Such a big boy
Rees has been wearing cloth undies full-time (including nights) for a couple of weeks now. He has been using cloth undies during the day for several months, but we recently started nights too. The road to being toilet trained was long and sometimes arduous. Ha-ha. We have been working on it for the better part of the last year (he’d been wearing Pull-Ups). Rees just didn’t really care about it. If I asked him to use the toilet, he would, but he wouldn’t go on his own and it didn’t bother him to have his bottom “changed”. I think this was partly due to having a baby brother.
Last year, at the end of October, I was about to leave town to spend the weekend at the DARPA Urban Challenge with Bryan in California, when I had a phone conversation with my best friend Kristin. I was getting to the end of my rope with the toilet training. I didn’t know how to get him over the edge. Kristin told me (more or less) that even though everyone always says to keep toilet training positive, with no punishment, that it was time for me to lay down the law with Rees. I protested that I didn’t know if he was capable. She told me, “OF COURSE HE IS!” Ha-ha. Leave it to Kristin. I was determined to turn this around when I got back from my trip.
When I got back, Rees and I had a discussion. When he failed to use the toilet, we would put away one of his treasured material items (toy, book, video, etc). It was traumatic at first. But within two or three days, it was done. He was dry. I couldn’t believe it. It’s funny, I was expecting him to tell me when he needed to go, but he just went by himself. And he has never, to this day, had an accident again during the day. This is just like him - when he decides to do something, he really does it. Like flipping a switch.
He continued to wear Pull-Ups at night - we didn’t make a big fuss out of nights at all. If he was wet, we would be disappointed, but no big deal. He put on clean cloth in the morning. Soon, he got drier and drier at night until he had gone several weeks without getting wet. So we did a mini-countdown to no-more-”night-undies”. Not sure if it was a coincidence, but the night of his last pair of “night undies”, they were wet. We proceeded to put him in cloth anyway the next night, and he had an accident that we cleaned up in the middle of the night. I moved him back to Pull-Ups (against Bryan’s wishes). He was dry for two or three more days, after which we went back to cloth, and he has been dry at night ever since.
I am just thankful that he was toilet-trained before he turned four. Bryan and I were starting to joke that maybe James and Rees would be trained at the same time. 
Rees has a bit of resistance to change, but he is such an amazing kid. He has tons of energy, has empathy for other kids, is shy and polite, loves Sunbeams (his teacher calls him an “angel”), is READING like crazy, and is learning how to be a big brother. Love him to pieces.
Add comment February 11th, 2008
