Potty Talk

My son turned 3 in March and since then has learned to pee and poop in the toilet. The problem is, he will still go in ANYTHING he wears – diaper/pull-up/underpants, even just pants or shorts - anything that covers him up. When we let him go commando at home, he will run to the toilet on his own to do his business. Luckily, he won’t go on the floor, but I still don’t know how I can get him to wear something AND use the potty. He absolutely doesn’t mind being wet and is content just playing and sitting in his wet briefs and pants for the rest of the day if I allow him to (ugh).

His pediatrician told me to allow another year for potty training (he just had a baby brother who is now 5 months old) and went as far as telling me that as long as baby #2 is in diapers, he might not be fully potty trained. YIKES. There has to be some other way to potty train him fully before he is 5, right? It’s driving me crazy (not to mention that I get so disgusted when he poops in his pull-ups or diapers). I fear that with the rate we are going (we haven’t even began with night potty training – baby steps), he will be in diapers in college.

We tried putting him straight into underpants from diapers but because we had to throw a few away already (after he pooped and peed in them, making a huge, horrible mess in our living room), he is now in pull-ups (which I think are just expensive diapers). The only thing that worked to get him to sit on the potty to do anything was to bribe him with m&ms. But now he’s not interested in them anymore, and even after I’ve told him 1,000 times that pee and poop go in the toilet, or encouraging him to be a “big boy” and use the potty like mommy and daddy, or after reading potty book after potty book (you get the idea), he’ll still go in his pull-ups/underpants.

I’m running out of ideas. It’s not like he doesn’t have control yet or know how to use the potty. He has long learned control by peeing and pooping on the toilet before he was one, but because of our month-long vacation to another country, that was all erased. That's a whole other story. At least now he enjoys putting down the toilet seat cover and flushing, so I think he’s just being stubborn and “asserting himself” by going in whatever he’s wearing.

What to do, what to do?

After posting this question on one mommy network, the general answer I got was to wait until he's ready. Patience is really not my strong suit, especially when it comes to things I want. Like wanting to NOT change a poopy diaper again.

Guess I'll just have to ease up a bit on this one, because there just might be no winner if I keep persisting.