Pot's Right

Potty training isn't quite the third rail that vaccines or circumcision are, but it's definitely one of those parenting issues that people tend to feel strongly about and other choices get interpreted as criticism.  And it's another parenting issue on which I don't have a strong opinion affiliated with any particular school of parenting, and on which, therefore, I tend to think it pays to be flexible and open to various ideas because what works for one kid may not work for another, etc.

A big part of our potty training technique was informed by laziness and a deep ambivalence about starting the whole process, which I was pretty sure was going to be awful.  I mean, if it was going to feature, in any way, poop ending up where poop was not intended to be, my feeling was that this was worse than diapers and (not should, clearly, but) would be put off as long as possible.  The thing is, I got pregnant, and while the notion of two kids in diapers at once was unpleasant, it wasn't the gun at my temple that the looming prospect of pre-school was, and the the notion of having to train Ben while wrangling a newborn.

Luckily, it wasn't like we'd done absolutely nothing up to that point (that point being a couple of weeks ago).  We started putting him on the potty at diaper changes when he was around 16 or 18 months.  This was the result of what I thought was smart advice: that even if you have no expectations whatsoever of moving past the occasional potty-sitting, it's a good idea to get the baby used to the potty long before they reach the more oppositional phase around two and a half.  And I'd tried a few times since he turned two to take it a step further.  I put him in underpants and covered the sofa with towels, and he was enthusiastic about the M&M bribes and game for the Lightning McQueen underpants, but the experiment was always a FAIL, and we went cheerfully back into diapers.  The last thing in the world I wanted was to stress either one of us out by forcing the issue before he was ready to be successful.

I think we'd tried maybe three times, each "time" consisting of a few mornings in a row, by the time his third birthday rolled around and I started getting freaked out about pre-school.  And it had been a while since the last attempt, because lately, in the last six months, he'd become quite opposed to the very notion of underpants, and I didn't want to force a confrontation.

But the weather had turned warm, and if he refused underpants, he would at least agree to a couple of hours in the morning with no pants on at all.  Which was the key in the end, I think, because the feeling of underpants was too close to the feeling of a diaper, but total bottom-half nudity made him pay attention much more closely to his body's signals, and he didn't have a single accident over the couple of weeks we tried this out for an hour or more every day.

But still he refused underpants.  And then I realized I had one powerful tool yet unused, just lying there!  Bribery.  M&Ms worked great for the short-attention-span toddler years, but they weren't compelling enough for my three-year-old.  But the promise of a toy was.

I told him if he could go one whole day in underpants, no diaper, from the time he woke up until bedtime, he could pick out any toy he liked (within reason, void where prohibited, no live monkeys).  This was a Sunday, and I figured amid the failures, we'd go to the toy store sometime during the next week and choose the desired object, which would then be dangled in front of him in some cruel but motivating way for as long as it took to get through a whole day.  What happened was that he barely left me alone about the toy -- which he decided early on would be an excavator, which I hoped existed -- to the extent that it was clear the toy did not have to be in the house for effective dangling.  And miraculously, he stayed dry in underpants that entire next day.  And we went to the toy store on the Tuesday, and lo and behold, they had a Playmobil Excavator, worth every penny of the sixty bucks it cost.

And that was that.  Potty trained.

But of course that's not how it works, is it?  Potty training is a continuum, and we had achieved only the first stage.  Which is a big deal, don't get me wrong, but it's definitely one of those things with which parenthood is rife: the thing that looks like one simple step from one side and turns out to be a whole staircase from the other.

Because it's not like you move right from diapers to the kid climbing cheerfully up onto public toilets and wiping his own tuchus.  I drive around now with a Frog Potty in the way-back of my Outback, a technique I heartily recommend to anyone at this stage of training.  (Empty pee into shrubbery or anywhere you wouldn't feel rotten about a dog peeing, which is pretty much anywhere, at least if you're me; wipe out potty with wipes.  Poop goes in trash bag and right into any trash receptacle you wouldn't feel rotten about dumping dog poop under similar circumstances -- which may mean you drive around with it in the car for a while, so have plenty of extra bags.)  The kid can pull down his own underpants, but he balks at doing the same thing for pants, and he simply isn't coordinated enough to put any of his clothes back on.  He's in diapers at night, largely because we still have a big box of them, but he wakes up dry more often than not.  And he'll sit on a proper toilet without too much fuss, but still prefers the frog potty.

