At eighteen months Cooper is an adorable blond-haired, blue-eyed bundle of energy. Like a typical boy he’s obsessed with choo-choos, cars and balls. And also like many boys, he’s a little behind verbally. While both of my girls were singing and using short phrases at this age, Cooper still has a vocabulary of under twenty words and he often prefers to point and grunt and seems to get frustrated that I can’t read his mind. He often wants to be picked up and then points around the room as if to steer me, shaking his head and saying “No!” until I find the the object of his desire. And then there’s potty training.

Since he’s still showing very little interest in the potty, other than sitting on it for about ten seconds and saying “Pee pee, pee pee!” before he gets distracted and hops up, I’ve put it on the back burner. I’ve been focusing my efforts on let him run around naked as much as possible so that he can see what happens when he “goes.” I won’t be able to do this much longer as the chill of fall is in the air. Needless to say, we’ve had countless pee puddles on the floor and the occasional log as well. I remember while potting training our middle child Kate, who was a climber, I found a poop log on a side table. Seriously.

Cooper surprised me the other day when he peed on the kitchen floor and then ran over to the potty saying “Pee pee, pee pee!” and pointing excitedly. I sat him down as quickly as I could but alas, not even a dribble made it into the pot…but on the other hand, I could see that he was starting to make the connection….slowly, very slowly but surely. He tends to pee on the floor and then immediately run through it, splat! Banging his head on the hardwood floor and getting covered. Luckily, baby urine is pretty mild so the damage is minimal and I always try not to laugh too hard.

Probably the biggest “incident” so far with Cooper was when I left him unattended and diaper-less for a few minutes (I was in the same room but he was around the corner and I couldn’t see him).  I heard him calling “Mama! Mama!” with a sort of urgency– a mix of surprise and pride, if you will. I walked around the corner to find him using his toy vacuum to “vacuum up” a large poop log on the carpet. The picture I have of him, buck-naked, and proudly pushing his bright yellow vacuum back and forth over the carpet to clean up after himself still makes me laugh out loud. The poo ground into the carpet, however, quickly turned the laughter into dry heaving.

Where’s the strangest place you’ve found a puddle of pee or worse while potty training your child? Come on, it can’t be any worse than on a side table, or can it?