The Definition of Torture

Daddy had a sit-down with me last night. It was his feeling that we should go back to diapers. He wanted to give Collin's brain time to readjust to the idea, time to "forget" any negative potty experiences and start fresh, time to "rest." And, he wanted to put time in his calendar to take some days off to re-do the 3-day training about a month or so from now, this time with a tag-team parenting approach, in which I won't be alone for ANY part of it. That sounded okay, so diapers back on. Yeah, I folded. Sure, diapers back on and he's asked to go potty today. Grrrr. What is WITH that kid? Diapers on and he wants to potty, diapers off and he pees his pants?

Anyway, so I've tortured the kid. It started with hair yesterday. He had to have a bath because he peed on himself just one too many times for my taste and I couldn't tell if, after nap, he had sweat in his hair or pee, and that's just not a question I'm willing to leave to chance. So, into the bath he went, which meant I could either brush his long, luxurious locks into place, or have a field day with them and some gel because Daddy wasn't home from work yet. Guess which way I went with it?

Yeah! And I don't think it was a mistake either. Was it a mistake to let him wear the look for hours and hours? You tell me.

He kept touching his head and saying: "Cool. Neat." Despite the fact that his lingo is straight out of 1951, I think he's got the hip cat thing down, right? We must talk that way, otherwise where would he pick that up? Does that mean that we, as his parents, are woefully lame? It must be true.

I guess only Lame-O parents would think this is adorable, right?

But, the torture of my son continued today. He ate a pretty good lunch, and I was taunting him by eating jelly beans in front of him, causing relentless begging from the peanut gallery. So, I gave in. Did I give in nicely? Uhhh, no. Guess which jelly beans he got?

Yep, the black ones, the peanut butter flavored ones and a popcorn flavored one for good measure. I mean, seriously, what was Jelly Belly thinking! Popcorn! Gross. He thinks he won the lottery because we don't normally have sweets around the house, but they are remains from the potty training experiment and even a black jelly bean is something special to a kid that doesn't get jelly beans. Me, I set them aside in the "eeeewwwww" pile, while I munched on the good flavors, like "red." Anyway, as you can see, he looked gross when he was done. Good thing he doesn't know he was being tortured.

Oh, and I instituted a new rule: clean up! It's been around a while, but with mixed results. But, lately, Mr. Collin has taken to bringing me a bin of toys and dumping it out in front of me, while pronouncing "dump!" then walking over to his box of stories to bring me a book, thus abandoning the dumped pile of toys. This is annoying, to say the least. So far today, I've made him clean up three bins of dumped toys. It's working so far! Hooray. No dumping and abandoning. I think that's a generally good rule for all things, don't you? And, I don't consider it torturous at all. The end result of all of this, he begged to go potty before nap time, where he promptly made a gallon of pee in the froggy potty before deciding he was done and ready for bed. Go figure. Maybe, I should be meaner to him in the future.