A "Teachable Moment"- Missed

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

It was late in the afternoon. Duke was eating dinner and I was trying to get my dinner cooking so I could eat shortly after putting him to bed. I will starve to death, people! Of course he finished eating early and I was in the middle of cooking with about 15 minutes till I could break away and give him a bath. He ran around like the little "White Tornado" that he is and between disappearing in and out of the kitchen and hearing various items in the living room being moved around, I thought I was in the clear.

He came into the kitchen for a pit stop and to play with his castle for a minute. He starts telling me "poop". I asked if he has to poop? "Yeah." I say, well that's OK, you can go ahead and poop.

*Aside: We are not potty training yet. We are talking about it. And by we I mostly mean Duke. I have been intending to do it for some 3 or 4 months now, but haven't quite gotten around to it. I finally have most of my supplies and my new plan was once Lilly's room is together (hopefully next week) we will take the plunge. As you'll see from the rest of my story, I hope we make it that long.

To that he looks at me puzzled and says, "in the pants?" I flounder for a moment and say yes, you can poop in your diaper and someday soon we'll learn to use the potty. I just couldn't fathom getting the potty down and setting it up and trying to show him how to use it, especially not with the kind of notice I had. So he squats and takes care of his business.

Now let me remind you that it is about 10 minutes till bath time and about the same till I can step away from the stove. I figure, he can run around with a dirty diaper for 10 minutes and it won't kill him. I'm not going to put a diaper on him for 10 minutes and then just throw it away, plus there's the matter of my dinner! (Go ahead, call DCF on me.) €

So he resumes his treks in and out of the kitchen, running up and down the hall. He's pulling on his pants. He comes back into the kitchen and tries to pull them off (another hesitation/excuse in potty training is that he doesn't really know how to dress/undress himself yet). I tell him he can take the shorts off but not the diaper and help him.

He makes another round then comes back and unhooks the diaper. The poop drops out onto the floor. I go to grab him and he steps in the poop as he tries to escape. Trixie comes over to sniff/taste it. I am trying to clean it up and get it off his heel so there aren't little poop prints all over.

As for peeing, he isn't sure when he's going to do it (he doesn't announce it's imminent arrival like he does the bm's) but he sure likes to have his little toy Thomas the Train go pee in the potty. Every night in the tub he has Thomas and tells me over and over and over and over "Thomas go pee in the potty" and keeps repeating it with a very serious nod of the head until I lift the toilet and hold Thomas over it and squeeze the bath water into the potty. Repeat.

So what's the moral of the story? I don't know. Don't postpone potty training? Or that poopy pants take precedence over dinner on the stove? Nah, that can't be right... I hope I didn't wait to long or miss the key moment for teaching him to go. I guess we'll see.