On Comps and Potty Training

The two major things going on in my life at this point. We'll get the comps stuff out of the way first. I found out on Monday that I passed my writtens, which was very exciting and a big relief. The oral exam is Tuesday, from 10-12, and I'm hoping that will also go smoothly. After that, I have to really gear up for teaching my first class, a survey history class on the U.S. through the Civil War. It's not my area of expertise by any means, but I think it'll go well.

Potty training has been the other big thing. We've been working on it off and on for awhile, but over the past few weeks, we've really bucked down. Ronan wears underwear (or nothing, if we're just hanging out in the house) all day, with diapers only coming out at night and sometimes for naps. His daycare teacher also recommended that we let him wear underwear to daycare, so we've been doing that for a week or two now. He's doing pretty well. He'll have the occasional accident, but a lot of those have been at nap time. And there have been several days where he's in the same clothes when I pick him up that he was wearing when I dropped him off. At home, he's gotten pretty good about going to the bathroom on his own, without any prompting, when he feels the need to go. We still have accidents, of course, but he's doing a really good job. Yesterday, he got through our whole zoo outing without an accident and today he spent two hours with me running errands and was able to wait till we got home to use the potty.

The thing that makes me laugh, though, is how calculating he is. My mother in law has a long-standing practice of giving m&ms to the kids when they're potty training for each successful potty visit. So we started that here and Ronan quickly figured out the way it works. In fact, he figured it out so well that if he's in a sweets mode, he'll actually ration his bodily outputs (to put it delicately) so he can get a treat multiple times in a row. It just makes me laugh.

So those are my two major success stories for the moment. I'm not sure which one I'm more proud of...