Daddy's Fish BowlA Clear View Of A Father's Family Experiences

Tre is all grown up now!!!

Have you ever had baby balls dangling in your face? No? Well you’ve never attempted to potty train a little boy.  Let me tell you right now, it’s not a pleasant experience. The booty and balls of a two year old are not two things that I want to be up close and personal with; but in the end, it all paid off.  If any of you have read my tweets, or Facebook statuses over the past few days, you’ll know that we’ve been potty training Tre with great success recently.  It’s been a long & tough road, but we now see light at the end of the tunnel and I’ll share with you my 100% guaranteed fools proof plan to potty train your child in 2 days flat!

Okay, it’s not fools proof, it’s not even 100% guaranteed, hell, it may not even work, but it’s worth a try right, lol.  Let me start by saying it’s all about waiting until the child is ready, you can’t force it on them, they just have to want to learn it.  Tre is 2.5 years old and he finally decided that it was his time to learn.  You always hear people touting, “my child was potty trained at 18 months, blah blah blah” so what, who cares, I can’t stand it! When your kid turns 30 and still doesn’t have a pot to piss in, that little achievement at 18 months really won’t matter will it! Ah who am I kidding, if Tre learned to go at a young age like that, I’d be the same exact way, probably worse, you guys wouldn’t hear the end of it. Hypocrite, yes. Ashamed, NO.  Nonetheless, I’m super stoked that he’s learning to go potty, and doing such a great job at it.  But it wasn’t always roses and sunshine, in the beginning, it was more like hot garbage and thunderstorms.  In other words, it stunk and you couldn’t avoid getting wet.

Yeah that’s right, I’ve been peed on, I’ve had stink (our word for fecal matter) stains smeared on my clothes. I’m a Dad and it’s all part of the process, I’m proud of it!  But once Tre got older and we attempted potty training on numerous occasions, it wasn’t so much getting hit with his body fluids any more, but more so just his body.  We’d take his diaper off and let him run free, unfortunately, Tre doesn’t understand the rules of common decency.  He didn’t care that he was naked, if he wanted to jump on Daddy’s back, then Daddy better be prepared to palm a little booty.  He’d do things like climb on my shoulder and jump off onto the couch.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to watch SportsCenter with baby balls dangling in your face? I couldn’t tell if Lebron was holding a basketball during that press conference, or if Tre’s family jewels just had perfect alignment with the TV screen.

The first few times we took the diaper off, it went a lot like this: Tre would do a short Indian rain dance indicating that he needed to go, we’d rush him to the toilet only for him to run away to his pile of diapers and point to them screaming that he needs a diaper.  Remember we’re talking about a two year old here, bladder control isn’t one of their strong suits, so after all of this commotion, you’ve probably already guessed that we had a small spill to clean up. Do you have any idea how low it makes a person feel to endure a naked lap dance from their child, only to then be forced to clean up pee from the carpet? Once we finally got him to sit on the toilet, it surely didn’t last long. He’d spend about 10 seconds there and then HE would say: “good try, time to flush”. At least he felt he had made a good attempt, but I suspect it was all a ploy to try and flush the toilet.

I know you’re probably thinking, “Keith, you said this was a success story, where the hell is the success?” You’re absolutely right; I’m getting to the success part, but it happened so quickly that I wouldn’t have had much of a story if I jumped straight to it. This past Sunday, I decided enough was enough; I wanted to liberate myself and become balls free.  So I took the diaper off and proceeded to usher Tre off to the toilet every 10 minutes to see if he would go.  This was very disappointing at first, he just wouldn’t go and I running out of Lysol to decontaminate all of the objects his naked body had come in contact with.  Then suddenly a light bulb must have went off in his head, because after 2hrs of failures at 10 minute intervals, he said “Daddy, I have to pee pee.” I humored him, and took him back to the bathroom again; I knew he wasn’t going to go, but it was worth a try.  Just as I expected, he didn’t go, so I went instead.  He told me I did a good job and left the bathroom (isn’t that backwards).  Then 30 seconds after that he ran back into the bathroom with the speed of a lightning bolt.  I had no idea what was going on, so I just followed behind him, next thing you know, he’s peeing in the toilet!!!! I got so excited, that I think I scared him with all the clapping and cheering; he only got out 6 drops.  Those were the most important 6 drops of both of our lives, he had done it and it was time to celebrate.

I think that we may have celebrated a bit too hard though.  No lie, Tre went to pee in the potty at least 20 times in a few hours.  Each time just pumping out a few drops, enough to keep the party going and keep the praise coming.  Eventually, he started holding it longer each time and started making full fledged bathroom trips.  I’m so proud of the little guy and look forward to helping him continue his progression.