I Think He's Ready

I've been procrastinating about starting potty training with Patrick for months now. I really don't want to bother with it. It's so much more of a nuisance asking him if he needs to pee every hour and traipsing to the potty to force him to sit there for a few minutes only to leave an empty potty when he's done. I'm not looking forward to the bribery, the wet and poopy clothes, or cleaning out that nasty potty several times a day. Oh, yeah...and I haven't felt like Patrick was anywhere near ready yet.

I think he's ready now. In the last few days he has suddenly started repeating me when I ask if he's poopy (a silly question since you can smell it a mile away). "Poo-pee," he'll say even while I'm changing his diaper and cleaning his butt. I suspect he knows what he's talking about, too, instead of just repeating a fun-sounding word.

Then just a few minutes ago, he grabbed me and started pulling me all over the house, a sure indicator that he wants something. We ended up at "his" bathroom. I guessed he wanted a bath since he had so much fun dumping water on me during bathtime yesterday. I shrugged; we had time for a bath right then, so why not? He seemed more eager than usual to get his still-dry diaper off, but I assumed it was because he was that eager for a bath.

As has been my habit for the last few baths, I set him on the potty naked to chill while I was filling the tub. He wasn't having anything to do with it today, so instead of forcing him and making him hate the potty this early, I let him stand next to the tub where I was kneeling, waiting for the water to hit the right temp.

Suddenly I felt my leg getting wet. I couldn't figure out how the water was splashing out of the tub onto my leg without Patrick in there. Then I traced the stream of water right back to Patrick--he was peeing on me. Yuck.

But even while I was cleaning up the icky mess, I could see the bright side of it. He wasn't dragging me to the bathroom to beg for a bath. He had to pee and wanted to do it in the bathroom like Mommy and Daddy do. He was (sort of) successfully able to tell me he needed to pee.

I guess that means potty training starts hard-core this week. What a fun stage this will be. Or not. With any luck, we waited long enough that he's really, really ready now and will make things easy for us.