potty party

Because I just have to remember this.

We've been potty-training for eight weeks.  It's a process, for sure.
Actually, it hasn't been as hard as I thought it would be...
We started out easy, letting him take the lead.
At first he only wore underwear for a couple of hours a day.  It was good for him to feel the success without us pressuring him.
Once he started, though, he caught on pretty quick.
(we rewarded him with a "Potty party" of chocolate chips, then fruit snacks, then oreos, and now we're back to fruit snacks but only when he remembers and wants one),
except for when it comes to going #2...


Every day he tells me how excited he is to go poop on the potty and how he's going to get a poptart and how he gets to play his fishing game and he's going to do it! 
And up until five or six days ago, he had yet to earn a single poptart...
Even with all the laundry I'm doing, though, it still feels SO much better than changing two kids' diapers all day long.  He'll figure it out eventually. He gets better every day.
 And he's the king of "holding it,"
so we can go out and about without me ever worrying about him having an accident.


And there have been a few memorable incidents.
Like the time that Nicholas most obviously needed to go to the bathroom but was refusing to go.  He was doing the potty dance for an hour and screaming at me that he didn't need to go.
So finally, because I would rather clean up the tile than the carpet, I took the gate off the stairs and trapped him in the bathroom with me.

But instead of making it onto the potty, he went on the floor--#1 and #2.  Awesome.

So I scoop him up (he's screaming, of course), and stand him in the sink. Then I start to clean up the mess.

Meanwhile, Ellie discovers that the stairs are now unguarded, and she climbs up halfway, then falls down and bonks her head.

So Nicholas is screaming at me from the sink,
I'm standing in his puddle,
and Ellie is screaming from the stairway.

As Kent said when I told him about it,
It was just one of those Kodak moments.

He's getting better and better at it every day, and he's always so excited about using the potty-he does a little dance when he finishes and sings while he's washing his hands.
I love this kid,
and I'm more than a little glad he's not in diapers anymore.