Tuesday - Mommy's Little Ladies Man

[ninanevermore]

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about my husband's opinion on why our son has no interest in not wearing diapers.

We were lying on top of our bed the other night after putting our son in his crib. Bedtime with our 2 year old takes a lot of energy. On the nights that Jeff is home, he has a strict 3 story limit, as opposed to my limit of three stories plus one bonus story, plus an additional "Okay, but this is absolutely the last one and I mean it because Mommy can't stop yawning" story.

Even after his stories, it's not a simple matter of putting him in his bed, covering him up and kissing him good night. It takes longer than that. There is a ritual of him demanding a few more slurps of apple juice, then the gathering of all the toys he wants to sleep with and tossing them in the crib. Once he has everything he needs in the dark (toys, books, a pacifier, a spare pacifier, his pillow, and two different blankets), then he must get in the crib by himself. If we try to pick him up and put him in his own bed, he screams until we take him out again and let him scale the side of the crib, pull himself over the edge of the railing, and then fall unceremoniously on top of the pile of loot he tossed in ahead of himself. Then he curls up on his side and I must arrange both blankets over him. The blanket that is red on one side and white with red patterns on the other side must be put red side up, or he can't sleep. The white side isn't any softer; it's just the side that he likes least and doesn't want to have to see before the light goes off.

Once the ritual of getting our son into bed is over, I am exhausted. On the two nights a week that Jeff is home, he is also exhausted. So we alays lie down and rest awhile before getting ready for bed ourselves. It's one of the few chances we get to speak privately, face to face.

"I've been thinking," Jeff told me on this occasion, "I bet I know why he's not interested in potty training."

Our son really is not interested. We ask, "Don't you want to be a big boy?" and he shakes his head and says "Uh-uh." Potties are not something he cares about.

"Why?" I asked Jeff.

"Well, think about it. He's got some real pretty teachers at his daycare. I mean, given the choice between wiping his own bottom and having a pretty girl wipe his bottom for him, I think he'd rather have a pretty girl do it. I don't blame him."

I raised my eyebrows and looked at my husband. He was very earnest about this idea, and seemed to want my opinion. I offered him the only one I really had, and it had nothing to do with our son.

"I just learned more about you right now than I ever wanted to know," I said. "There are a lot of things I'm willing to do for you, sweetheart, but I've got to draw the line right there."

"Well, no, I wouldn't expect that for myself. But you've got to admit, he's got a pretty cool thing going on and he just doesn't want to mess up the status quo when it's working so well for him."

I've thought it over since then, and maybe my husband has a point. Perhaps our son's teachers are all too young pretty, and if we moved him to a daycare with fewer college students and more grandmothers changing his diapers, he might want to use the potty and be a big boy. It's about as good as any theory I can come up with myself.


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Comments

[l-l-u-w-d.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* As a mother who is in the midst of potty training the youngest child of my own, I feel your pain. I have potty trained boys, and girls, and to be honest, I have to say that boys are easier, from my standpoint. My one son basically trained himself. I had just put my younger son in daycare with him, and one day I picked them up, and had to make a stop at the store to pick up a few things. While there, of course, the older son decided he needed to go potty. So, there I go, lugging the infant in his carrier, and the two year old into the bathroom to let the older one try to go, because up to this point, we really hadn't seen much progress, and it usually meant just changing his pull up. We get in there, and I go to help pull down his pants and pull up...only to find that my son isn't wearing a pull up. He's wearing underwear! I wrack my brain, and the only thing I can think of is he ran out of pullups at the daycare, and no one mentioned this to me, and no one had an extra for him to 'borrow'.

The next day, when I dropped him off, once again, in pullups, because I had no clue, and my son didn't say anything at all to me that I could make out for sure, I asked about why he was wearing underwear vice a pullup when I had picked him up the previous day. That is when the lady in charge of his class told me he just up and decided that he was a big boy now, because he had a little brother, and flat out refused to wear his pullups the day before. And, as they always had 'extra' clothing and such there, they found a pair of underwear for him to wear. And, other than the pull up I had put on him the night before, and the fresh one that morning, he never, ever wore pullups again. And didn't have any accidents, either. I have to say that was the easiest instance of potty training I had ever heard of. But, I wasn't complaining, either.


*maybe you should make your son a big brother* LOL

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

I just turned 38, and his father is 48. The best way to turn myself into a widow would be to announce to Jeff that I am pregnant. He would keel over.

mess up the status quo

[regatomic.livejournal.com]

maybe he's thinking of running for president,..o.o

Re: mess up the status quo

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Why not? He's already a lot smarter than the one we have. At least my son learns from his mistakes.

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

LMAO!

That's the funniest excuse ever for not wanting to be potty trained!

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

He may be small, but even a toddler has to get his jollies somehow. For him, it appears to be pretty teachers who toss him on a table and undress him. I can guess that variations on this fantasy are not that uncommon, even later in life, and right now he's getting to live the dream.

I'm just glad that he no longer takes out his genitals and shows them off to the little girls in his class (http://neanahe.livejournal.com/73101.html). There is only a very short period in a man's life where he can walk up to a group of girls at a Baptist church with his penis in his hand, and not have people call the authorities on him. I'm grateful he got that out of his system before the age of two.

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA

He's precious!

Or is that precocious... :D

[sidneymintz.livejournal.com]

cute!

I have a potty for Bodhi next to the big potty. He likes to play with it, and even sits on it sometimes, but we haven't really started the training yet.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

We have a potty, too. My son refuses to go near it, much less sit on it. I think it's a control issue with him, a matter of "you can't make me do what I don't want to do." My instinct is that forcing him, rather than slowly coaxing him, would be counterproductive.

And so, for now, there are diapers. *sigh*

[discreet-chaos.livejournal.com]

My boy doesn't go to daycare and though he has peed in the potty once or twice, it's always when Mom or Dad is on the large one and he tries, a lot more often than he's successful. I just figure, he'll eventually come around and in the meantime, we do a lot of talking about it.

My daughter was easier, but she was talking more and a lot more independent at two years and we had her in cloth, so it started by her taking-off her own, when it got wet. One of my sisters on the other hand, she was really big on the whole "learning the baby's language" stuff, so she went the route of taking it to the potty, when it looked like it wanted to go or when it was the regularly-scheduled time. As a result, her kid was potty-trained before it could talk, but she also had a girl.

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

I hear that girls are easier. We talk about it, read stories about it, tell him how cool it is, etc. When he announces "I pee!" (always after the fact) we point out that he should do that in the potty, and he looks at us and says, "No."

We'll get there eventually.

[jenelycam.livejournal.com]

Never thought of that one before.

Bedtime's always a ritual isn't it. Sometimes I can go without it, if I plean extreme exhaustion...LOL Then again, Camie's not TWO anymore. :P