King Of The Throne

Hellooo! I am back in the blogging world after a 2 month hiatus! Many things have happened in these 2 months, including the Chinese New Year frenzy and a deeply personal situation that I may one day feel brave enough with the outside world. Till then, I will stick with the story that light-bulbed in my head today.

 

Hear ye, hear ye! The Rascal is officially potty-trained after some false starts and much utilisation of our otherwise leisurely mop (yep, this tells you pretty much about the state of cleanliness of my house. All 121sqm of it..). To be fair, we had attempted to get him to be King of the Potty long before he started childcare in Nov 2012. This included preparation of a traditional plastic potty circa our grandparents' time, loads of briefs a la toddler style and bankrupting NTUC of its entire stock of floor detergent.

 

Armed with grim determination to never have to change a stinky/soggy diaper again, YSY and I morphed into walking alarm radios which went off every 15 minutes to the dulcet tune of 'Boy, do you want to pee? Must tell mama/papa if you want to do so k?' Repeat process a gazillion times and you get 2 extremely thirsty adults plus a toddler thinking: 'Man, can someone turn off the Repeat mode on these 2 bozos? They are making me look uncool in front of the girls.' While we had a certain degree of success in getting the Rascal to pee in the potty, it was getting kinda tiring to have to repeat the Pee Mantra over and over and over and over and over (you get the picture) again without any initiative from the Subject to inform us that he wants to pee.

 

Despite what the experts say, the crash course on learning to pee in 2 days with intensive training did NOT happen. Nor did it happen in the next 3 weekends which was the only time we can give him 100% of our time to learn potty-training. I even ventured to buy him a musical potty which sings and makes flushing sounds when peed / pooed on correctly (parallel imported no less, for all the good that it did), in the waning hope that he will be incentivised by the new 'toy' enough to be successfully potty trained. No such luck, though he got himself a new singing toy complete with toilet paper.

 

After that, we decided to shelve the potty training for a while as he did not seem mentally ready for it despite all the physical signs of readiness. Fast forward to January 2013. In a rare chance for me to chat with the Rascal's cc teachers (rare cos YSY is usually the one who fetches him to and fro from school), I remarked to Teacher J that he is actually physically ready to be potty trained but did not seem to want to do so. Could the cc see if they can help in this aspect? Little did we know that this little discussion helped push the Rascal to his next major milestone of being potty trained (finally!) when one day, YSY came home and told me that the cc proclaim him toilet trained (the Rascal that is, not YSY. I sincerely hope that he has been potty trained 20 plus years ago. If he hasn't, it will explain those wet patches in front of the toilet bowl...)

 

There's an old saying: ' Man propose but Heaven dispose'. I find this pretty true in the Rascal's potty training saga.

 

1. We set out to train him but he wasn't mentally ready at the time. 
2. We 'invested' in a pricey, fun potty to get him interested but as of today, the only thing in use is the detachable potty cover which can be used on other adult-sized toilets as well.
3. Even the said potty cover above is being gradually ostracised by our post potty-training purchase: toddler ladder (to facilitate their climbing onto the throne) which comes with its own attached potty cover.

We are happy to say that the Rascal is happy to go about daily in his 'big-boy' briefs instead of 'small baby' diapers and eliminate in the 'big adult' toilet bowl without much fuss or accident. The fact that we do not have to risk being fumed by his adult-smelling poo when cleaning up doesn't hurt too bad too! =)