Potty Update

As I mentioned a few weeks back, at some point in July - completely out of nowhere - Lucas suddenly became super interested in using the potty. We were not necessarily ready to start potty training, but when your child is telling you he has to use the potty regularly - and then actually does - you need to just jump in, ready or not.

We happened to jump in a few days before we went on vacation - and the beach and pool and wacky vacation schedule are not exactly conducive to potty training, especially since it's pretty much all based on routine. So right out of the gates, we faltered. It was just too challenging to keep any kind of consistency or routine when there is no such thing on vacation! So when we got home, we tried again - for real (or as Elise now always says "for real, for real"). But again we were doing lots of traveling over the weekends and we had visitors and even during "regular weeks" Lucas is in a different place, with a different schedule, pattern, and caregiver almost every single day of the week. We were never really able to get in those first crucial series of very consistent days. It was a lot harder than we thought, especially considering that he was the one who wanted to get the show on the road to begin with.

He has had some success, but overall it has not been the easy, breezy potty training experience that we envisioned when this whole thing started. At this point, I think he likes wearing Choo-choo Train undies more than he cares about actually using the potty. Which is really not all that surprising, because they are pretty cool undies. And then last week he started literally screaming every time we tried to sit him on the potty. Screaming. It was at this point that we decided to back off. We were never in any rush to begin with, so what were we doing? It feels like we got off on the wrong foot to start with and never really found our groove. I think it was partially because we were so hesitant to do it from the get-go.

So we have backed off and are feeling out the situation for a while. If he starts to get really interested in it again, we will give it another shot - but next time we will only get started when we really feel ready. In the meantime, he does continue to tell us that he has to go potty once or twice a day, and then and only then, we put him on the potty - and he always goes when we says he has to. At least we have that going for us! The next time around, we'll be ready. All of us.