Toilet Trained

Oh, don't get excited, we're not all toilet trained here in this house.  Okay, some of us are; those of us who wear the adult pants in the house have, for the most part, proven that they know when it's time to "go potty."  It's the smaller members of the family that still have a ways to go.

There are a lot of different definitions on what it means to be toilet trained, one psychologist said.  It basically means different things to different people.  Some parents will say their child isn't toilet trained if they have one or two accidents a week, even through the night.  Others will declare their child is completely trained, and their definition of trained means only a few mistakes each day.

I can unequivocally say though that neither of my children are toilet trained.  One is doing well though.  My son can go all day, up until bedtime in one pair of underpants.  He can make it through a nap without going in the bed as well.  But not always, and not every day.  He still has imitative problems and doesn't like to break from his busy schedule of playing with this or stealing that toy from his sister or explaining how he NEEDS whatever it is from the pantry he's decided he wants.   And nap times aren't that successful always, but he wakes up in a dry bed more often than a wet bed.  We haven't even considered underwear at nighttime at this stage though.

So my son is doing well, but there's definitely more work to be done.  My daughter, on the other hand, is wearing underpants all morning at school.  Some days she comes home with no wet underpants in the bag, and other days there are five.  She can't pull her pants on and off well at all at this age so we don't practice toilet training at the house every day with her.  Some days we do and those days can be frustrating (to the adults.)

But why am I writing this potty post?  It's because of math—underpants math.  We wash the laundry every two to three days.  I just got done with a three-day laundry batch and the pile of underpants was large.  It was so large that I counted them.   There were twenty-four pair of underpants. And that's a lot of underpants.

Two children, three days.  If they didn't mess up any underpants we'd still have gone through six pair of underpants.  But that leaves eighteen pair of "messy" pants to account for.  That's three pair of messy underpants per child, per day.  And how often do these kids go to the potty anyway?  It's laundry loads like this that make me wonder if we're making any progress at all.

Some of it I understand, like in the morning when we bring my daughter down for breakfast and after eating she doesn't make it to the potty in time and we're on pants number two before we're even off to school.  Sometimes we change clothes in the middle of the day because we were playing and dirty, but not every day.

I would guess my son is responsible for one pair of messy pants each day, on average, which means my daughter is messing up four pair a day.  I'm thinking at least two pair are at school from the marked underpants I send back every wash load, but still, she needs to pick up the potty training pace here, honestly.

The Big Boy Update:  "I love you mommy"  I was sitting quietly in the dark in the children's bedroom the other night waiting for my daughter to go to sleep when daddy and my son came in the door.  Out of the blue my son told me he loved me, twice.  It was very cute. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Toes!  She found her brother's toes on the couch this afternoon.  She would come over, touch his toes, look at me and say, "Toes!"  I confirmed that yes, those were toes.  She would sweep by every few minutes to tell me about the toes for a good while.

Someone Once Said:  Pffile, dear. I don’t have morals, just customs. I don’t wait for a man to make a pass; they fumble around and waste time.