Daddy's Desk - Jan, 2007 "iPotty"

Over the Christmas break my wife and I decided to tackle a project we’ve been putting off for some time…potty training our 2 year old. Our preschool teachers have done everything else in raising our child, we just couldn’t stick this one on them as well. So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work, because I believe there’s only one way to do potty training, and that’s 100% full throttle. No sense going into it half-hearted. It had been several years…several technologically-advanced years mind you, since we last dealt with this messy subject, so we first needed to check the stores and websites to see if there had been any advances in this field. I mean, since our last potty training episodes some 7 years ago the world has been altered with cars that parallel park themselves, GPS devices that navigate us all over the world, iPods which compress our lifetime CD collections into a stick of gum, and synthetic human ears with telephones genetically attached. Surely potty training has seen some advancement. Potty training is one of the few certainties in life, after all, right behind death and taxes. And both death and taxes have benefited from technology advancements, so why shouldn’t potty training? I really thought by now Apple would have developed the iPoddy.
On the contrary, we found potty training advancement is sorely lacking in the developmental processes. Sadly, the brilliant minds driving the technological world have ventured into less odorous fields. Apparently there’s no future in baby doo-doo. So we were left with the old-fashioned, time-honored techniques of our fore-fathers: in other words, take your child’s pants off and let them run around the house half-naked, and pray they someday figure it out. That’s all we had to work with.

We tried everything to make sitting on a plastic potty cool and fun. We read to him, we moved it in front of the TV, we put matchbox cars in it, we decorated it with festive party streamers, we put chips and chip dip in it. Nothing worked. No matter how hard we tried to make that hunk of plastic-with-a-lid cool and fun, Christopher eventually wanted nothing to do with it. He thoroughly enjoyed walking around the house bottomless, however. Each day was an adventure in dress for him. He found countless ways to accessorize his bare bottom: hooded sweatshirts, socks and shoes, hockey jerseys, winter caps and gloves…all of these items were worn while he roamed the house diaper-free. All the while he stood there like a ticking time-bomb, ready to unload at any moments notice. He controlled our lives at home like some sort of “poop” terrorist; we never knew when he might strike. We lost sleep. We lost weight. The anxiety was killing us. Until one day his older brother Adam took a turn sitting with him in the bathroom. Adam read him a book and when it was over, he looked into the plastic bowl and noticed some magical fluid. It was a Christmas miracle! Moments later Christopher came charging out of the bathroom with full exclamations shouting “I did it! I did it!”. We shared his enthusiasm. He loved seeing us jump up and down shouting “You did it! You did it!”. So much so that he began going to the bathroom frequently after that. It was a joyous holiday break after all. But we’re only halfway there. Step Number 1 is done, the dreaded Number 2 is a work in progress.