It's official.
I have become one of the mothers I used to make fun of.
I think this must happen to everyone at one point or another - humor me if this isn't the case though.

I may ask Franklin if he "feels a pee pee" about five times a minute these days. I'm not sure if that's even an exaggeration but I'm really hoping it is.

Potty training is going well. He has got into the smartie, sticker, and little prize incentive (bribery) thing we've got going on. Ha! When I was somewhere around nine years old, I remember cheekily telling my father that bribery was "in no way appropriate" when raising a child.
I believe I owe him an apology.

Notice here that I'm the only one who has set a "toilet training" tag on flickr:

This shocks me. However, there are tags for potty training so my hope for humanity is restored.

Okay, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about anymore.

When it comes to teaching your child how to pee in the porcelain, bribery is where it's at - for us. I should add that last part, in case someone has gone, or will go through this type of parenting later only to email me that she actually didn't have to revert to bribery because she and her baby are both genetically superior or somehow grounded to nature and the ultimate pee-goddess-of-motherhood. It's working for us because we're genetically stunted and only understand a reward system to change our behavior patterns - sort of like the absence of chocolate in my diet is rewarded by not investing heavily in Monistat or Canesten.

Reward/bribe... tomato/tomatoe.

It also helps that we followed the daycare idea by insisting that he take off his own wet underwear when there was an accident. It isn't perceived as a punishment, but more of an annoying consequence of deciding that playing in with his trains for that litle bit longer is easier than taking a potty break.

Interestingly, while we are on the subject of trains, we have had to take the train out of toilet training. The phrase was confusing Franklin. He thought he was supposed to be holding his pee for something somewhat train-related. I'm not quite sure what for, but he voiced his confusion last night as D was putting him down for the night. You'd think, with our home so train obsessed, we would have clued in on this language coincidence earlier.
No, we didn't.
We're genetically stunted, remember?

So, now we're "learning how to pee and poo in the toilet", we are not toilet training.
Trains don't belong in the toilet, we don't pee on trains, and there will be no trains coming to our home to pee on the toilet to get a smartie.

- because, logically, trains have their own toilets.