This weekend, we visited a friend that my dad has known since they were in high school. He took my family out on his boat, Hammer Time. I volunteered to stay with Dash and Sam because they are too young for the ride. I didn’t mind being left behind because I’m terrified of the ocean.
We’re away for the holiday weekend. This is our first vacation with two babies. Traveling with them has been surprisingly easy. Dash has been such a good boy. I have so much fun with him!
After dropping off Dash at preschool yesterday, I took Sam to visit my mom at work. She doesn’t get to see Sam as much as she got to see Dash when he was this age. Less than two weeks after Dash was born, I returned to work at my family’s company. They let me bring my baby to work with me. I had a private office, so I could close the door when I needed to nurse him or when he was being too loud. And it was so nice to have my mom there to watch him when I needed a break. I stopped working full-time about nine months ago, but I’ll always be thankful for the opportunity to work in an environment that was so flexible toward and tolerant of my situation.
We’ve been casually potty training Dash over the last few months. I say “casually” because we haven’t approached it very deliberately or consistently. We started by teaching Dash to point to his diaper when he needed a clean one. Once we knew that he could recognize when he had peed or pooped, we began to teach him to correlate diaper changes with sitting on his training potty.
Only recently did we start letting him run around naked (or without pants) while he played. The goal was to catch him in the act and quickly put him on the training potty. It only took a few accidents before he started to understand. Almost every day for the past week, he has peed in the training potty at least once a day. It’s gotten to the point where he will sit on the potty on his own accord when he knows that he needs to pee.
We make a big deal about him peeing in the potty by clapping and cheering. Last night, I was so proud of him that I stopped clapping to give him a high five. He obliged me once, but his grin vanished when I tried to give him another high five a few seconds later. He grabbed each of my hands and moved them together. He wanted me to keep clapping!
He gets so much delight out of carrying his training potty to the bathroom to dump the contents into the toilet and flush. He likes this so much that he will pee just a little, carry out this dump-and-flush procedure, then return the potty to his room and repeat several more times before he has fully emptied his bladder. It’s exhausting!
For the past two nights, he has thrown tantrums when I try to put a diaper on him before bed. He would tug at it like he was trying to get it off, and he would sit on the training potty and scream. I though that he might be trying to trick me into taking off his diaper by making me think that he would pee in the potty, but really he just wanted to keep playing.
Then it occurred to me that maybe he doesn’t want to wear diapers anymore because we keep telling him that diapers are for babies; big boys pee in the potty. So last night, I let him wear Pull-Ups for the first time. It also happened to be the first night that he slept in a twin bed rather than in his crib. My baby is growing up!
We still need to teach him how to pull down his own pants so he can go to the bathroom on his own. It’d also be nice if he would learn how to say “potty” rather than pointing at his crotch. But I think he is making excellent progress and I won’t be surprised if he is fully potty trained in a week or two!
Lauren Newman lives in Richmond, Virginia. She majored in urban planning, married her high school sweetheart, and dreams about moving to Mexico. More »