Poo = Chocolate

Plop, plop, plop!

One of the keys to encouraging employees to learn new skills and become more productive members of your workforce is a reward structure tailored to individual preferences. As it is in corporate life, so to in toilet-training. The Big Fella likes to eat – hence a reward structure based on food. Not just any food, but the king of foods – chocolate!

“Plop, plop, plop!” he exclaims as he wriggles off the toilet. The Big Fella looks down into the bowl to examine his handiwork, and then looks up at me and declares “Three chocolates!” I can’t fault his logic, as sure enough, there are three more than satisfactory stools floating about in the water.

Apart from weeing his pants when tired or excited or distracted, The Big Fella has certainly got the hang of poo. It seems to be a matter of some satisfaction to him that he can now wee and poo like the rest of us, and not in a nappy.

It’s only been about six weeks from his first trial and error attempts to now being almost completely toilet trained. He began with long sits on the toilet with nothing much happening. It was a week until the first wee arrived, much to everyone's excitement. Chocolate was initially for wees, but once he got the knack of that we swapped to poos. There followed several weeks where for every one poo in the toilet we’d be cleaning up two poos in his underpants. But once he knew that satisfying ‘plop, plop, plop’ echoing in the toilet bowl equalled chocolate, there was no stopping him.

I now think he poos nearly as much as I do, even though he’s only one-third my height and one-sixth of my body weight. An intriguing phenomenon – and I’m not sure that science has an answer. Sure, he eats quite a lot – but looking at the size of his stomach compared to mine, be buggered if I can work out how he squeezes it all in. It must be under incredible pressure. Let’s hope he never explodes.