When does your baby become a little boy or little girl? Is it when they first eat solid food? When they can walk? Talk? Or is it when they first go to school?
All these are important milestones. We've all got our stories and memories about our children's "first times".
My baby became a little boy when we toilet-trained him. Babies wear diapers; boys don't. Simple.
Simple? Toilet training? Yeah, right. In fact toilet training was probably the part of parenting I'd been most dreading since the first full night's sleep.
When to start the training was our choice. A bit of research suggested the right time was when he could understand and act on simple instructions. He was about two years and three months. when we started.
Even the lead-up was worrying. So many decisions and preparations had to be made. When could we put aside a whole weekend for training? Two weeks from now. Potty or toilet seat? Toilet seat. What design should be on the seat? Giraffes (they were on special offer). How many pairs of underwear do we need? Lots. What design should be on the underwear? What colours would he like? What should we do with our floor rugs? Do we have enough bleach? Some questions were obviously more important than others.
There were also new terms to be learned by both us and him. What words should we use that would be acceptable for a child? We settled on "wee-wee" and "poo-poo", which I found quite unnatural (having spent the last two-and-a-bit years consciously avoiding "baby speak" and trying to talk to him like I would an adult friend) but which he took to with little fuss, like so many other new words he absorbed every day.