potty TRAINing

It’s like a butterfly landed on your nose, only better because it’s the Emily sticker you got for your third potty success of the day.

(Alternate title of this post: In Which Thomas the Tank Engine And His Friends Assist Us with a Major Milestone.)

Yesterday, he went the whole day without a diaper. And only one accident, in the morning. Thanks in part to my friend Meg who met us midday at the toy store and suggested we buy a book of Thomas stickers to help the process along, Jonah has now earned about 15 stickers in two days, most of them for successes, and a few for really great tries.

The part that’s blowing my mind is how excited he is about it. He literally ran around in circles pretending to be an airplane/helicopter – an act that seemed related.

He also hasn’t thrown a tantrum in two days. Except when I dropped him off at preschool this morning.

The part that’s funny is how much we didn’t plan it. Certainly, we’ve been laying groundwork with our part-time EC efforts and his daily potty sits as part of our bedtime routine since he was around a year old. But I figured we’d missed the window – that mythical intersection of willingness, capacity, and trainability that I imagine (or read in some EC mom blog) exists at 18 months.

Jonah had pronounced to me not long ago that he much preferred diapers, and that potty training was for “Big Boys.” Then he said, “I’m not a baby, and I’m not a Big Boy. I’m just a Boy.”

I wasn’t exactly stressing about it yet, but I was kind of starting to wonder how and when we might pull this off.

So, this is how it happened:

We ran out of diapers.

See, we use these ridiculous hippie diapers. So hippie, even most hippies don’t know about them. They’re called Tushies and they’re made entirely from cotton and wood pulp, no “Super Absorbant Polymer.” Basically like having your kid swaddled in a wad of paper towels only ever so slightly more aerodynamic.

(Given all the hoopla recently about the evils of Pampers Dry Max – touted as environmentally friendly due to the decrease in use of cotton and pulp but reported to cause horrifying rashes possibly due to increased volume of SAP and other chemical processing, I feel both further vindicated for avoiding SAP and the like, and environmentally offensive for the volume of trash our diapering choice has produced.)

We order them off of Diapers.com (hey – go there, buy something, and use my code, and we’ll both get a discount: JULI6612) which offers free next day shipping and usually saves us in these situations, except when we discover that we’re out at 11 o’clock at night. Which happened Wednesday night.

We had ONE diaper left.

“Here’s the plan,” I said to Scott. “In the morning, we just keep him nakey-butt until it’s time to leave for music class. And then, after class, I’ll go to Rockridge Kids (the only store in the East Bay that stocks these ridiculous things) and buy a pack to get us through till Friday,” paying 1.5 x the cost of ordering them online. But hey, that’s the tax for not paying attention to the depletion of our stash.

So the next morning, Jonah is irritated about not getting into a diaper immediately, but he eventually goes along with it. And then, something happens.

I put a pair of elastic-waist stripey jersey pants on him without a diaper. And he likes it.

Before we leave for class, I suggest that he could get those pants off by himself and try peeing in the potty. (We rarely ever dress him in pants that are this easy to remove.)

He takes the pants off. I ask if he wants to go in his little potty, or on the big potty. He chooses little, backs himself up to the thing (do your kids do this? start out about a foot away and scootch backwards with one arm reached out behind, searching for the top of it to lower himself down?).

It works. He’s delighted!

I ask him if he would like to go to music class with no diaper and he says yes.

I pack two bags. One has the big potty ring in it, the other has four pairs of soft, elastic waist pants and shorts (thank you grandma Marcia for the recent adds to this category), extra t-shirts (you never know), and extra socks (think gravity, people). I also put him in his (waterproof/washable) Crocs shoes.

And off we go. We do a potty try before class. Nothing. We don’t do one right after class because he says he doesn’t have to go. And then he’s playing in the garden outside of class and he pauses and I hear him say “Uh oh…”

So we do a costume change and a somewhat gratuitous potty try and then it’s off to RK to buy the emergency diaper pack – or so I thought.

He starts at the train table. We go on to read some train books. There’s two he really likes. One shaped like James, the other like Thomas, both with plastic wheels attached.

I don’t really ask him if he needs to go potty. I just coerce him to sit. I read him a potty book conveniently located on the bookshelf right outside the bathroom, changing the main character’s name to “Jonah.”

And… nothing! But I buy him the Thomas-shaped Thomas book as a potty celebration gift anyway, and promise him the James later if he can make it all the way to the end of the day without a poop accident (the one thing I’m dreading).

After this, we meet Meg for lunch and she accompanies us back to the toy store for another potty try. (I’m going back there again only in order to use their potty-ring-adaptor thingy because I’d left mine in the car.)

While he’s so disposed, she BRILLIANTLY scans the book section for ones that contain THOMAS AND FRIENDS STICKERS.

Honestly, I can’t remember if we started the bribe before he did the deed or after, but success came at the perfect time. And thus the doling of the stickers began. (I also surreptitiously bought the James book and had it wrapped in hopes of being able to present it to him soon-ish, if not that night.)

He scores a Bill sticker for the toy store success, a Murdoch to celebrate perfect poopage in the grocery store lavatory – in which I crouched in a squat next to him in the tiny stall and read the stories that accompany the stickers in order to get him to sit longer.

At home, he does the solo routine with the pants, the backing up… and then the high five and the Emily sticker.

That night, at bedtime, he gets his James book.

This morning, he seemed game to go diaper-free to preschool but we decided not to expect that of them and talked him back into his packaging.

As soon as I picked him up though, he asked to go potty, and asked for a sticker.

We went from preschool to the zoo. I took him out of his diaper, loaded up my various supply bags, and crossed my fingers. As a precaution, when we rode the train, I had him sit beside me rather than on my lap, as I hadn’t brought spare clothes for myself.

He rocked it. Or rather, we rocked it, since sometimes (possibly motivated by the desire for more and more stickers) he asked to go, and other times, I just put him.

We were at the zoo with a friend (Hi Talia!) who told me about the next level – making a chart with stickers for each no-accident day in order to score bigger ticket Thomas items. Hmmm…