finally some progress
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
We started our attempts at toilet training Kenny quite some time ago. We've had mixed results.
He was, for instance, the first child in his day care class to start controlling his need to pee. But he's always hated the idea of sitting on the toilet, even with the little child's seat we've had for something like twenty plus optimistic months and the assistance of his mum, who provides things for his feet to rest on while he sits on the throne.
But today we managed to get him to sit down and see it through. We congratulated him, and this morning I repeated my pride in his accomplishment and told him he was becoming a big boy. No getting around that when he's 100cm tall, of course, but it's one of those things. We can't go through this cycle of washing his pants in the middle of the day all the time, especially with Junior Kindergarten looming.
We'd prepared a reward gift in advance, and presented that this morning when he woke up: a set of toys from the movie "Cars" that he loves so dearly: both the race-car character Lightning McQueen and his transport truck "Mack", who Kenny calls "Pretty Music" because that's a line that Mack says. Those toys* were waiting for him outside the front door this morning. I'm hesitant to associate a gift like this with a reward, but it's a toy he's been playing with for quite some time at a local drop-in day care that costs $6/day. It's practically the only reason he wants to go there, so this will pay for itself in no time and is reason alone in doing it. And yet I worry that the precedent is set.
*Dear Disney: you are overpackaging your toys to a degree that is downright ludicrous. It must have taken me ten minutes to get those cheap plastic toys out of the two layers of wrap and the many twist-ties and clips. Enough of turning every boxed toy into a window display: just box it up and put a picture of the toy on the outside, ffs!