Daddy Daycare

I have taken to going in to the office on Saturdays to get the work done that I don't get done at home on days like yesterday. I call these days, Daddy Daycare days.

I can count on getting at least one but usually two or three calls from hubby on these days. Today was no exception.

The first call usually comes about an hour after I leave the house. It usually involves some form of older son telling me he loves me and misses me.

The other calls tend to be of the "when are you coming home" variety....usually accompanied by earsplitting child sound effects in the background.

Today, he pulled a new one on me though. In the grocery store, I received a call regarding poop. The content of the conversation went something like this:

H: "So what do I do? Older son pooped in his pull-up, but just a little bit. Then he went in the potty". (The rest of his question, from which I will spare you, involved a description of the aforementioned poops and the locations and timings of them).

Me: "Well what I did last time, was tell him that if he finished pooping in the potty, I wouldn't take any toys away, but he won't earn any of the others back since he went some in his pull-up". (envision me in the grocery store, surrounded by unsuspecting shoppers just trying to figure out what hamburger helper to have for dinner, trying to avoid saying this loud enough to make anyone lose their appetite but loud enough for hubby at the other end of the cell to understand).

H: "O.k. then, I won't take any toys away, but he doesn't earn back any of his others....When are you coming home? You were stopping for pizza and milk. It takes you 20 minutes to get pizza and milk?"

Me: "I'm heading to the checkout." (I'm really not, but he doesn't need to know this).

I received two more calls before I got home.

You may be wondering why we need to have a summit meeting every time our child poops. The answer is this, my dear hubby is (he will deny this to the death) too tender hearted to have any semblance of authority on certain issues. If left to him, the task of poopy training our four (yes, four) year old would never happen and I would be changing poopy pull-ups until he was 18.

I love my husband, but he thinks that the sun rises and sets with our four year old and does not believe that the fact that our son is still not completely potty trained is a control issue. Therefore, I issued a moratorium on him making any decisions regarding this issue without consulting me first. Older son was manipulating daddy dearest.

The thing is this, older son has an uncanny knack for figuring out the loopholes. First we tried a reward chart for the pee training. This didn't really work too well.

The only times he peed in the potty were when he wanted to earn a new train and then he would sometimes go three times in an hour to get enough stickers to go to Came-apart for a new Thomas engine. He managed to get pretty much the entire fleet before we figured out what he was doing.

Outsmarted by a four year old.

So then he finally was trained when we caught on and told him "no more new toys" until he kept his pull-ups dry for a week. Then we stretched it to a month and so-on.

When we decided it was time to push the poopy training issue, we thought we were wiser. This time, we gave him a warning (mind you, he had taken to going off to his room to hide when he was going to poop and then returning to announce that he had done it and ask for a clean pull-up--also, he never goes at daycare--so we knew that he should be able to use the potty every time).

The warning was that if he pooped in his pull-up, we would take all of his trains and all of his cars. Of course he didn't believe me, so when they were taken away the first time, there was quite the drama.

We told him he could earn them back by pooping in the potty. One train and one car, each time. So he pooped in the potty, one little ball and there we were. We hadn't specified how much he had to poop to get the cars and trains. Damnit!!! Outsmarted again.

Rule change: Now he has to poop it all in the potty to get the trains and cars. If he poops any in his pull-up, we take away the cars and trains he has earned back. So now, he poops a litte in the pull-up and then the rest in the potty. Son of a....

Who knew that parenting would be rocket science...er, poopy science.