February 13, 2004 - Friday
We've been trying to encourage Harry to use the toilet downstairs rather than his potty chair upstairs for more than a month now and it has been going pretty well. Certainly it's a lot easy for us, when we're getting ready for dinner or something, to walk in to the downstairs bathroom and help him finish up as opposed to running upstairs. We've gotten a little wooden step stool and that makes him, much of the time, quite (and wonderfully) self-sufficient. The caveat is "No. 2." He still likes to use the water-less, splashless potty chair upstairs for that, which means commonly while we're getting ready for dinner we need to run upstairs and help him finish up. So, we've encouraged him some more about that, but with much less success. Howver, identifying the splashing worry seemed to be a positive step and over the last couple of days I've tried to talk to him about "solving that problem" rather than avoiding it. I'm not sure whether that's really possible, but just isolated the fear seems to have helped. Last night when he had to go he whined that he liked going upstairs better. We've dealt with this in different ways, but tonight it was "OK, you can go upstairs, but you need to start thinking about trying to do it downstairs, too." That was followed by the inevitable "OK," which was followed by a statement that it's only "OK" if he really tries, and that was follwed by his four-year-old acknowledgement that he "understood." Surprise, surprise. He listened. This evening he did it on his own in the downstairs bathroom. Thankfully, there was no splash this time.


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