Dressed For Success

Inspired by a sale on Training Unders at Hanna Andersson, I decided to encourage Zeb along a bit with his potty learning process. We increased the naked time and when, finally, after months of uneventful sitting, he actually peed in the potty, we put on quite the song and dance. He had, at last, figured out how to release his bladder on command. I quickly realized that if I were to bring him to the potty every hour or so, I could easily keep him out of diapers without mishap. But after a few days of this, and no sign of any potty independence on Zeb's part (no mention of "I have to pee," no self-inspired running for the potty), I decided that maybe this was not the route to diaper free living that I wanted to take. Perhaps I was spoiled by Luke and Jaz, who were self-motivated to stop wearing diapers and from the moment they decided they were done (they were about Zeb's age), they never required me to be the "time to pee" alarm clock. It was easy and not at all stressful to transition them out of diapers, whereas after just a few days of directing Zeben's pottying, I was definitely starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.


So I decided to take a step back in the hopes that Zeb would step up. When we're home, Zeb now wears his Pro-Potty Outfit: a shirt and leg warmers with a bare bottom, and he has started to claim responsibility for taking his own bare bottom to the potty when he has to pee.


When he's having a particularly successful stint, he gets to wear underwear. Which makes him feel like "Super Zeben!"But for the most part, we keep him bare-bottomed since the cloth undies can feel awfully similar to a cloth diaper, and I think they cause him to forget that he's not wearing one. Which is why he has not yet reached any sort of potty independence when he's dressed. I either put him in diapers, or decide to be the potty police and bring him to pee every so often when we're out and about (mostly depending on where we're going and my mood).

When I was uploading the latest batch of documentation onto my computer, I was struck by this one photo of Zeb on the potty. Of course, I have taken many photos of Zeben on various potties over the past couple years (we started documenting this journey when the poor kid was only 4 months old), but for some reason this photo seemed oddly familiar in a different way.

I ran over to my mom's house and flipped through a photo album until I found the picture I'd been reminded of:
That's me, at 17 months, trying out my first potty. And while there are many similarities between these two photographs, what I love most is that we're wearing such similar shoes! How crazy is that?

I'm hoping that all of this potty stuff will click for Zeb in the next few weeks and he can go back to wearing pants, but until then I will continue to appreciate my increased exposure to the cutest bum in the world.

The 5-month-old bum