Quiet Night

Learning

I just put the kid to bed. We still have to lay down with him for a half hour or so before he just conks out and goes to sleep. Until that point he wiggles and turns and pokes at me and generally keeps himself from going to sleep. To slow the wiggle down process I lay my arm on top of him and start pretending that I am asleep. Some nights this works pretty quick but tonight it took almost an hour for him to settle down.

Sometimes I feel like my life is not that much different from his. I get frustrated easily. I try to complete simple tasks and get caught up in the emotion of simple failures. Come to think of it, all of us are not that different from when we were toddlers. Some people explode in anger, others just start crying when they reach a tough situation. Maybe we just learn to soften our reaction to things as we get older.

Unfortunately, as we get older we lose that zest to learn new things. I look at my son and see someone whose enthusiasm for learning out paces mine. Alex reads books, he absorbs shows that teach the alphabet, he watches us and learns how to interact with others. I find this refreshing and renewing. This makes me realize that I need to re-learn how to discover parts of the world. I need to get off the couch and wander around armed with that ‘teach me’ spirit. Yeah. I need to re-up my zest for learning. Time for more books and for using the opportunity to teach my son as an opportunity to teach myself.

Potty Training

We, like most parents with toddlers are now going through the steps of training our child to use the potty. For months this has been a futile effort of showing my son books and videos that try to describe the benefits. None of these had any effect. Alex just didn’t care that bigger kids do it nor care that he was wearing a soiled diaper that felt icky (this it seems, interfered with his agenda of learning mentioned above).

A few weeks ago I noticed one of his friends at day care was using the potty. So I started mentioning it to Alex. A few days later we got an update from daycare that he had ‘asked’ to sit on the toilet. Wow. Where did that come from? Was it peer pressure from his two older friends in the class? Geez. I hope so. That is about the only leverage we have had so far in this extended prodding exercise.

So for now Alex is only using the potty once or twice a day. So we are actively talking about the potty more than ever. We talked about pull-ups and the need to take them down when he needed to go. And we setup the bathroom downstairs so he can just walk in and sit down. So far, his habits have not changed so we might have prod him a bit more often. But we shall see since he seems to be as steadfast in not using it as his parents are in trying to get him to using it.