Potty-training blues

When I got pregnant three years ago, I thought the hardest part of motherhood would be the labor and birth of my little bundle of joy. No one told me that the hardest part was when that bundle could walk and talk and lie right to your face!

Getting Cooper to sleep and getting him to stay there was a huge challenge for us, but compared to potty training, it was a walk in the park! I was so prepared for the task ahead: I had read books, researched online, asked other mommies their opinions and gotten a plethora of superhero tattoos and two big bags of marshmallows for potty rewards. I thought I was ready. Surely everything would work out, surely my smart 2 1/2-year-old would pick this up in no time and we would be on our way to big-boy land.

I mean, he can count to 25, he knows all his colors and shapes, and he can even pick a few letters out of the alphabet, so potty training should be a no-brainer, right? Wrong!

I almost gave up that first day. After going through 26 of our 30 pairs of big boy underpants and cleaning pee off our carpet all day, I was about to quit. But then he woke up the next day and sat on the potty and all was right in the world. It wasn't overnight, but within the week, he was picking it up faster than I imagined.

By week two, I would say he was 85 percent potty trained. He still had accidents -- he would be playing and forget to say he had to go -- and he still wouldn't do anything but pee pee on the potty, but he was getting the hang of it. He was fully trained at our wonderful babysitter's house and halfway trained everywhere else.

By week three, he was telling us he had to go, he was waking up in the middle of the night to go and he woke up dry every morning. Of course, this made my head grow three times its size -- I thought I was a potty-training guru who, with the help of an amazing babysitter and mother-in-law, got my kid potty trained.

Then week four hit.

Because my head was so big, I missed my kid's body language that he didn't quite have this thing down. We spent one whole mommy/Cooper Saturday right where we started, going through 17 pairs of underpants and me spending the whole day on my knees mopping up the carpet. Max came home as I was cleaning up the 10th pee mess off the floor, and there was a screaming child in timeout, wearing a diaper and yelling, "I'm not a baby! I don't wear diapers!"

After a timeout myself, I re-evaluated how I was handling this potty-training thing. Now on week five, I would like to say we are almost completely potty trained. Cooper tells a grown-up when he has to go, he has been waking up dry but wearing a pull-up just in case, and he longer looks like a UFC fighter because peeing no longer means you get a superhero tattoo.

The only thing I am still struggling with is how to get him to use the potty for things other than when he has to pee. Right now, he will hide under the table, behind a chair or in a corner, do his business, and then look right at me and say he didn't do it -- the "Other Cooper" did. I am open to any suggestions you may have, because let me tell you, I do not look forward to my daily scrubbing of little superhero underpants and hoping I can get them clean!

-----------------------------------

Kristen Pind, a native of small-town Gower, Mo., came to Southeast Missouri State University with big dreams of being the next Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer. She never thought that by age 25, she'd be married with a baby and living in Cape Girardeau. Keep up with Kristen's adventures as a first-time mom -- one who's still a girl trying to figure out how her own life fits together. Turns out, she's living a dream she never knew she had, and loving every minute of it. Kristen invites moms of all types to find her "Baby Steps" page on Facebook.