But he's trained enough that I don't have to hoist him up onto the changing table or get down on the floor to change his diaper, which is a mercy at nine months pregnant.  And he's trained enough for pre-school, where I'm relying on a little old-fashioned peer pressure to carry him the rest of the way.

Toy Story

Hasbro Playskool Busy Gears

This probably isn't in his top five anymore, but it's notable because I can't get over how evergreen it has been. His Grandma Kath sent it to him about a year ago if I'm not mistaken, and it has been among his favorite toys since the day it arrived. I'd say his interest in it peaked around 15 months. I would never have pegged it as an engine of inventive play, or a toy that would have unfolded over the months with different ways of interacting with it. It looks so one-dimensional!

You push the button, and music plays while the center cog turns, which turns the other cogs. The center one is attached to the toy; the others are removable (and stackable, though that doesn't seem to add anything to his enjoyment).

When he was tiny, he just liked taking all the cogs off and chewing on them. I would push the button for him occasionally, and he liked that well enough that he learned to do it himself. (And the music isn't bad, for a mass-market kid toy -- it might be the least annoying music-making toy in the house.) He then went through stages of mastery of manipulating the cogs in various ways: putting them back onto their nubs, sticking his fingers in the way so they can't move (it makes a different noise when the cogs are blocked), etc. Lately his interest is in putting things on the main cog so that they spin around or fall off. He's been experimenting with that for a while now.


Peg Puzzles

It's like he woke up one morning about a month ago and suddenly had peg puzzle mastery. He'd had a couple of the really big chunky ones for a few months, which mostly got handled and chewed and their pieces misplaced, but he never showed much interest in "solving" them. Then one day I got out of the shower and found him poring over one of the 8-9 piece puzzles (also presents from his Grandma Kath) that had been sitting on a bookshelf in his bedroom for month unnoticed. That was that. I found the others -- I'd put them away months ago -- and suddenly he was solving them in a flash and yelling for more.

Melissa and Doug, who made the four we had at first, seem annoyingly to be have added sounds or music to their classic 9-piece puzzles (like the one above), when one of the best things about puzzles as far as I'm concerned is that they're quiet! So we hit Target and found an armload of Circo puzzles instead.

Cars, Trucks, and Buses

Since his colossal interest in all things vehicular first manifested a few months ago, he's built up quite a collection in various materials and scales, from Matchbox cars to a wooden dump truck that was mine as a toddler and probably weighs ten pounds. He has the fabulous little Plan buses with smooth-running rubber wheels at left, and he has a seriously irritating Fisher Price schoolbus that makes a dozen different noises that all make you want to kill yourself. (And, wow, did Little People ever get super-lame.)

It's hard to say which among these are his favorites. He has affairs with certain ones for a few days and then casts them aside for others. He does in fact take them to bed -- the smaller ones, anyway. At bedtime and naptime, he picks one or two to take upstairs. He doesn't cuddle them, but they do appear to be essential to the going-to-sleep process somehow.

My favorites, of course, are the ones that don't make noise and don't have pieces that come off and need to be incessantly replaced.

Snapshots

Still no words. But when you ask him, "Hey Ben, when are you going to learn to talk?" he puts on this sweet, half-whispery voice and says, "Da da da da da da da," like: I got yer talking right here, silly adult.

He's been climbing up stairs for months now, but he wasn't going down them, and I was getting tired of schlepping thirty pounds of him every time he needed a diaper change, so we did a little crash course (without any actual crashes, thank goodness) in knees-and-belly descent last week, and now he goes down faster than he goes up.

He went trick-or-treating for the first time this Halloween, which meant I went trick-or-treating for the first time in more than 20 years. He was kind of perplexed by the entire ordeal, but totally game, and he definitely approved of the candy part. His enthusiasm was underlined by the howling and grabby-pointing after the pumpkin bucket when I disappeared it.

He very much enjoys watching the Life of Mammals dvds and slideshows of various animal groups on Flickr, especially Wild Animals in Action, both of which I heartily recommend for toddler-adult entertainment. He likes to point out each and every critter and say "Dah!"

