Potty Talk

This might be a little too much information for some of you, but I simply must share: Matthew used his potty today for the first time! What's more, we just got the potty yesterday, so it's not like I've been trying to get him to use it for weeks. What I have been doing for the past few weeks is cuing him to go to the bathroom while I hold him over the toilet. It works pretty consistently, but I have been wanting to get him a potty of his own to use. (He weighs almost 30 pounds now, so my back was really excited about the potty, too.)

This morning, I held him over the potty instead of the toilet and POOP, I mean, POOF he went to the bathroom. Then, this afternoon, I sat him on the potty while I made the cuing sound. Mostly, he just looked at me like I was crazy and I thought that he was just humoring me. But when I picked him up...I realized that he used the potty after all! Now all I have to do is figure out how to tell when he needs to go - I've been using intuition and timing until now - so that we can move this little big guy out of diapers as soon as possible.

Speaking of diapers, I HATE them. Seriously. I don't mean that they're a pain to deal with and stinky and all of that. I mean that I HATE them. Nothing enrages me faster than stumbling into Matthew's room in the middle of the night to find that he is crying because his diaper has leaked, again. I must have washed his sheets 20 times last week. I don't mind doing laundry, but I do mind paying money for a product that doesn't work. It baffles me that we can put a man on the moon, but we can't make a diaper that won't leak during the night.

I thought the hard part would be teaching Matthew to sleep through the night. Turns out, Matthew happily sleeps 12 hours a night. The trick is trying to get his diaper to let him do it. When we switched back to cloth, I tried the extra insert trick for a couple of nights, but that was ridiculous. Instead, I dress him in cloth during the day and put a super-overnight-we-promise-it-won't-leak disposable diaper on him at night. I'm still up once in the night, usually, to change his diaper and settle him back in the crib. On bad nights, I'm changing sheets, changing baby, and cursing the diaper companies in the softest, most calm voice I can muster.

When I'm ready to get back into working saddle, I'm going to look for work at a diaper company. Seems to me, work performance evaluations would be pretty insignificant there. If you didn't accomplish your goal of, say, stopping diapers from leaking, everyone would just say, "That's alright. You tried. And you did a pretty good job, even if the diaper still leaked. Let's call it an A+!" Some nights, I fantasize about taking Matthew's full "overnight" diaper immediately back to the store where I purchased it and asking for my money back at 3AM. But then I realize that the rage is taking over and I take a deep breath and try to get back to sleep.

So, that's why I'm so happy for Matthew's potty progress. Plus, Matthew's cloth diaper leaked the other day while I was talking to a cool new mommy at the mall, so I'm generally sick of the whole diaper thing. I'd much prefer Matthew just telling me that he has to go. And I think he likes the increase in potty talk. (What kid doesn't like a good potty conversation?!) After he peed in the potty, I snapped this shot of him pointing to the star of the show. Way to go, Matthew!