You have to be a parent...

(I apologize and warn in advance about the graphic...er, gross...nature of this post.)

I was just thinking about how life changes so much when you become a parent. There are stages of growth for a baby, but the parent grows with them at each step: learning how to recognize certain cries, learning about feeding them, learning how to set boundaries, learning how to teach sounds and letters...and then you try learning how to potty-train. Oh. Everyone who has done it is sitting there nodding their heads right now. And depending on how recent their experience was they are either grimacing or laughing. Jerks.

But seriously, it has been MONTHS of figuring out how to do this with our now-3-year-old-boy. In the course of that time he learned that he liked to pee in the potty but NOT go #2. In fact, he adamantly refused. Every day I would ineffectively plead with him to poop in the potty before he took a nap, and every day I would resign, put the diaper on, only to be summoned by his calls about 45 minutes later when he would have woken himself up from a VERY short nap by pooping in his diaper. Not only were we being ridiculously unsuccessful at the potty training, but he was grumpy from having short naps as well. Argh.

One afternoon, roughly 3-4 weeks ago, I about had a coronary when he jumped up from play, ran into the bathroom, and came out totally bare from the waist down, declaring that he had just gone potty. By himself. Without me asking him. And when I went to flush I found he had gone pee AND poo. No pleading, no coercion, no threats. It's like he just suddenly decided he wanted to do it and that was it. Since then he has pretty much been potty trained. There have been the invariable accidents here and there, which I totally expect, but they are few and far between considering what it took us to get here.

Again, I was thinking about how being a parent changes you...because the other day when I was getting him ready for bed and he ran into the bathroom by himself, I could hear "plop-plop" coming from the bathroom and I thought how ODD it was that such a disgusting sound could make me so ridiculously happy that I would be grinning from ear to ear. It was like music to my ears. Like I said, I think you have to be a parent.