Potty Talk, or, A Toddler Milestone

So, WELL over a year ago, we started potty-training Jones.  To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, "I thought potty training was going to be an event when, in reality, it's a process."  We started last September, on Labor Day weekend, with a "naked weekend" as suggested by the Three-Day Potty Training method. 

Jones is all about being naked - it was definitely his favorite part of potty training!

It worked okay. He got the idea, at any rate, and thus the training part of potty-training commenced.  We got down the peeing portion of the program pretty quickly, but I had pretty much decided that we were NEVER going to be able to convince the child to poop in the potty.  I had my moments, let me tell you.  Then, we'd have little episodes where I thought we were making progress:  like, one time, he told Alan that he had to poop, so Alan took him into the bathroom and set him on the potty and then said, "Okay, buddy, I'm going to leave you alone.  You poop and I'll be back in a bit."  Previously we had always sat in the bathroom with him and tried to encourage him, with no success.  Well, when Alan stepped outside, it was only a couple of minutes and he stepped back in and, ta-da, poop in the potty!  The (sort of) frustrating thing during all of this time was that he had it down at school, and very rarely had accidents (!); in fact, his teachers were the ones that were like, "Hey, you can quit sending him in pull-ups - he's got it down.  Just send some extra clothes, for the once-in-a-blue-moon when he has an accident."  I was like:  "Seriously?!  This is some kind of sick joke, right?" 


A side-effect of the potty training is that he LOVES to run around either naked from the waist down, or with just underwear. 
"No pants!" has become his war cry, and he especially favors the look of underwear, no pants, and shoes, his favorite being cowboy boots.  I call him Captain No Pants. 
Every morning, we have to have a discussion about how he has to wear pants to school, and he can't wear his cowboy boots to school (I can't send him in cowboy boots - can you imagine all of the stomped toes that would result?  I can't be responsible for that.)  So, as you can imagine, as soon as he gets home, he wants "I take off pants!"

We had good days and bad days.  We had days like this:

And then we had days like this:

 

And then, Lord help us all, we had days like this:

 

For reals, y'all.  The child went through a phase where he would poop and then take out the poop and play with it.  And this is, apparently, not an uncommon problem - just Google it, you'll see what I mean.  Jones is not alone, but trust me, you feel like you're all alone when you're cleaning up poop.  There are worse pictures than these, but I think I'll spare everyone from that (these are bad enough, right?).  The first time it happened was at my parents' house.  There are no pictures from that incident because it was so awful, it took all hands on deck to clean it up, and none of those hands had time to operate a camera.  To make a long story short:  Jones snuck into my parents' pantry, took a poop on the floor, and then smeared that poop all over the floor of the pantry, all over himself, and on several of the items on the shelves of the pantry.  Like I said:  awful.  With these incidents, it never failed, we'd walk into his room and there he'd be, poop all over him and his bed, and he'd say, quite cheerfully, "I pooped!".  No kidding, Jones.  No kidding.  This was, obviously, wearing us out.  Nobody likes to clean up poop.  Nobody.  And I really don't know that there's a way to stop him or any other child from doing this because, believe me, we tried pretty much everything, but he persisted ... I mean, I seriously considered using duct tape on the child for a while.  For real.

I will say, a side benefit of the potty training is that I think the little boy underwear is to-die-for cute.  I mean, seriously?  How cute are these underoos? 

And how cute is this boy in his underoos (and, side note:  could he be the next Fingers Taylor?!)?

So, while there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth from me and Alan, we kept at it.  The crew at Noah's Ark wasn't worried about it, and Dr. H was not worried about it (Dr. H : "Don't worry about it.  Boys are harder.  And they're not going to announce at his graduation from the U of A, 'Jones Tanner Ward, who didn't poop in the potty until he was 4'; so don't stress out."), and pretty much every person I talked to who had potty-trained a little boy told me not to worry about it (pretty much everyone said the same thing:  "When he wants to do it, he will, and you will feel exhausted and silly about all of the time you spent fretting over this.  I though my son, X, was going to go to kindergarten wearing diapers, and then he decided he could do it, and it was not a problem from there on out, once he decided to do it").  So, I tried not to worry about  it.  And then ... the clouds parted, the sun shone down upon us, and a great peacefulness descended upon all the land because, literally, not kidding, the week we went to the beach, the child decided in his own mind, in his own time, that he was ready to poop in the potty EVERY TIME.  And tell us that he had to use the potty EVERY TIME.  Which just goes to show you that the beach is a magical and blessed place, and all good things happen there. 

 

Seriously, as we were loading up the car to head to Florida, Jones came up to me and said, "I need to poop!"  Since that may have been the first time he'd ever said that to me BEFORE pooping his pants, I was startled ... but not so startled as to not get him on the potty as fast as possible.  And ... he did what you're supposed to do in the potty, right before we left!  And he did it every day for the next week while we were on vacation!  He would VOLUNTARILY tell me he had to go (this while he was playing on the beach or doing some other fun activity that any toddler would be loathe to abandon!) and we would go and he would do his business LIKE IT WAS NO BIG DEAL AND HE HAD BEEN DOING IT FOREVER AND GEEZ, MOM, WHY WERE YOU FREAKING OUT ABOUT THIS!  So now, our long national nightmare is over, and we have ditched the pull-ups, and it's as if he's always used the potty and there was never any YEAR-LONG struggle.  For which I am PROFOUNDLY grateful. 



Me and my big boy!

Dad's proud of our big boy too!  And Jones is proud of himself, of course!

So, in short, I have no advice for other parents other than to be patient.  It's a process, not an event, for sure, and your kid's process may be longer than you want, but that may just be the hand you're dealt.  And, as every experienced parent I talked to told me, "He'll do it one day when you least expect it, and he'll never look back."  Seriously, pretty much every person I polled told me some version of that and IT IS SO TRUE.  It's just hard because you want that day to be the day you pick, and it's pretty much totally up to your child.  I'm just glad that Jones did finally pick a day ... and hasn't looked back since.