Cooper is officially a toddler. He’s no longer the walking infant he was at 12 months. He’s a chattering, running, flirting, tantruming little kid and we are enjoying every minute of him…remind me I said that when he’s screaming on the changing table, K?

He now says about ten words, the most used being: Ball, Mama, Baby, Toe, Dada, Baby and Girls. (He yells “GIRLS!” when he is looking for them the way I do when I am yelling at them) and he’s using baby sign language to tell me he wants “more” or to “eat,” and we are working on “drink.”

He’s also learning about his bodily functions. Thanks to the warm weather I’ve let him run around naked plenty and whenever I catch him peeing I make sure to say “You’re going pee-pee.” He can actually say “pee pee” as well but he isn’t telling me when he needs to go yet, rather just copying me like a baby parrot. But it’s a start.  I even caught him peeing on the side of the tub before a bath and quickly put him on the potty…but alas, it was too late and not even a drop made it in the toilet. But he sat there anyway saying “Pee pee?  Pee pee?”

In addition to the occasional puddles on the floor, I’ve found the occasional “log.” My sister said that when her sons would poop on the floor they would be a little freaked out… “That came out of me??” but Cooper’s reaction is much more mundane, in fact, he barely seems to notice.  Cooper doesn’t seemed too phased by poop, whether it is inside his diaper or not. And to be honest, he doesn’t seem to mind when he is wet either.

He’s now totally cool with sitting on his little potty and he claps his hands like he’s proud of himself. But he doesn’t have the attention span to sit for long, so before you know it, he’s turning around and sitting backwards, standing on it and or taking the removable bowl out of the seat and putting it on his head.

Right now the I’m definitely not pushing the potty training. He’s clearly not ready in many ways, but I am doing my best to keep the conversation going.  By this I mean, every time he poops and I change his diaper, I tell him we’re going to “put the poo poo in the potty” and when I catch him peeing, I tell him what he’s doing so he can start to make the connection. I’ve also considered giving him a sippy cup of water to drink while he sits on the potty in the hopes it might trigger a dribble or two. I don’t see him breaking any potty training records in the near future and I’m all the more amazed that my nephew Andrew was potty-trained by seventeen months. No pressure, Cooper!

Where are you in the potty training process?