a proud moment of parenthood

After weeks, no, months, of Oliver showing no interest in trying the potty, we have had a breakthrough.

Last spring, we had a couple of good efforts and one rousing success with the potty. That was followed by some sort of incident at school and since then we have not been able to get Oliver to sit on the potty without wearing pants and a diaper. A few weeks back I showed him a potty chair on my laptop (or as he calls it, the "cooter"). I asked him if he liked any of the colors and he pointed to the red one. I found it on sale earlier this week and ordered. It arrived today.

Oliver helped me take it out of the box. We put it in the living room and he promptly sat down, fully clothed, and watched part of a movie until dinner was ready. After dinner we all went in to watch the end of the movie. I mentioned that taking off his pants and diaper would be a good idea. He seemed to disagree so I gave it a couple of minutes, then just took them off. He sat back down until the movie was done.

While I started getting Eleanor ready for bed, CD brought the potty chair and Oliver upstairs to his bathroom. He also got one of Oliver's potty books. Oliver sat down again and they read the book together. When CD passed me on the way to get the other potty book I suggested turning on the water tap. They read the second book together and at some point during that time Oliver peed AND pooped in the potty. He has pooped about this time each night all week so our timing definitely helped make this a success.

I made a big deal of how proud I was, and gave him a sticker to put on the potty chair. He was beaming with pride. CD then suggested he wear underpants until it was time to get ready for bed. It was the first time we put the underpants on him and he was thrilled. This was a difficult photo to get because he could not stop dancing around his room.

hooray for underpants!