(No, not me.  Gross!)

We’ve been struggling with the dreaded potty training for a while.  Number One has been going smoothly for a long time, but there was no way son was going Number Two.  It seemed to scare the bejesus out of him.   

We tried the “gold star” chart, which really helped the process for Number One become ingrained in his head.  This worked after attempting the failed Cheerios method (using them as targets was supposed to work well), the Elmo Potty Video, and everything else.  The closest we came was the “Pee on a Tree” method which works well in a rural area but feels an awful like housebreaking.  Housebreaking a dog is way easier than teaching a kid to use the potty, actually.

But still, nothing worked for Number Two.  Until we noticed that our three-year-and-two-month old really, really loves video games.  So much so, that we bought him a V-Tech V-Smile or whatever they are called.  We placed it nicely up over the living room armoire, where he could wistfully stare at it but not reach it. 

Well finally, finally he went yesterday, in the potty, though it was a very small, er…deposit.  We let him play the new video game system for 30 minutes.  We then put it back up to unreachable spaces and said he could play more next time he…made a deposit.

So today…today!  Success!  He sat up suddenly, looked at us, and proudly announced he “had to poop.”  And he did!  Right where he was supposed to!  My goodness, I wanted to take a photograph of his creation (no, I didn’t) because this is a momentous occasion!  (We’re really, really sick of diapers…what makes it worse is that he is as tall as a four or five year old, so we get strange looks when we have to change him in public places, ala ‘why isn’t your kid potty trained yet’)  And we are going to let him play another 30 minutes of his video games. 

Call it bribing if you want…I call it a major accomplishment!  Let’s just hope he takes to Number Two as well as he did Number One…