He's all about cars and trucks lately, and in fact just walked in here with a toy car in each hand and then took them both over to the stairs to push them around. Walking through a parking lot can include his pointing at every single car we pass and saying, "Dah!"

He is a huge fan of books, and would probably be content to do nothing but bring me one book after another to read until we ran out of books, and then he'd want to start over at the beginning. Granted, I'm not that familiar with other toddlers' reading habits, but he seems remarkably patient with wordy books (like, say, Ping or Ferdinand) and also remarkably gentle with paper (i.e., not board) books. He will often amuse himself for long periods of time just sitting on the floor and paging through books, sometimes da-da-da-ing to himself.

He recently learned how to dip french fries in ketchup, and now he dips whatever into whatever else at every opportunity.

Play Kitchen

Ben is a little young for the kind of pretend play that takes place in a play kitchen (they're usually aimed at three-year-olds), but he's a big fan of kitchen tools, knobs, and cabinets, and he spent nearly all the time we were at the Fs' in July bashing around their play kitchen. So we decided to get him one. Only, Andy being the buildy sort, we're making him one.

Yesterday was the first effort: plans made and tweaked, materials bought, construction started. Here's what it looks like so far:

I can't tell you how awesome it is to co-parent with somebody who's willing and able to build play furniture. It opens up so many possibilities. I looked at dozens of play kitchens online, and the only ones I could get enthusiastic about were the unbelievably expensive ones like this one, three hundred bucks for just the stove! Or this one, which at least you get stove and sink for your $250. There were others I could have been ok with, like this one or this one, but they all had something I objected to, however nitpicky: they looked ricketty, or had microwaves (where's the imaginative fun in pretending to reheat something?) or fake clocks (a particular peeve) or my favorite bugbear of design for littles: ungodly over-embellishment. This is a big toy that's going to be taking up visual and actual space in my house for the next two years or more -- a lot more if we have another kid -- so it mattered to me that it wasn't going to be something I learned to hate the sight of.

But Ben's kitchen is going to be great. Sturdy, in colors I don't hate. It's going to have a stove and a sink and cabinet, and if he uses it enough and wants one, we left room to add a fridge. We even had fun wandering around Lowe's yesterday, looking for bits and bobs to be repurposed. We scoffed at the package of replacement oven knobs ($20!), when little wooden discs would do just as well and look cuter, too. We plotted how to paint neat circles for burners using shelf paper and a compass (Andy being Andy, we have a compass). It's a great nexus of Andy's craftiness and mine.

This morning I searched "play kitchen" tags at Flickr, and wow. A lot of people like us are building play kitchens, and some of them are pretty fantastic. I mean, wow.

More Toys

It was December when I last blogged a list of Ben's favorite toys, and the kid wasn't yet crawling, and probably unsurprisingly to parents of toddlers, the first two items on the December list make it onto the June list, too. We've gone from one big cloth box of toys to a whole TROFAST (I love Ikea) cabinet, with at least half the toys in storage so that A) there's some kind of limit to the mess, and B) toys can be NEW! all over again in a month's time.

Here are the evergreens, the greatest hits:

1. Leap Frog Learn & Groove Musical Table. Ben loves this thing, and for an electronic noise-maker, it's pretty amazingly non-irritating. My advice: put the talk mode in Spanish so it's less distracting when you're trying to read a book.

2. Ikea nesting and stacking cups and stacking rings. He's nearly able to stack now, which increases the play value, but you'd be amazed at how much he loves playing with these even without being able to manipulate them the way they're intended to be manipulated.

3. Animals from Playmobil 123 (from the farm set and the tractor set) and Schleich (I've bought him mother-baby pairs of elephants, cows, and pandas). The cows from both are the biggest hits. At left he's cruising the sofa with a Playmobil cow in hand.

4. Hammer balls from Plan. I love Plan Toys. Good, solid stuff, well made by a ecologically and economically responsible company. Ben, of course, doesn't care about that, and I have to confess I'm surprised by how much fun he clearly has with this toy, which I would have thought was of limited interest (he got it as a gift). He will hammer the balls through and then retrieve them and replace them to hammer again.

