating him, and this time, he was more interested in helping me flush after I emptied his potty into the big toilet. This is such an exciting process!

He never seems to get tired of reading books with us, so I'm hoping that reading on the potty will be enough of an incentive to keep sitting there, even in the coming weeks/months as the novelty of the situation wears off. Luckily, we always have books from the library that he likes, plus his old favorites, so we should be able to have enough of a rollicking good time on the potty that he'll do okay with this whole process.

I'm prepared for the eventual assertion of independence that will seem to squelch our progress, since his assertions of independence affect a lot of other areas of our life these days, but I'm still optimistic. And thankfully, I'm not at all squeamish about cleaning up pee and poop. More on this as it develops.

Labels: Kent, photography, what to read

• posted by erica 12/10/2008 08:18:00 PM
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