featherbutt said:
Wow, you have a very strong memory!
And you do a very good job of capturing your experiences and your mindset. By doing experiments you were able to better understand your body and its signals. And because you didn't have to worry about being embarrassed, you could do these experiments whenever and wherever without having to worry about the potty.
It sounds like your mom could tell when you had to poop and was trying to help you figure it out too. And it sounds like it worked! What other ways did she help you work on the mechanics of it?
It also sounds like you were frequently in undies instead of pampers, even though you weren't potty trained yet. Did you pee and poop in undies a lot? Did you feel pressured to use the potty or were you happy to just go in whatever you were wearing?
I wasn’t really pressured to use the potty all that much until I was around four-and-a-half and starting to learn how to ”go” standing up. Even so most of the pressure came from my father. This was because he wanted to get me into kindergarten at or before my fifth birthday. As it turned out this did not happen. I wasn’t punished for this because it wasn’t my fault but everyone in the house knew that my father (and some of my other relatives) were disappointed by this.
I have already covered most of the mechanics of “the second part of my toilet training“ in previous posts.
Because of the “urine training first method” my mother actually worked with me on the mechanics of urination first. She would have me sit on her lap for this. This would typically be done in an outdoor setting on a weekday while my sister was at school. If I hadn’t urinated in a while my mother would gently put her hand on my bladder area and apply a very slight pressure. (She knew how to do this safely because my doctor showed her the correct technique).If I started wiggling around she would tell me to put my hand on her stomach and she would tighten her stomach slightly and she would tell me to to the same thing. At this point I would wiggle more and she would tighten her stomach some more. Eventually my bladder would empty either into my diaper or into my underwear depending on what I was wearing. After I finished my mother would say things like “Good boy, Tommy you went pee-pee”. After this my mother would give me that day’s snack items (such as animal crackers,Fritos, or some potato chips) followed by some fruit juice. Based on how clearly I remember this I was probably somewhere in the three-and-a-half to the four-and-a-half age range. But I think I was closer to four. To me it didn’t really matter if I had a diaper on or not. It didn’t really matter to me what I was wearing. I eventually started doing this on the toilet with some encouragement from my mother but due to my lack of embarrassment at that age I was pretty much fine with going anywhere. My mother is pretty sure that when I was younger I didn’t really see much of a distinction between underwear and diapers so they both ended up being used quite a bit. She’s probably right about this. As long as I was sitting on either the ground or my mother’s lap my feet would usually stay dry so I didn’t really mind either way. For some reason having wet feet bothered me a lot (at least when I wasn’t in a bathtub or a kiddie pool). I think it‘s some kind of “sensory thing”.
I started kindergarten the next year at age five (almost six). I still wasn’t one hundred percent toilet trained, but I was maybe around ninety percent (at least during the day). This was enough to get me into kindergarten. I still had accidents pretty often in my first kindergarten class of the year. This would usually happen during story time. The teacher would sometimes read such fairy tales as “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”,”Repunzel”,and “Hansel and Gretel”. I found these stories to be pretty scary at that age to the point where I would sometimes “have an accident”. Sometimes after this happened one the kindergarteners would put his or her carpet square back in the spot that the teacher specified and notice that one of them was wet and comment that someone in the room was still a baby. After the teacher heard this she would check each student to find out who had the accident. After about three or four times of this I was transferred to a different kindergarten class diagonally across the hall with a slightly smaller class size and stories that were not scary. I think this class was still technically a regular class (but I’m not positive). Some time later following several wetting accidents during nap time and a sensory meltdown during a coloring activity it became obvious that this wasn’t working either. After that I went to my third and final kindergarten class with a class size of maybe five or six students. This class was part of the special education program. In there we mostly learned about calendars and such concepts as days,weeks,months,years,what the current year was, some basic colors (and their names), how to recognize a Guinea Pig (a Guinea Pig named Patches was the class pet), and how to count to ten.
The next year I started first grade. By then I was maybe up to ninety-five percent toilet trained (at least during the day). I stayed around that level having maybe one or two accidents a month in class (just like my classmates) and more than a few during recess for at least most of my time during elementary school. I only did this well because (due in part to the small class size) the teacher’s aide would usually notice if I was doing “the potty dance“ and suggest that I head to the boys room before I have an accident. In this fashion the number of accidents were greatly reduced. By about the beginning of fifth grade my daytime accidents had mostly stopped and I was sometimes waking up dry at night. By sixth grade my night-time accidents had mostly stopped aside from the occasional ones that happened when I was sick, unusually stressed out, or both. These things didn’t really embarrass me all that much at the time (even in third, fourth, or fifth grade) but sometimes they are embarrassing to look back on. I also learned how to use a computer when I was in those classes so it wasn’t a complete loss.
