Pee and pride of another kind

With guys it's easy: we can pee anywhere we want, appropriate or not, legal or not. And we're damn proud of that fact.

With women, not so much, although when the Mama proved to me how utilitarian she was soon after we were dating, my heart swelled with damn proud manly love.

She had me at hello, wearing a baseball cap and peeing in the woods. Mercy me I love that woman (and it is almost Valentine's Day).

But now we're dealing with pee and pride of another kind. The B-hive kind. The toddler potty training kind that boggles the adult mind.

I've written before about how Bea has a slight speech delay, and now her speech therapist's evaluation has confirmed it's more than likely auditory processing disorder (APD), which affects less than 5% of school-aged children.

What this means is that Beatrice has trouble processing the information she hears in the same way as other kids because her ears and brain don't play nice together. That in turn affects the way her brain recognizes and interprets sounds. Also, loud background noise or any sudden loud noise really bother her, and that further complicates and distorts the sounds in her head and the processing responsible for composing speech.

Although it hasn't slowed her academically (for a toddler), it has slowed some of her self-care progress, primarily potty training, but look out world -- Bea's on a pee roll.

For months now, getting the elder B to pee in the big T is what the Mama and me have been working on. Actually it's been more Mama than me, but I help with consistency when I can (I've been working on that previous rhyme, though).

We're focused on the child-centered method, which means, "I'll go on the potty when I damn well ready to." If you've ever experienced potty training, you know that forcing or pushing only leads to meltdowns and breakdowns -- and the kids suffer too. Seriously, forcing them to go when they don't "own it" is a bad scene and doesn't work. At all.

Back to Bea pee -- at first we started bribing with chocolate chips, a variation of the M&M payoff. But then our preschool discouraged the bribing and instead encouraged encouraging the positive behaviors of sitting on the potty, etc.

Which we did. And it kinda worked to get her to sit on the potty, to then still pee in her pull up.

Screw that. Back to bribery. One of her favorite toddler shows now is Super Why!, a show about learning to read (which she's close to doing actually). In this show are four primary characters, each of whom become a reading and problem-solving superhero in Storybook Land.

So the idea was to start putting stickers on the calendar each time Beatrice went pee on the potty, and when she got to 5 stickers, she'd get a Super Why superhero character.

As of last night, she's collected two of the four characters (we're gonna have to get more goods). And just the night before when she went pee she then stood proudly from the potty and said:

"I did it!"

Right on, baby. We are so damn proud of you!