Pure economics- or not so pure....

Disclaimer:
The words pee, poo, potty, potty training and toilet are used in this post. If you will be offended at reading about these words and what they represent, please skip this post and come back later :0D


So, when we first met Elisha- now almost a year ago, it was love at first sight- actually even before we met him, we felt we knew him.

Imagine our excitement when we went back a few months later to bring him home and the very first night at the hotel, mere hours after picking him up, he poops on the potty!! We were overjoyed that we wouldn't have to work so hard on the potty training, since he seemed to have it down.

Then, after several months of diapers and pull ups, we realized he was potty-timed at the baby home, not potty trained. And there is a huge difference.

Potty trained children understand their body talking to them- that discomfort in the belly that they have to pee or poo- and they go to the toilet and relieve that pain.

Potty timed children are put on the potty several times a day at strategic times- like a puppy-upon awakening, before and after meals and snacks and then again before bed.

A potty timed child is perfectly potty trained- as long as his/her parents are able to get them on the potty at just the right time.

Unfortunately, this has seemed to make our potty training time last FOREVER.

I am so thankful that he has no problems going to the bathroom on the potty----- but, he doesn't seem to be bothered by wet underpants either.

Thus my economics dilemma. I decided 2 days ago that we were not going to do pull ups anymore. All cloth underpants. This in hopes that he would learn to wake up if he had to pee, as well as save the world by not putting more diapers in the landfills than absolutely necessary.

Maybe I should give it more time. But doing a small load of laundry after nap and bedtime, seeing that the "pee-proof" plastic of the mattress pad isn't so much, spraying down the mattress hoping it doesn't start smelling........

I'm thinking purely economically that I am much more green with 2 little diapers a day than I am with 2 incomplete loads of laundry, (washing and drying) the time lost- Oh yeah, mostly the fact that he soaked through everything last night and still was completely sound asleep!!!!

I think I will continue with the advice from my sister-in-law. We have been going up just before going to bed and putting him on the toilet several hours after he's gone to sleep. I think I'll try going green again when he wakes up because he is wet, instead of continuing to sleep so peacefully.

For those who have been there, done that, have the tee shirt and wrote a book- if you have any advice that worked for you- please feel free to share. Denise- the cheerios work to help make sure everything is out- but he was having fun hitting the big hole in the bottom of the toilet before, anyways.

He continues to be a blessing to us and so many around us!!