Healthy At Home

Potty Training

Are YOU really ready?

This is a very serious question: are YOU ready for your child to be potty trained. Like, really ready? Have you thought about all that it entails? Are you simply sick of changing dirty diapers (I hear ya!)? Are you sick of buying diapers (Also, I hear ya! I have been buying diapers for 7 years, and it would be nice to spend that moola somewhere else!).

Have you ever potty trained before? Did you love it? If you say yes, I will call you a liar to your face. Just kidding, I know that some people have these awesome children that pretty much potty train themselves, which is amazing. For most people, however, that is usually not the case.

Now, just to set the record straight, I am talking about potty training young children. You might have heard someone say, “Just wait until they are ready and then it is easy.” Well, I have never waited that long and I have found in life that I don’t like doing things the easy way. You think I would have learned my lesson sooner. I have four children and I potty trained them all before they turned 3. I potty trained two of them at 22 months. My youngest child is now 26 months and if I could do it over again I would wait and seriously wait for quite a while. I’m talking like potty train just before preschool starts.  If you’re interested I have some thoughts for you moms with little children.

Potty training can be traumatic for kids and for parents.

Here are some of my traumatic experiences for your reading pleasure. If you feel TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read), go ahead and skip past them. There is some more advice afterward.

Traumatic Story 1

I went all in with Logan. He was my first and I wanted to prove to myself that I could potty train in three days and make sure that he was potty trained through the night. He was a great sleeper and usually woke up happy and babbled to himself for quite a while before I would go in and get him. Well, one morning during our crash course in potty training, my cute little Logan woke up crying. I rushed into his room and was met with an overwhelming smell wall of poo, number 2, pooper dooper, poop. There was poop literally everywhere! It was all over him, the crib, the sheets of course and he was traumatized and so was I.

Traumatic Story 2

The first time I potty trained my third child, my daughter, Jilli she was doing amazing! I thought to myself, “My goodness girls are just the best and so easy!” Haha, she sure showed me how wrong I was! Jilli figured out that drinking liquids made her need to go potty so every time we offered her a sip of apple juice or Capri Sun she would pretend to take a little sip and then run off to some distraction. After several hours of assuming that she had been drinking and wondering why she hadn’t peed we realized that something was up. We took stock of how much she had actually drank and realized she hadn’t so much as drank half a pouch of Capri Sun. Pretty soon she was exhausted and not feeling well. She fell asleep at 5PM that night and woke up dry. I felt terrible because that morning made me realize how dehydrated and traumatizing that experience was for her.

Follow up to Traumatic stories 1 and 2

I tried again with both of them a few months after my initial attempt and they picked up on it right away and we never looked back. (haha, or did we?)

Traumatic Story 3

Nikko was 22 months when I potty trained him and he picked it right up. It took him a little longer to figure out that he needed to poop in the potty too. He pooped on the floor 3 times and on the third time he picked up and handed me his poop. I, not paying close attention to what was truly happening let him place it directly in the palm of my hand. That’s right, my child handed me his poop and I reached out and took it! Luckily he finished in the toilet and he has never again had a poop accident. I know this sounds like a success story but I would like to remind you that my child HANDED ME HIS POOP!

Traumatic Story 4

I know most of you have experienced this. My fourth child, Ezra, HATED having his diaper changed. It was extremely frustrating to try to clean up a poopy diaper while he screamed, cried and tried to escape. More often than I can say, poop ended up in places I did not care to have it (on me, carpet, furniture, clothes… ARGHHH!). I was fed up, so I decided to potty train at 22 months. He picked up on it pretty well. However, he is now 26 months and while most days he ends up with a dribble of pee in his underwear most weeks include at least one day with multiple full pee-pee accidents. It is difficult to have him watched by someone and have to tell them to ask him frequently if he needs to go potty; especially since I know that he will most likely say, “No!” in the middle of soaking his shorts. Also, on two separate occasions, when in time-out as punishment for something unrelated to potty training, he watered the carpet, and I suspect it was just to punish me right back. While not especially traumatizing this is the reason why I said at the beginning that I wish I had not potty trained him as early as I did.

If TL;DR, pick up here:

Something to prepare yourself for is that your child could be completely potty trained and all of sudden, months later they are sick of it and start peeing their pants and they couldn’t care less. Good news and bad news: the good news is you don’t have to fully potty train them again! The bad news is that you do need to do a refresher course, which can be frustrating.

Before you decide to potty train I would suggest you think about the pro’s and con’s beforehand and decide what fits your lifestyle best. Here’s a list to think about.

Pros:

·      No more changing poopy diapers! This really is amazing.

·      MONEY, MONEY, MONEY! (who doesn’t like saving money?)

·      If your baby get diaper rash easily, guess when you get rid of the diaper, you also get rid of the diaper rash

·      If you’re child hates their diaper being changed you eliminate that hassle

·      If you’re child sticks their hands down their pants or takes off their own poopy diaper you also eliminate that

·      They feel like a big kid and are usually excited to try

·      Most preschools require children to be potty trained

·      Clothes just look cuter on them

·      2 year olds in undies might be the cutest thing ever

Cons:

·      Before you go anywhere you have to make sure to take them potty

·      Are you prepared to take your kids potty when there isn’t a toilet around because this will happen.

·      You are shopping at Costco and your child tells you they have to go potty. You look around and realize you couldn’t be any farther from the toilette. You need to drop what you are doing, speed walk a quarter mile, while weaving in and out of the carts parked at odd angles, and having no time to express your frustration with a slight glare in the cart-parkers direction as they slowly savor their bean burrito samples. Halfway there: bad news… Little kids have a hard time holding their pee in. When they tell you they have to go to potty it pretty much means right now.

·      If you get them in trouble and put them in timeout, they are smart and they will show you who the boss is and pee their pants. Haha, who’s the fool now?

o   Follow up: The best way to help guide a child in potty training is with positive reinforcement. Celebrate success and don’t get them in trouble for accidents, because these really are accidents. Also, as I said, they can turn it into a weapon. It can be kind of hard to keep your cool when you are folding your third load of laundry for the day and your child exclaims, “Uh, oh!” While lying on your bed. I know I want to get them in trouble faster than I can say, “Load of sheets plus a comforter!”

·      If you have more than one kid, and they are close in age, you have to take them all potty or at least all of them to the bathroom. That’s not fun.

·      If you potty train a 2 year old they simply have a hard time pulling up their own pants so they run around naked all the time. (Con or just life?)

There are many experts that can tell you how to potty train efficiently and effectively. In a future post I will tell you what has worked for me, after all the trauma. My goal here was to hopefully give you more of an understanding on what you are getting yourself in to. Don’t compare yourself to other mothers around you who have all potty trained their kids at young ages. Look at your situation and decide what is a good fit for you and for your child. Don’t compare yourself because you are doing what is best for your family and that means you are a good mom.  One day all of your children will be out of diapers and that will be an amazing day. But who knows, maybe it will be a sad day because you are leaving that crazy stage of life. Be prepared that potty training might take a little longer then expected, be kind to your children and to yourself, and try your best to enjoy every stage of life.