The Potty Wars: a late update

Sep­tem­ber 13th 2010
6:39pm CMT BGKY

It’s been a blur of impres­sions about how Mac has gone from intran­si­gent soil­er to proud­ly announc­ing the time and place of his next main event. If he knew how, he would be post­ing Twit­ter updates; No, Jenn won’t let me sign him up for a Twit­ter account.

It is now no mis­take to say that the main rea­son Mac’s pot­ty train­ing took off was that friends vis­it­ed us for an extend­ed stay and they had 4yr-old Thors­en who was ful­ly pot­ty-trained and wast­ed no time let­ting Mac know that he was a big boy because of it. Mac was pret­ty much trained with­in a few days. I sus­pect an instinc­tu­al com­pet­i­tive­ness was the moti­vat­ing fac­tor in Mac no longer paus­ing in mid­step or sen­tence to start breath­ing fun­ny while his gaze turned inward becom­ing almost cross-eyed and his face became flushed with urgent concentration/​constipation.

So know­ing this, we are let­ting Scar­lett know that Blake­ly, a younger cousin, is now ful­ly1 pot­ty-trained. Giv­en Scar­let­t’s own com­pet­i­tive streak and if we can trick her into think­ing she wants to be pot­ty-trained, this should take no more than a few hours. Yup.

  1. This is not strict­ly true. Blake­ly is in the process of being pot­ty trained but we’ll let this onto­log­i­cal sub­tle­ty slide. []

PPP&P part deux

PPP&P part deux :

Because this week­end Mac has essen­tial­ly declared that he will not poo in the pot­ty and has had at least two very recent mishaps that defy the law of physics (I’ll spare you the details.1 ) and has drawn his Mag­inot Line in the sand, writ­ten in yel­low so to speak. The results of our assault are Gal­lipo­lian in nature. So, I do want to report that Scar­lett, on the oth­er hand, seems to be right on pot­ty-train­ing sched­ule. She has respond­ed pavlo­vian­ly to the lol­ly-pop bribe, and a time or two now has lit­er­al­ly peed on com­mand when remind­ed what was in it for her.

Need­ing no bribe, Jack­son can always be relied on to pee the moment he is sans couche.

  1. OK, OK, in one he was able to pee in the mid­dle of a fur­ni­ture store by seem­ing­ly spir­it­ing his pee past his pull-ups and shorts in order to cre­ate a very large pool of pee on the con­crete floor. The sec­ond, he again some­how over­whelmed his pull-ups with much less desir­able con­tents and results. []