In Training

After a busy month of family get-togethers, house-guests, and overnights at Papa and Nana’s house, things have finally settled down a little bit. What a perfect time to potty train Abraham! For months he’s been handling his #2 business in the potty (which is great!), but we figured getting him to pee in the potty every time would be a greater challenge.

The way Abraham chugs his drinks, ANYTHING, from soy milk to apple juice to carrot juice (yuck!), he just has a lot of liquid, steadily running through that little body of his. We’ve played around with the training in the past, tossing on some Cookie Monster or Batman panties (aka: manties), and he has shown absolutely NO idea what is going on down there.

“Abraham, are your panties dry?”

“Yeah”

“Why is everything on you and around you wet?”

“I no know?”

However, he is a motivated little guy...And truth be told, we ran out of diapers. But we did have some extra pull-ups on hand, so one day we put him in a pull-up. Pull-up! Just the name got him interested this time. Sometimes he has sported a masculine, blue Toy Story pull-up, and other times when it was closer at hand, he has strutted his stuff in one of Mimi’s unused pink, Disney princess pull-up. It didn’t really matter to him (we’re so proud!), he just wanted to promote himself from diaper status.

Lisa and I added our effort to the process by offering him (and Mimi) an M&M each time he went pee in the potty and kept his pull-up dry. Well that didn’t take more than a couple times before he was kicking off his pull-up (blue or pink), scooting on to the toilet all by himself, and a minute later, informing us that he had an M&M coming his way. Of course he needed a few short lessons on the technical issues (ripping toilet paper so he doesn’t have 3 feet of paper that’s an inch wide, pointing “it” DOWN, and lining up the leg-holes on his pull-up so he’s not showing too much cheek).

So now he’s good, we think. At least at home. He goes to the potty more than he needs to, only producing anything about 75% of the time (although he asks for an M&M every time). Sometimes he’ll try 3 or 4 times in as many minutes. But he does everything all by himself. He digs his pull-ups and manties. He’s on his way to really being potty trained...we’ll deal with the M&M induced diabetes later.

He's checking for Mommy and Daddy if his manties are dry (the boots and hat aren't officially part of the training process).