The M&M Curse

Monday is supposed to be the day to start potty training. Marcus just didn't get the memo. We went out on Friday to get some supplies. We came home armed with lots of big boy underwear that Marcus is really excited about. We also made it home with a giant bag of M&Ms. I have heard from various sources that these little candies that melt in your mouth but not in your hand have worked wonders for lots of potty training children. (Just and FYI, if you drop them in the toilet, they melt in there too, at least the outer candy coating does.) The plan was to give Marcus one of these tasty morsels for every successful pee pee on the potty and give him two for every successful poopy on the potty. Greg asked if I was going to start the M&Ms prior to Monday. I decided to just do everything at once on Monday. But somehow it didn't work out like that.

I put the M&Ms in a clear canister and put it in the bathroom. Marcus was on one of his scheduled trips to the potty, maybe before or after nap, when he spotted them there. I told him that he could have one if he went pee pee on the potty. About a minute later he was eating his first M&M. It was so good that he couldn't even eat it with his mouth closed because his face was stuck in a smile. One more successful potty and one more M&M later and his little two-year-old mind had completely caught on. I could hear him thinking, "So if I just go pee pee, I get one of those pieces of yumminess... Just watch how awesome I am."

During the next hour, Marcus went pee pee in his potty a minimum of 14 times. (Not sure of the exact count because I wasn't counting at first.) He peed more times than my dog does when I take her for long walks and she stops at every yard. In attempt to spend some time in a place other than the bathroom, I moved his little potty into the kitchen. For an hour things around here went like this:
1 - Marcus says he has to go potty.
2 - I tell Marcus to start the process.
3 - He lifts the lid on his potty.
4 - He starts to try to get his pants down and I have to help. (I got wise after about 5 times on the potty and put a pull-up on him because then he needed less help than he did with the diaper.)
5 - He sits on the potty.
6 - He cheers.
7 - We look in the potty and see there is a teeny tiny little puddle.
8 - We all cheer.
9 - Marcus starts pulling up his pants and needs a little help.
10 - I squirt a little hand sanitizer on his hands.
11 - I give him an M&M and he smiles for about 30 seconds before eating it.
12 - While he is smiling I head down the hall with the potty bowl.
13 - I empty the contents of the potty into the toilet.
14 - I clean the potty bowl.
15 - I return the potty bowl to the potty in the kitchen.
16 - I wash my hands.
17 - As I am washing my hands Marcus starts telling me he has to go potty again which puts us back to step one.

I didn't want to tell him no because the point was to encourage him to go to the potty. I figured that eventually he would run dry. I really have no idea how he kept going. The only thing that stopped it was that my mother-in-law showed up to babysit while Greg and I went out to celebrate our anniversary. The kids sat down with their grandma to eat and I moved the potty back to the bathroom and hid the M&Ms. Hopefully we have about half as much interest in M&Ms - I mean, in potty training - tomorrow when we actually start this process. Otherwise I am going to be completely exhausted.

(Greg and I had a great anniversary celebration. We went out to dinner at the place where we got married. He didn't tell me what we were doing to celebrate but I assumed that we were going there. I didn't have a clue though that he had booked us a room at a hotel not far from our house and had arranged for his mom to take care of the kids all night and into the morning too. He even packed a rather well equipped bag for our overnight stay. We had breakfast out this morning too but I was itching to get back to my kids. I just wasn't emotionally prepared to leave them overnight! It was a great time though to just hang out with each other and not have to wake up in the morning and make breakfasts and change diapers and wipe noses.)