the wiener mom begins

I've joined the world of the blog, late as usual. I've been looking for some type of intellectual stimulation, beyond the world of the wiener in which I live. My wieners are all here; big wiener home from school, middle wiener napping (finally) and little wiener talking to himself and staring at his toes. And me of course, the mommy. The cook, the cleaner, the teacher, the nurse and everything else that any of my three little wieners could want.

I spent the day stacking checkers with middle wiener and trying to convince him to pee on the potty and not on the floor. "Who do you think has to clean it up?" I ask him. "I'll clean it up!" he says happily, goes and gets a dishtowel from the kitchen and wipes up his pee puddle. Although he seems pretty self-sufficient on the clean up front (unlike big wiener who used to pee all over and not give a rat's ass) he is significantly less interested in changing into dry underwear. "I don't care mommy, if they are wet. I don't care!" He says with a smile and goes about sticking dump truck stickers all over the cover of the library book that I have 4 more days to read. But I do care, wet underwear is not happening for me, so I wrestle him down and change them.

Potty training is my least favorite thing about parenting (I say that now because I'm doing it, but ask me again later...) Big wiener was near to impossible to train and took many months, going on six now it's all good, but there were some very dark and very pee-soaked days.

Now we're on to middle wiener. He's a candy boy, so I started out (not with a ton of fore-thought) using little candies to reward him for peeing. By day three he had figured out that every time he peed he got candy and so he'd be on his 'once upon a potty' every couple minutes. "I peeded!" He'd announce and then help himself to three smarties. I'd look in at the few drops of pee and wonder how I'd break him of this.

I tried a timer, when the timer goes off it's time to try to pee. Then he got attached to the timer and would ask, "Can I try to pee when the timer goes off?" Trying to explain to him that he could try to pee whenever "he felt the pee" was an exercise in frustration because he'd just say, "but the timer didn't go off" and look at me with confusion.

Finally, by day 6 we had a breakthrough. We went to a friends' house for dinner (one 12 year old son) and brought along our potty. My guess is that they don't have too many people show up for dinner carrying their own potty. We put it on the deck while we sat outside and hoped for the best. Sure enough, middle wiener comes running out of the sandbox to the deck holding his crotch, pulls down his little briefs and shorts and goes. He doesn't say anything to us, watching in rapt attention. Stands up, pulls up his clothes and heads back to the sandbox. No mention of candy! No timer! No begging and pleading on my part! Yea! He didn't pee on their floor all evening. Yea middle wiener!

Today we had only one pee crisis, walking to the bus stop to pick up big wiener, all of a sudden middle wiener grabs at his crotch and says, "I have to pee. Where's my potty?" Of course, being that we were only 1/2 a block from home and HE HAD JUST PEED I didn't cart the potty along. "Can you hold it?" I ask. Duh, I'm asking a two and a half year old who pees randomly just about anywhere, if he can hold it. I tell him he has to pee on a tree. For this I am glad to have boys. I pull down his shorts and briefs and point him towards a tree, which is by the way my friends on a very well traveled street, the street on which we live actually. My son is peeing in front of a stream of traffic. I feel damn lucky a cop didn't drive by and ticket us for indecent exposure. I can see the headlines, "Two Year Old jailed for Flashing on Monroe Street. Mother and 3 month old Brother Accomplices." Perfect, just what I need. It turned out fine, no one pulled over and yelled, no one walked by, biked by or came raging out of their homes demanding I stop exploiting my child to passers by. God, I hate potty training. Only one wiener left...