5. Playskool gear toy. Another one I'm surprised by the duration of his interest in. At first, he just liked pulling the gears off and chewing on them. Then he worked out how to push the button and make them turn. He clearly finds the thing fascinating and challenging, and the music is really not bad at all.

Here, on the other hand, are the things I wish he'd like, but he remains steadfastly uninterested in:

1. Push walkers. We have a super-cute one from Ikea and a plastic hippo-shaped one borrowed from a friend, and not only is he not interested, he gets annoyed if you put him down too close to one. Ok, no pressure, kid!

2. Blocks. We have at this point hundreds of very nice, very expensive wood blocks. Andy and I like them very much, and when we get down on the floor and make exciting block structures, Ben does enjoy destroying them, but that's really the limit of his interest. He has very recently figured out that he can stack one block on another, though, so it could be that blocks are on their way in.

3. A baby doll. I bought him this one for his birthday, and he gave it a good poke in the nose and proceeded to other things. His cousin, six months older, loved the baby doll and carried it around giving it hugs and kisses, so I have good hope that Ben will develop regard for his baby eventually.

Toys There Should Be

1. A deck of sturdy, circular plastic cards, each about the size of an adult's palm, with photographs of everyday objects or African animals or body parts or other things you find in, say, Priddy books. If you must make them "educational," the reverse of each could have the word, or the initial of the word.

2. Board books made of sturdy plastic or wood, so that gnawing youngsters don't A) destroy them and B) end up with little pieces of semi-dissolved paper in their mouths.

3. A toy with one very easy to operate switch that turns a light on and off. Bonus if the switch is actually shaped like a real light switch.

4. Boxes with hinged lids and different kinds of closing mechanisms, all slightly challenging, in which parents can stow different assortments of interesting gummable and handleable objects.

If any of these things do exist, please tell me where to buy them.

Bright Copper Kettles and Warm Woollen Mittens

Some of Ben's favorite toys are not toys. I'm not surprised by that, as toys for babies are largely total failures. Do toy manufacturers never put babies in a room with a box of objects and just watch which ones fascinate?

Some of the objects which have obtained resident status in toy boxes because of sustained interest:

The ex-mobile cards (from the Manhattan Baby Infant Stim-Mobile). I guess you could argue that these were intended as a toy -- sort of. But they're certainly not being used as intended. We cut the little pokey bits off and smoothed the rough edges so they're more or less just round, rigid plastic cards with colorful images on them. He loves to turn them over and over in his hands, gum them, fish them out of boxes. They may be his longest-running consistent favorite.

The remote control. We took the batteries out of the remote from a long-expired dvd player (luckily, Andy is an electronics packrat, so the remote from a dvd player we haven't had for two years was in the bag of remotes, of course). It's smaller than the universal remote he's perpetually lunging for, and no one uses it but him (which I'd have thought would reduce its interest significantly, but doesn't seem to), but oh man, does he love the buttons. It also gets turned over and over and gummed.

Similarly, the old cordless phone, also with its battery removed. Toy phones are a staple of childhood, but kids today have a crummy crop of them, in my opinion. Most people use only cell phones, and have you seen toy cell phones? So lame. We're among those who still have a land line and use a cordless, but I don't think I've ever seen a toy cordless phone. But we did have an old cordless handset lying around (see above re packrat), which has been in Ben's toy box since before he could really even hold it properly. Buttons. Kid loves buttons. I should add that Andy's mom gave him a toy ye-olde phone -- the Fisher Price "chatter" phone we all remember from our childhoods (which is no doubt why they still make them), which Ben also loves. But it bears as little resemblance to the phones he sees us using as one of the cats or a glass of milk, so I don't see it having a lot of imaginative-play value. When he gets around to that, which of course isn't yet.

An empty tea tin. Go figure. It's red and metallic. It's of a slightly awkward size which tends to slip from his fingers and there for need to be chased. I've been thinking of putting a coin inside to make it a rattle, but I'm not 100% confident he can't get the lid off.

Kitchen gadgets, especially large bowls, small pans, measuring spoons, and a mesh strainer. We haven't baby-proofed the kitchen yet, but when we do, I intend to give him access to at least one cabinet which I will stock with as many baby-safe kitchen implements as I can conveniently donate to the cause. I've started looking at the gadget aisles in kitchen stores with new eyes, too, and I recommend them to parents of inquisitive crawlers as a source of relatively inexpensive toys which not only may have more lasting interest than some musical horror, but which may actually have a life after baby as useful household objects.

