I spent a good deal of the weekend on childcare duty by myself, so between the baby and the Monster, I had my hands full.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the Monster is getting over his fear of the toilet, which in itself is a step forward. Previously, the seat we had wasn’t quite the right shape for our toilets – we have those oblong seats rather than perfectly round – and since they didn’t fit right, we were trying to get him to sit on the real seat from the get-go. As the STAR seminar on toileting had cautioned, though, he was indeed terrified of being suspended over a hole over water – he fought us every step of the way. The wife has managed to find the padded seat she’d bought that better fits on our toilets, and now he’s not even in the slightest bit resistant about sitting on the pot.
The rewards seem to be working as well – I’m not quite sure that he’s putting two and two together, since he has yet to actually use the toilet properly, but he’s certainly aware that he gets rewarded with chocolate for sitting on the toilet, and ends up running over to the stairs near the powder room before asking for it.
One humorous part, though – he’s still really ‘too big’ for the seat as it is, which ends up with him pointing in a manner that’d have him spraying the room if he actually did use the toilet. (I’m sure you all wanted to hear that.) So I’ve been working with him to make sure that, at least until he’s willing to sit on the seat without the padded insert, he’s pointing downwards. I’m probably a hair too emphatic about the fact that he needs to be doing that, since now when he’s sitting there, if I start to remind him, he yells out, “Point your penis down.”
I can’t wait till the wife has to be the one, in public, to take him to the bathroom…