Cold turkey

Barak lost the diapers yesterday. I took off his diaper in the morning and said, "Bye bye diapers! All gone diapers!" He cheerfully waved bye-bye to the diapers with me, but didn't really have any idea of what was actually about to happen.

What happened was that I rolled up the rugs, put plastic sheets on the mattresses, made our bedroom off limits and started following him around the house all day plunking him on the toilet every time he seemed to get a faraway expression on his face. And keeping him there, as long as possible, with endless rounds of The Wheels on the Bus, endless readings of My Big Brother and Serious Trouble, and endless repetitions of both the ABC and aleph-beis songs. He now has special potty toys--two trains and a bulldozer, all Matchbox-car-sized--that he is only allowed to play with while actually sitting on the potty. Oh, and there is a case of paper towels at the ready in the back bedroom. Well, there was yesterday. We've gone through three rolls already.

So far we are batting about .500 on the pishing front. The problem seems to be that he goes just a little about every fifteen minutes. (I know, you wanted to know ALL about this, didn't you?) So there have been a number of accidents, which Barak now points out to me. I then transport him swiftly to the bathroom, even though it's too late, to make the point that THIS IS WHERE WE DO THAT, NOT THE LIVING ROOM FLOOR. And then I hand him a roll of paper towels, and he cheerfully tears off a few (he doesn't usually get to do that), wipes it up, and throws the paper towels in the garbage. But he's also earned a fair number of chocolate chips, yesterday and today.

As of this morning, however, it had become pretty clear that nothing more, er, substantial had made its way into the toilet (or, fortunately, onto the floor). Barak had, it seemed, decided that if he couldn't poop the way he wanted (e.g., into a diaper) he wasn't going to do it at all. Yesterday we promised ice cream. Today we upped the ante, and promised ice cream and a Muppets episode. I don't know if that's what did the trick, or if he forgot what he didn't want to do while sitting on the toilet. One way or another, he earned himself the mitva song AND the mazal tov song (yep, the one you sing in shul when there's a bar mitzva or an aufruf or a new baby), AND ice cream AND the Muppets. A red-letter day indeed. Thank Gd Ada is still here until next week--it is not easy to take care of a five-week-old baby and a toilet-training two-year-old at the same time. Yesterday I spent two hours straight sitting on the bathroom floor nursing Iyyar and entertaining Barak on his throne.

And no, I'm not putting him to bed in diapers either. It's warm, and he's got an undershirt and underpants, and even if they all get wet the worst thing that he'll be will be wet and uncomfortable--which is good. No, I'm not totally sure this will work, but I do know that all over Europe toddlers are toilet trained well before they're two, and diapers are long history by now. If they can do it, so can he. Of course, in Hungary the usual way to toilet train a toddler is to have grandma or a big sister take the job on full-time, and do nothing else but treat the baby like a puppy all day long. Which isn't really an option for us. B"H we have wood floors...

Is it a little crazy to be doing this now? Yes, in a way. But it's also the best time. I've got seven more weeks at home. In three weeks, Barak starts playgroup, and is not going to be in my clutches full-time. I've got two more weeks of Ada here in the morning, so I'm not the only potty policewoman.

Well, further bulletins as events warrant. One more thing that was funny, though. Yesterday, I went to Target and bought two packages of underwear--the only two they had. One was a three-pack of Batman underwear (MHH is SO jealous). We have, as I may have mentioned, a bust of Batman in our house that is actually a bank, which functions as a tzedaka box--I bought it for MHH when Barak was at the age of putting everything in his mouth, in an attempt to break MHH of the habit of dropping change everywhere. Barak likes to give tzedaka--it's fun to drop the coins in the little slot. If he sees a coin on the floor, he picks it up and says, "Daka! Daka!" and wants to put it in our Batman pushka.

So, anyway. Yesterday, I gave Barak his new underwear, with much fanfare. He looked at it, not terribly impressed. "Look, Barak! New underwear! Are you such a big boy now? Who's that on your underwear?" "Daka!"

Well, we all knew that Batman was a mitzva boy too.

"