Potty training. Ugh.

I potty trained Kaitlyn almost exactly a year ago.  At the time, I was very optomistic.  She had been interested in the idea for nearly 6 months, and is such an independant sort of girl that I figured it would only take a couple of weeks.

A year later, she still has accidents every single day.  Usually, she pees a tablespoon or two, stops herself, and then walks around with wet pants unconcerned until someone notices her and makes her go to the bathroom and change.

I have now decided that one of the most important components to potty training is that the kid needs to NOT like the feel of wet underwear.  Of course, both of my kids lack this.

So this time there was no optimism.  There are no happy thoughts about diaper free days on the horizon.  The thing is, Tyler doesn't tell us when he is hungry, usually.  He just waits around hopes we will feed him.  But sometimes he just bypasses us and gets the food himself.  That is my only hope for potty training - that he just decides to do it himself when he wants to go.

So far I am on day two.  For a kiddo that takes five times as long to learn anything, that is absolutely nothing.  I have weeks and months to go.  Thankfully, he is coming into this quite adept at going.  If you put him on the potty, he will push out anything he's got.  He knows how to wipe and wash his hands.  So if you take him often enough, he doesn't even have time to have an accident in-between, in general.  We're working on expanding that from the half an hour limit we are at now.  But I did have two good moments today.

First of all, I was folding the laundry when I heard him start to explode a bit in the underwear.  So I nervously called out "Tyler, what's going on?"  And he said "I need a diaper!  I need a diaper!"  When I hurried to him, he was quite concerned about this.  I was glad he recognized that it was something that didn't belong in his underwear!  Unfortunately, he continued to hold in the rest of that explosion until much much later, somehow. 

I went to the gym tonight, and put him in a diaper while we were there so the staff didn't have to deal with it.  Not consistent, but that's life.  If I thought it would only take a week, I would clear my schedule, but . . . I do what I can.  While we were eating at Subway on the way home, he suddenly got very concerned again.  "Oh no!  My diaper is all wet!"  Apparently the rest of the explosion had come out.  But hey!  He knew that stuff didn't belong in his underwear that morning, and now he knew that didn't go in his diaper either!  Hopefully someday we will get it where it belongs. And even if he doesn't mind wet underwear, maybe he does mind stinkyness. 

Baby steps.  If there is one thing that being Tyler's mommy has taught me, it is to not expect results, and just keep persisting while enjoying any progress you do see.  You just keep doing the right thing, day after day, and even if it doesn't appear to be making any difference, one day he will suprise me.