Potty training and spanking. I noticed a new connection today.

Natasha is currently uninterested as she’s been her entire short life. I’m only slightly more interested, so neither of us is really focused on the whole “potty-training” thing (You’ve heard, I’m sure, that potty training is as much or more about the parents’ training as the child’s? It’s true.).

The obvious reason I’ve always seen for kids to be uninterested is that it involves stopping what you’re enjoying to do the needful. And who is ever interested in that?

A few weeks ago, Jay and I got out the cloth diapers again, thinking that Natasha may be more interested in learning if she had “uncomfortable” as a motivator, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. She never cared if she was wet when she was younger, and she doesn’t care now. The one change I’ve noticed (and it’s mine) is that I have to stop what I’m doing more frequently in order to change her.

That’s the one thing that I think will come out of this revisiting cloth diapers: it’ll force the retraining of me. These girls can literally go hours in one disposable (they prefer it that way too), but no matter how frequently we change the cloth (and the most frequent we’ve gone is every 30-minutes) they’re always wet. So I at least am having to get used to regular interruptions. And they are too. Resistantly right now.

The bell rings when some short person makes the connection that these interruption are going to to happen no matter what, and maybe the toilet isn’t much different of an inconvenience.

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Now spankings.

I can see spankings being a good deal more effective once a kid is out of diapers, but before then I may eventually decide a mixing spoon would be a useful tool for this stage.

Spanking has a very appropriate place in our family (can you imagine a time-out for continually getting out of bed?). But what I have noticed is that I can’t hit nearly hard enough to actually make a child uncomfortable through her diaper. So sometimes I think we’re all just rolling our eyes together and saying, “Yup, Mom really means it this time.”