behind every successful man...

abraham lincoln led our nation through our greatest internal crisis and ultimately abolished slavery...

winston churchill's determination and courage inspired the world to defy a tyranny...

martin luther king jr. left a legacy of hope and motivated us all toward respect and equality...

william wilberforce devoted his life to ending the slave trade in england...

christopher columbus bravely defied the modern knowledge of a flat world and set sail...

what do these brilliant men have in common?

behind every successful man...

...is the mom who potty trained him.

some people lead nations. some discover cures for disease. some win the nobel peace prize. some perform life saving surgeries on microscopic sections of the human brain.

and some people potty train.

it ain't for sissies.

so let me just say, that bennett, my precious little happy-go-lucky middle child is officially potty trained.

this was no small feat. in retrospect, it seems almost easy. and very quick. and in a lot of ways it was. (that's what happens when you wait until your child is almost 3.)

but in other ways...

i mean, how do you convince a toddler to completely change the way he has been doing something? take away the convenient for the not-so-convenient. convince him that this new way is actually better in the long run and it may take a little work but it is so worth it for him? we are going to take away the comfortable and the easy, for the new and unknown.

yeah, 2 (almost 3) year-olds don't grasp this concept.

but then again, do any of us?

while pleading and begging and bribing and borderline threatening bennett and thinking to myself that seriously, why doesn't he get this it is so obvious... i had an image of what it must be like for God to try to talk to me. convince me of what he has in store for my life. interesting correlation, my spiritual life and my son's bathroom habits, but hey, that's kind of lessons you get around here.

can a parallel be drawn between potty training and following God? why yes, i think it can...

and now that we have conquered potty training, i pray that someday, my son can be known for a far nobler cause in life, similar to those leaders listed above who have altered the course of history.

today, potty training. tomorrow the world!