Another thing that I need to catch up on:  My little man is potty trained.  He’s been for… oh, a couple months now?  He was potty trained right after he turned 2, which people never stop telling me is highly unusual – especially for a boy.  Well… it’s not so unusual for OUR boy, no?  *smile*

A couple people have asked how we did it, upon noticing the lack of “diaper bulge” when we’re out and about, but I have little advice to offer.  As always, I simply followed his lead.  When we was around 6 months old, I considered trying “elimination communication” with him and purchased a little red potty.  It’s been sitting in the bathroom since then.  I was too lazy to do the elimination communication thing, though, especially since he was, at 6 months, “a late starter.”  The only advice I can possibly think to offer, then, is this:  Don’t be shy.  Chris & I have not been at all shy (ahem) about bathroom habits.  Felix has seen everything & has always tended to wander in and hang out.  Since his little red potty is in his bathroom, he would often sit on it and wait.  I’m sure that has much to do with it.  We never pushed and never made a big deal out of it.  I did notice that he found the whole idea pretty interesting (I know, strange, but we’re talking about toddlers here) and liked sitting on his potty.  Then I found out that, in order to go to preschool, he needed to be fully potty trained.  So I started letting him run around the house sans diaper and pants and would occasionally ask if he wanted to sit on the potty.  After only a couple of days, he was totally in to the idea.  At home, without his pants on, he just started going to sit on his potty whenever he had to pee.  Flash forward to now – he never wears diapers during the day, even when we’re out and about.  We’ve been out for entire afternoons and he will always ask to go.

Poop (just what you want to hear about, right?) was another matter.  For a couple of weeks, it seemed to frighten him and he would get frantic whenever he’d feel like he had to go.  For about a week, he drove me mad by asking me to “wipe” him every 5 minutes, for hours on end.  And then he’d poop on the floor, which cracked me up.  I didn’t care that he pooped on the floor, I just didn’t like the endless demand of “wipe wipe wipe?”  That lasted for a couple of weeks and then he started going on the potty.  Another couple weeks of letting him run around without pants all day (because that was the next hangup) and then I eased him in to wearing underwear (toddler boxers briefs!  CUTEST THING EVER) and now it’s all exactly what you’d expect from a civilized, socialized person.  And I will say… having a potty trained kid, at 2 years, is freaking awesome.  Life truly is grand, after diapers.  But other than “don’t be shy” the only other bit of advice I have doesn’t work for everyone because it seems like parents just get obsessed with the process:  don’t stress out, don’t push.  This all happened, for us, because we didn’t care that much.  It was “if you want to, here’s the option but if you don’t want to, cool.  Do whatever.”   I mean, I had a little internal pressure going on about the preschool thing but I knew that the worst case scenario would be that he’d start a little later than we wanted.  No big deal.