Potty Training Update

I'm really not sure what has come over me with this second child. With the first one, he was falling asleep on his own by the time he was three months old, in recovery from pacifier addiction by the time he was one, and potty-trained within two or three weeks of turning three.

This second child, though, he's . . . different. He is just now falling asleep on his own, is not yet in recovery from pacifier addiction, and thinks that underwear is just another convenient place to go tee-tee.

Potty-training is the most pressing issue right now -- I need to get him potty-trained because, well, it's embarrassing me that he's still in diapers. I've tried all the tested methods and he's not interested in them. I have threatened to make him clean up his poopy mess by himself. Nothing works. So to make myself feel like we're making progress when clearly we are not, I have taken to just putting underwear on him. In theory, I understand that this isn't really a bad plan so long as you take the child to the toilet every half hour and make him go . . . it's the Puppy Housebreaking Technique, which is a pretty effective way to go about potty training. In theory.

In reality, you are able to stay focused on the task for about an hour and a half, taking the child off to the toilet to tinkle every half hour and then dinnertime rolls around and you sit with the child while he meanders around his plate, slowly eating every last bite ("Are you done? Can I take this?" -- "NO! MINE!" -- "Fine. Eat all your lettuce. Whatever!"). Just as you are poised for the last bite to be carefully placed in his mouth so that you can whisk him off to the potty, the phone rings and your client needs to discuss why his bank account is frozen, so you walk out onto the porch and ten minutes later, here comes the boy with wet pants -- not to show you his wet pants and get changed, because he could care less that his pants are soaked in tee-tee; he wants you to play in the sandbox with him. So as you are still on the phone, you gesture furiously, pointing to the pants and mouth: "WHY DIDN'T YOU GO IN THE POTTY??" And he just pulls on your hand to drag you to the sandbox. So after you get off the phone, you take off his pants altogether and say, "Fine. Don't wear anything at all."

So he doesn't:

And five minutes later, he gets your attention to show you what a big boy he is cause he didn't go tee-tee in the potty:

He went in the sandbox.