The Crap vs the Heirloomery

A silver porringer. A silver cup. A bright yellow sweater. Velour overalls. These are relics of my own babyhood that have an active place in Ben's.

I fed him baby cereal from the porringer at every meal for a while there, until the charm faded a bit when his menu expanded and created even more dishes and I didn't feel like hand-washing the bowl three times a day. The silver cup is in the box of toys next to his green chair in the kitchen. It gets pulled out and handled and chewed on many times every day. Every so often I put a splash of water in it and hold it to his lips, tip it back, and see what happens. When he's ready to use a cup, it will be his first.

The sweater is getting lots of use lately in the wicked cold snap we're having. My mother made it for me. I'm doing some knitting myself now for Ben, and I tend towards chunky yarn and big needles for fast knitting, but Mom's project was way more ambitious: it's minutely knit of fine wool, but sturdy, and it's held up marvelously and is as useful an object as it is nostalgic and charming. The overalls, too. Mom ordered them from Switzerland, which, back in the 70s with no Internet (and did they even have phones?), what a project! They're great stretchy, soft, super-sturdy little numbers, though, and they, too, are employed for use as much as memory.

There are some other objects, though, of which I've also taken custody, that don't translate into use. There's the fine cotton bib with delicate embroidery, which I'm sure I'd have to hand-wash, and which might not stand up to it. This is a relic of Mom's babyhood which was pressed into service again for mine. There's the little silver chain with two clips shaped like duckies; one is supposed to clip a washcloth and use it as a bib, and back in the days before Velcro, I'm sure it represented a convenience. Now it seems fiddly and precious and time-wasting.

There are things from Ben's babyhood I'll pack away, hoping he or a subsequent kid will someday provide me with grandchildren and want to use. The silver cup and porringer, certainly, and the clothes, providing they make it through my kids' use. Sweaters I'll knit myself, and well made baby clothes I've come to love. Maybe one or two of the nicer wood baby toys, to which I've grown unaccountably attached. But none of the useful objects of babyrearing: not the spoons or bowls or cups, not the bibs, not the chairs (though I'm thisclose to buying the kid a Svan). So many of these things of daily use are well made for their purposes, which means easy to sponge off or machine wash, or thoroughly disposable, and therefore in no way candidates for heirloomery. Which is fine. I'm enough of a packrat without falling in love with every bit of baby gear. And if I'm tempted to bewail our culture's sad tendency towards the plastic, the crappy, the disposable, I just think about the entire day every week my grandmothers had to devote to nothing but washing clothes, and how much cleaning a baby created back before all these crappy but convenient products, and I thank my lucky stars.

Toys in Babeland

"Playing" with toys at Ben's age (six months) is still largely a matter of his acquiring a target and working to bring said target to his mouth and gum it, with maybe a little passing the object from hand to hand and examining it a little. But some objects are clearly preferable to others -- these are the ones he will retrieve from the box most often.

1. Ikea nesting/stacking cups. He doesn't stack or nest them, but the cups themselves are of great interest. At $2.49, without question the best value of any toy so far.

2. Ikea stacking rings. Again, he doesn't stack them, but the discs themselves are favorites for handling and gumming.

3. Measuring cups and spoons. I took them off the rings they came on (which looked like they might pinch little fingers or lips) and put them onto those ubiquitous plastic links, so he can work at separating a spoon from its cousins.

4. Baby cups. The dented sterling baby cup that was mine and a plastic one with two handles. Good for gumming, bashing, and throwing, especially the silver one, which makes a much better noise.

5. This thing (Haba Pipapo) and another precious European wooden toy from Oompa that I can't find now -- it's a rattle shaped more or less like a lean mushroom, with a natural stem and a red cap, and four different colored beads on top and bells inside. It's such a hit that we keep it on the changing table to occupy him.

6. Classic for a reason: baby keys.

Honorable Mention: Dad's favorite toy is the Skwish by Manhattan Baby.

Extra credit: How many of these toys have been replaced because Hugo has eaten them?