out of the mouths of babes

It's been a somewhat trying week. A bit stressful at work. Busy at home. Trying to toilet train a 3 year old and trying to teach him to eat dinner. But as always, there are moments when you cannot help but laugh.

All the articles and books you read say you must teach a child about their body, using the correct terminology and not use nicknames for things. So a conversation overheard between my husband and son:

D: When you are a big boy, you go pee and poo on the toilet.
T: I wearing my underpants now. (His "Cars" underpants that we chose together at the store)
The pee pee comes down my penis and goes into my underpants.
D: Well, when the pee pee comes down, you can go to the toilet and the pee pee can go in the toilet.

T is unimpressed with everything we have tried so far - will go on the toilet when it suits him, especially when the bribes are good (ie chocolate eggs, gummy bears)

A few nights ago, T decided to wear his "Cars" underpants to bed and could not be persuaded into a diaper. We reminded him that he would have to get up and go pee in the toilet because he was wearing underpants. Of course, in the middle of the night, he woke up screaming for mummy - he was soaking wet, the bed was soaking wet and his blankie was soaking wet. I managed to change him top to bottom and he came to sleep with us. The problem was his wet blankie which he refused to give up - so D and I were trying to keep most of it out of our bed and still allow T to go to sleep with a tiny corner of it.

We're also trying to teach T to be more adventureous with food. He won't eat anything he doesn't like, not even try a bite which is very limiting (no meat, few vegetables, no potatoes, rice, pasta) so lately we've been trying bribes - if you eat some of your dinner, you can have ice cream for dessert. No dinner, no ice cream. So Saturday, he didn't eat dinner. D did so he got ice cream with chocolate sauce. T got down from the table and ran around for a bit but finally couldn't take it anymore and sidled up to D and said "you can give me a taste". He didn't get mad when we kept going over the rule but he got creative. He opened his mouth wide and said "my mouth is open, you can put the ice cream in". He did it again last night when he didn't eat his dinner (don't like it!) which prompts the same response "you didn't even try it". He didn't hover around the ice cream for as long but opened his mouth wide and brought our attention to it. D and I were laughing so hard while trying not to show it to T!