Potty Training Impossible

My oldest son potty trained at 2.5 years old. He was super easy to train and gave me a false sense that potty training itself was an easy process. Oh, how wrong that would turn out to be.

Fuzzy will be 3 in November. At the rate we are going with potty training he will be going to high school in diapers. Everyone told me that he would be easier to train than Little Bear because he would see his big brother using the toilet and wearing “big boy underwear” and would want to do the same....This has not been the case.

Fuzzy refuses to even consider using the toilet. He doesn’t seem to be afraid of it. He just doesn’t want to use it. He also has no interest in standing to pee which was a big deal to Little Bear when he was training so I purchased a potty chair. He will pee on the potty chair but not with any kind of regularity (not the kind of regularity that has to do with bran).

When I change his diaper I always ask if he wants to go pee on the potty. Sometimes he says yes and sometimes he says no. When he says yes he actually goes and I think “great. We are actually going to get this” and then I put a fresh diaper on and he goes again...

I ask him throughout the day if he would like to go pee on the potty and he almost always answers “I already did”.
By “I already did” he means “I already took a giant crap and have been marinating in it for the last 5 minutes”.
When I ask why he didn’t tell Mommy he had to go he either stares blankly at me or repeats “I already did”.

Fuzzy also has no interest in “big boy underwear”. With Little Bear wearing real underwear seemed to be the ticket to getting him to use the toilet instead of peeing his pants. Even though the thought of putting Fuzzy in underwear because of the number of times that boy poops in a day and the thought of cleaning crap out of underwear several times a day gives me the heebie geebies I am willing to give it a try if it means he will train quicker. However, when I ask him if he wants to wear “big boy underwear” like Little Bear he always says “no”.

Further discouraging is the fact I have several friends that have kids, boys at that who are the same age and well on their way of being potty trained. If we don’t get moving on training, Wee One is going to train before Fuzzy. Come on Fuzzy I’m about done with doing diaper duty for 2.

The T.P. Experiment

A week or so ago I went into the bathroom to use the toilet (just to clarify, I have done this several times since as well) and found that the toilet paper roll on the holder was empty. There was a half roll sitting on top of the empty roll. There was a half roll sitting on the back of the toilet and an empty roll on the floor in front of the toilet.

What the heck??? Really Papa Bear? There is a garbage can right there under the holder so there was no reason for the empty roll on the floor. Apparently there was a need for a second half roll sitting on the empty holder because the roll on the tank was a whole reach around away?

It was at this point that I decided that I was NOT going to replace the roll either and see what happens. For a couple of days, nothing. The same collection of empty and half rolls. Then this morning I went in to have my morning piddle and low and behold, I almost fell off the damn throne, there on the holder was a brand new roll safely secured in its place.

By golly he can do it! I'm so proud.

Now that we have tackled the toilet paper my next mission is getting Papa Bear to pick up his underwear off the bathroom floor after he is done in the shower. Training a man really requires some patience. We made some real progress this week. Baby steps, baby steps.