Potty

Two weeks ago mom asked Lucas when he wanted to stop using diapers and start using the potty full-time. "In two weeks," he decided on the spot. So we started a calendar, and every night he has marked off another day. Mom had drawn a star on today's calendar box to mark his last day of diapers. The three of us filled it in together after dinner tonight.

Of course we really have no idea, but he seems ready. He has used the potty off and on several times -- especially at daycare, mostly for number two but a couple of times for number one. He tells us when he is about to have a b.m. (Yesterday at daycare he even told the teacher he needed to pee right after his nap!) These are the things the books tell you to look out for.

For the last two weeks we have been talking about the big day, and tomorrow is it. We're staying home with him to manage accidents (mom in the morning, dad in the afternoon) and then he'll get one day at daycare to try that out before returning to full-time oversight by mom and dad on the weekend.

He has been very excited and positive about the whole prospect. Maybe we're projecting, but we can also detect some anxiety. Today on the playground Luke told Daddy to play "baby" while Lucas played the dad. Dad was instructed over and over again to be scared and to cry, and of course Lucas-daddy would then come help. There has been a lot of this sort of game lately, and more than the usual clinginess and talking about who's a "big kid". Is it potty anxiety? Who knows.

We're still planning to use diapers at night, but after his bath tonight Luke insisted that we put underwear on him, so we compromised with pull-ups and underwear. Spaceship underwear. Mom dressed him while dad was assembling his new grill (how gendered is that?), and before mom could get Luke's jammies on he insisted on running outdoors to show dad his underwear. "Wow, Lucas, that's exciting! What do you think of wearing underwear instead of diapers?" "They're cool!" He was really beaming.

Luke committed himself to follow-through two weeks ago by letting us draw a star on the calendar for today, and this post is our form of precommitment -- telling the world that tomorrow is a new day in toiletry. It's going to be rough. The books these days tell you not to rush potty training, and the doctors all tell you that these days kids quit diapers later than they used to. But as with everything in kid-raising, it's hard to avoid the rat race ("When did he crawl?" "When did he walk?" "When did he talk? " "Oh, he's still in diapers....?"); and maybe the enlightened laissez-faire attitude ("let him use the potty when he's ready") is just today's form of neurosis about this most-animal of things that we human beings have to do.

All of which leaves us wondering how to handle the inevitable accidents and likely resistance we're going to face tomorrow and for the next few days. Two weeks ago he asked us to bind him to the mast, but what happens when he says he really wants to go back to diapers? Ulysses's crew didn't get whipsawed by Penelope Leach on one side and all the "oh he's still in diapers" people on the other! (I guess they did have to deal with Scylla and Charybdis though.)