So, we are in the process of potty training my 2 year old son.   It’s not much of a process, because I’m not one of those hard core potty trainer people.  I know people who have taken that route, and it has produced mixed results. 
 
 Naked weekends seem to be a popular method (believe me, it’s not nearly as much fun as you might think).  This involves stripping your child down to his bare necessities and letting him run around the house while asking him if he needs to go to the potty every few minutes.  I have one friend who did this with great success and another friend who did it with great success except for the fact that their child continued to wet the bed every night for a couple of years.  My favorite example is a mother of twins who said that one twin picked up on the concept immediately and was trained by the end of the weekend and the other twin showed no understanding what so ever and kept coming up to her during the day and saying “hey mom, there’s another puddle in the kitchen.  Where did that come from?”

 So as much fun as chasing a nudey booty around the house with a roll of paper towels would be, I prefer the more “child centered” method of waiting till the child shows interest in the potty, occasionally reminding them, and more or less letting them train themselves.  Some might suggest that this is less “child centered” and more “Lazy parent centered,” but that’s just not a very nice thing to say.

 Shockingly, this method worked very well with my older daughter.  She began pooping on the potty with great regularity and then eventually began peeing on the potty, then stopped urinating while sleeping and then just started wearing panties and we were done.  Now, it took a couple of months, but you can’t argue with the results.  Dr. Brazelton would be so proud.

 This is more or less what we’re going through with my son now.  He has gotten to the point where he pretty regularly pees in the potty and holds it between bathroom breaks.  He likes to sit on the toilet, half way back with his legs spread wide at a 180 degree angle over both sides of the toilet, and then lean way forward with his hands on the seat.  Aside from some questionable hygiene issues and the fact that I have to completely remove his shoes and pants every time he goes to the bathroom, this method works very well, especially in keeping the firing device aimed down so that there are no liquid casualties on the linoleum (I know you all are just dying to get all of these details). 

 However, we have hit a few snags. 

 Pooping seems to be a  much more difficult concept for him.  Now I would have thought that of the two actions, defecation would be the one that you really saw coming, but apparently not.  He regularly poops in his diaper, although we have had a few positive outcomes on the toilet.  The problem is that Asher is a fairly independent young man, and since he can pee by himself he wants to do everything else by himself as well.  This has led to several incidents where I come into the bathroom and after some minor gagging have to remind him that when he wipes himself, he must must must USE TOILET PAPER!  Otherwise it is just really gross.

 We have also had a few incidents with his overly curious interest in the toilet.  We were at California Tortilla recently and I was changing the diaper of my infant on the floor of the men’s bathroom (no changing table!  You’re on my list Cal Tortilla!) and I finished the job only to turn around and discover that Asher had his entire head peering down into the toilet bowl.  He literally had his shoulders braced on the toilet seat and was spelunking.  I of course screamed, more in guttural response than anything else, and he ripped his head out, banging it on the toilet seat and tears and a lot of purell ensued (what I really need as a parent is for somebody to take one of those spray on tanning booths and fill it with purell so you can put your kid inside and have 360 degrees of germ killer woosh over them.  I’d pay good money to use one of those.)

 But I feel like we are making progress.  Yesterday I asked him if he had pooped in his diaper.  It used to be that he would just lie and say “no.”  This is possibly the worst lie ever, because the evidence was always pretty damning and it was pretty easy to get enough probable cause to perform a search.  But yesterday I detected a hint of something in the air and I asked him  “did you poop a little bit?”

 “Nope,” he said.  “I pooped a bigger bit!”

 And sure enough, he had.