July 12, 2001 - Thursday
We hadn't seen a whole lot of activity with Harry's potty for a few weeks, but that changed tonight. Harry had been interested at first, but that waned as the novelty wore off and his young body didn't respond on queue with any regularity. That was OK, though, because Harry is young for potty training according to current consensus, so we weren't going to push. We have started dumping the contents of his dirty diapers into the toilet and having him flush it. He likes that, and maybe he's the only 1.5 year-old in the state that knows what a toilet float is, but whether that helped inspire potty use is questionable. I have tried to be more consistent about having Harry watch me pee, his mother does that same, and I think that's as much motivation as our independent Harry needs. Whatever it was, tonight was a breakthrough.

When Harry's mother brought him into the bathroom for his bath tonight, Harry first started playing with the lids of the toilet and his potty chair, saying "open" and "close" as he raised and lowered each. Those words, along with "on" and "off," are ideas that Harry has just mastered. Then, he began to sit on his potty and talk about peeing. He still had his diaper on, so he wasn't going to make much progress. Harry's mother and I would have immediately taken off the diaper, but wondered whether he was just playing and that's not something we really want to encourage with the potty. Eventually, she took off his diaper to get ready for the bath, but Harry headed straight back to the potty. He sat there for several long moments and we started debating whether we should pick him up. Then, just when it seemed he'd been there too long, he did it. He peed. His mother and I were suitably impressed and told him so. We poured the admittedly small, yet significant amount of liquid into the toilet and let Harry flush it down. Of course, I had to take the top off the toilet to let Harry watch the water.


Comments, opinions?