Potty Training Perils

Who invented potty training??

No, really, I want to know, because he/she should be stoned.  I don't mean in the drug-induced coma kind of way.  I mean in the rocks thrown at him/her kind of way.  Yeah.  Maybe not until death but at least until the point of severe fear and embarrassment. Yeah.

That might sound extreme, especially coming from me, but I've completely lost my mind.  Potty training has made me totally lose all grip on reality.  I've flipped.  Yeah.

We are three weeks deep into the process here at the Hardison household, and I don't really feel like we've made much progress at all.  Layton is so stubborn.  He is (I think) scared to poop on the potty, so he holds it in basically all day (thus, constipating himself).  He will wait until he is either a) wearing a pull-up at nap time, giving him the freedom to do his business or b) past the point of no return and suffers a major blowout in his underwear.  What's so scary about the potty?  I'll never understand.

Underwear.  Stinky underwear.  Pee-filled underwear.  Sheesh.  I've washed more underwear and sheets in the last 3 weeks than I have in my whole life (that's probably no exaggeration).  Layton has no issue with peeing! Let me amend that.  He can pee on command.  Yeah.  All the time.  Every 10 minutes in fact.  I've never seen anything like it.  How can he have that much pee in him allowing him to go multiple times per hour?? It's nuts.  He really is doing great with going #1 in the potty.  He's also doing great going #1 in his pants -- MULTIPLE times per day.  I think there are at least a dozen pairs of underwear in the washer right now.  Those same dozen were clean this morning; I'm just sayin'.  Thank goodness for naps and pull-ups.  Those are my saving grace at times.

Layton Cooper, underwear model extraordinaire...

Bribery.  Yeah, bribery.  We are to that point.  And not just a little bit of bribery; no, I'm talking full- blown, merciless, embarrassing level of bad parenting, shame-on-us pitiful BRIBERY.  We've tried everything all the experts say.  Stand-alone potty, traditional potty with child seat thing that you put on top of it, cold turkey going to underwear, running around naked, making him clean up his own messes, pull-ups, potty dances and praises, stickers, smiley faces, tattoos, incentive charts with prizes, M&Ms, sound timers, animated apps, silent timers, self-initiation.......... I could go on for days.  Some things work for some... umm, hours (minutes, really).  Nothing really seems to be effective for long.  This far into the process, I had hoped it would start to become autonomous, but it hasn't at all.  We want him to go to preschool in the fall, and he'll need to be trained as a prerequisite.  But, he's not.  He's so untrained in fact that just yesterday he peed directly on the couch and then even more directly right on his mommy.  I swear it was on purpose.  He then looked at us and grinned as if to say, "Yeah, that's right.  That just happened.  I just peed on everything; whatcha gonna do about it? I'm the boss."

So yeah. Bribery.  Today I told him it was potty break time and for him to head to the bathroom.  I then headed to the kitchen to get an ice cream sandwich out of the freezer.  A treat for me for being such a good parent?? Hardly.  I took that bad boy with us to the potty and essentially DANGLED that sweet thing in front of my son's eyes and told him if he'd make poop go into the potty that he could eat the ice cream...

It worked.

Feel free to begin judgment now. Hahahahahaha.  But, when you are finished, please educate me or, better yet, come train my son.  Yeah.

Why Write?

I haven't written anything in years.  Not really.  Years?  Years??  YEARS?!  That's so depressing...

In school, writing was my absolute favorite thing to do.  I was never able to take an actual class that was JUST aimed at writing.  (I was the band kid that had to use all of my elective slots for music classes, so I didn't get to take creative writing, tennis, scuba diving, or the history of costumes in Czarist Russia like SOME people I know -- wink, wink...)

I lived for writing assignments.  Most of my classmates seemed to dread them; I never knew nor understood that sentiment.  My favorite moments were when the teacher would say it was time to journal.  You could hear the audible displeasure from others when the teacher would say it was time to open those composition notebooks and begin.  Yet, it was then when the teacher actually had me in her grasp and made my heart stir in a way that few teachers ever really did.

Few teachers ever really did.  It's true.  I was a very good student, but few teachers ever really reached me.  I don't know why really.  Maybe they should have let me write more. But, a couple stand out who did...

Ellanee Lancaster in 3rd grade...

She made us write all the time, and she should have.  I thank her for it.  We could use any kind of paper we wanted.  Remember the blue and purple lined paper you used to be able buy?  My parents probably kept that company in business when I was in 3rd grade.  I had to have the colored paper so I could write things for Mrs. Lancaster.  I insisted.  I think I thought she would appreciate the novelty and enjoy reading it more if I put it on "special" paper.  She would have us write short stories from story starters, and sometimes she'd turn them into writing contests.  My über-competitive nature loved it.  LOVED it.  I loved everything about her and her class.  She'd make us write and rewrite our stories, but that was fine by me.  She'd make us write skits and scripts to master content we were learning, and even though I was introverted and hated to perform, I could do it when it was my own writing I was performing.  She made me love writing in a way that has lasted a lifetime.

Patricia Hancock in 9th and 12th grades English...

I'll never forget Mrs. Hancock telling us to "just write."  She'd say it just felt right in her soul when she would write, and she wanted us to feel that way (thus, the inspiration for my blog title).  She took the time to individually respond to every single thing we would write, and not just in passing but in a genuinely, attentive manner.  I always felt my writing was important to her.  She told me I had a future in it.  Her class was wonderful because she taught us to write correctly and taught us about grammar.  Her English class was not just about all the stupid literature and reading that every other English teacher I ever had made us do incessantly.  I've hated to read -- well, for forever -- and still do.  I hated when my Language Arts teachers would just assign us books to read (and make us take tests over those books) but never cover the other parts of language, especially grammar mechanics and writing.  Mrs. Hancock was an inspirational teacher.  I still yearn as a teacher to be like she was for me.

So back to the title of this post... why write?

I write because I love it.  I write because it relieves stress.  It frees my thoughts of distractors and takes me to that mystical world that reading does for many people.  I'm in charge when I write and can go anywhere and do anything I want to with my words.  Crafting the perfect sentences (and, yes, I diagram them in my head) gives me inner joy.  Heck, generating a clever Facebook status is enough to make me giddy.  I've wanted to do a personal blog for years, to just write about whatever's on my mind and release it to the world.  I'm finally going to start.  Hooah!

Today was a craptastic day.  Really craptastic.  So, I write because it just feels right.  I feel a little less craptastic now than I did 30 minutes ago.  I write for me.  No one else has to even read it.  Don't get me wrong; I hope some people do, but it's totally okay if my words have no audience.  They reach me, and that's right.  Just right.  Just right to write.