It is that time at our house.  In fact, soon, it might be that time mul­ti­plied by two!  K is will be 4 in Novem­ber.  He had shown inter­est in using the potty on and off since he was about 18 or 19 months.  He would tell us when he needed to go for a few days, then, noth­ing for a cou­ple weeks.  We assumed even­tu­ally that he would just do it and it would be almost effortless.

Haha­haha.  Even as I write that, I feel a lit­tle silly for being so sure about that.  I’m sure that is the case for some kids.  How­ever, with K, almost noth­ing has been that easy.  He is a kid who doesn’t take change or learn­ing new skills easily.

Last week, we decided to have a bare bot­tom day.  K did great!  He ran to the bath­room on his own sev­eral times through­out the day.  He didn’t even come to me for help or any­thing.  Then, I think he may have decided that it was too much work to keep track of his potty needs.  After that, the acci­dents (and I use that word loosely) started.  “K, do you need to use the bath­room?”  “No.”  Three min­utes later, “Mom, I peed.”  “K, do you need to try going potty?”  “No.”  A minute later, “Mom, I peed.”  Today, he had an acci­dent less than 5 min­utes after using the potty.  He had another one within the next 40 min­utes.  After the sec­ond one, I went to get wipes, because he was dirty and wet, and he gave a friend of mine who was stand­ing by him a pretty mis­chie­vous smile.

My goal is to give him the oppor­tu­nity to go and be suc­cess­ful with­out tak­ing on own­er­ship of whether or not the process “works.”  It is very hard though.  I find it nearly impos­si­ble to be neu­tral after he pees less than 5 or 10 min­utes after using the potty or after me ask­ing him if he needs to go.  It seems pretty inten­tional to me.  I strongly hes­i­tate to apply inten­tion to my children’s actions, but in this case, there are times when it seems SO clear to me that he sim­ply does not want to be both­ered with using the potty.  It is very dif­fi­cult to remain calm and neu­tral about it.

I have gone over this in my head more than a few times.  Is he ready?  Am I push­ing him?  Am I expect­ing too much?  Should I have waited?  Was he show­ing inter­est?  Sigh.  I know he can do it.  I know that he is able to be mostly acci­dent free, because he did it on his own.  I don’t think I am expect­ing unrea­son­able things from him.  But, still I strug­gle with this process.  I strug­gle with my expec­ta­tions.  I strug­gle to avoid power strug­gles with him.  It is what it is, and right now, it is some­thing that is def­i­nitely test­ing me and mak­ing me reex­am­ine quite a bit about myself.