Research Nerd

Yeah, ok, so... I'm a researcher.  (Whew, glad I got that random confession off my chest!  "Say what?" you're thinking...)

I'm a researcher.  Not in the searching for a way to cure cancer or product test-panel-y sort of way, or even the college paper-writing sort of way, but in the sense that if there is ANY question of how to do something best, or which {insert random product here} works best, or even the perennial favorite of "just how much is this kid of mine supposed to be eating???", I am instantly on the web, scouting out reviews and options and "highly touted" methods.  I think this "research mania" I suffer from is connected to my 8 years of collegiate study in two ways:

1.)  I'm stuck in that financial mentality that once obligated me to "get the most bang for my buck" (aka Ramen syndrome)

and, to a lesser extent,

2.)  Yeah, yeah, those paper thingies assigned in nearly every class EVER.

So, I'm a researcher.
Which is how my family came to be the proud owner of one of these:

Quite possibly the creepiest looking boy doll ever marketed to the paranoid parenting community.

Toilet Training in Less Than a Day (sounds too good to be true, right?) is a book my aunt loaned to me shortly after the birth of our son, along with Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (which I'm still on board with  ...I think).  I read it, I researched it, and I thought, yeah, this could work!  

Well, I still have no doubt that the methods behind it can work, but someone in the family, be it myself, my son or Potty Scotty himself was not quite ready to undertake the task at hand.  We'll try again in a few months.  In the meantime, every time my son sees the box that Scotty lives in up on the shelf, he asks about him, in that cute little 2 year-old voice and barely decipherable pronunciation.  When asked whether he would like to try potty training again, he immediately responds with a very abrupt "No!"  The thing I need to wrap my mind around is that sometimes, what works for us is going to be what works for us.  No researching, no polling, no worrying that I'm going to somehow scar my child for life because I introduced pears before green beans.  God gave us moms a certain intuition, and if we (I!) would just learn to trust it and act in love, our kids will thank us in the end.  Regardless of which "method" we end up going with (the Ramen syndrome in me desperately hopes Scotty will still be an asset in this endeavor), it's not going to matter exactly when my son is potty trained, and potty trained is potty trained.  He's not going to be 20, wishing to himself that his mother had gone a different route.

Of course, ...for boys, I hear shooting cheerios works pretty well too.