I am the Editorial Assistant for The Fort Scott Tribune, where I have been employed since March of 2008. I live in the country near Mapleton, Kan., with my husband and our two children. I graduated from Uniontown High School, Uniontown, Kan., but before attending Uniontown, I moved around several times during my childhood. I love to take photos, write, read and spend time with my family. I am also a member of our local fire department and enjoy attending church with my family and appreciate everything a small town has to offer. I look forward to watching my children grow and spending time with my husband and family while living in the country.

Woes of Potty training

Posted Tuesday, February 24, 2009, at 3:29 PM

Lately, my son has been more and more interested in taking his diaper off. While he's very proud that he can take his diaper off, I'm not as impressed as he is, because cleaning up the pee that is all over the floor or all over his bed, is getting very old. And fast.

We have tried to no avail to get him to leave his diaper alone, duct tape didn't even work, so Saturday I finally broke down and made a special trip to Wal-Mart. There I bought him pull-ups. Finally an end to him pulling off his underpants, but until he's potty trained, I think I'm still going to have to deal with the occasional potting on the floor.

He occasionally tells us he has to potty, but his success rate so far is about 10%. The other day he actually sat on the toilet to potty, but he didn't quite finish and ended up emptying the rest of his bladder on my floor. Fabulous.

At least he's trying though, he really is. He runs into the bathroom, pulls his clothes off and carries a stool over to the toilet and stands up to potty. Then, regardless of whether or not he does anything, he claps his hands and says "Good Job Colby" or "Good try, Colby" to himself. He's very, very proud of himself.

A few night's ago, he was at his grandparent's house and decided everyone should be applauded for using the bathroom. Each time someone came out after using the restroom he would applaud and tell them "You potty. Good Job" and clap his hands.

We finally decided he needed to have pull-ups because we woke the other morning to a bare bottom two year old climbing into bed with us, telling us that he had been "wet". Well after further investigation, "wet" apparently wasn't all. Imagine our surprise when we found the floor in our living room covered in brown streaks. Apparently, he decided he could go #2 on the floor too. Oh the horror. It was everywhere. The floor. His bed. Our bed. Then we noticed he had "#2" streaked all over his legs. So I put him in the bath tub to clean up and scrubbed the entire living room down. Funny, when I bought carpet stain remover, I kinda had thought that I would need it for the dog, not the kids!

I'm thankful that we have hard floors instead of carpet and that the area rugs came clean fairly easily.

Now if only we could get him to stop pulling his pants down in public.

I sure hope he gets this potty training thing down fast.