Potty Training, Day Nine

Potty training is a touchy subject. Parents who have chosen to wait longer before beginning to potty train their kids can go straight into defense mode when the subject comes up. Parents who have had raging success with potty training before age 2 can dismiss the real struggle that some kids and parents have. Let me be clear upfront: When to Potty Train Your Kid is not an issue of morality. If you’ve picked a different timeline than I have, I’m not judging you.

My goal in writing this is just to share my story. This is Potty Training 3.0. It looks a lot different from the 1.0 and 2.0 versions.

Feel free to use my story as a point of reference for the beginning of your own Potty Training Story, take comfort in commiserating with me on it, or simply roll your eyes at me for writing sooo manyyyy wordssss about tiny people’s #1 and #2. Reader’s choice.

First Time

With my oldest, I waited until she was 3-and-a-few-months to potty train her. My main motivation was that I was ready to sign her up for preschool, and both of the programs I was considering required that kids in the 3-year-old class be fully potty trained and independent in the bathroom. Well, then.

I did it cold turkey style with her. One morning, we took off her diaper, and we never put one back on again. I didn’t buy pull-ups. We had a few days of naked bottom, perhaps an interval of dressed but commando, and soon she was in undies. She was potty trained in literally three days. She had one accident in the middle of the night, one accident first thing in the morning after the next night, and then basically never again. Since then, she’s proven to be excellent at “holding it,” which is both a blessing and a curse, depending on which “number” you’re talking about. On the #1 side, overnight potty training came so easily right alongside daytime potty training, and it was all just done so quickly. My fretting about preschool was replaced with confidence, and I was like, “I should have done this a year ago.”

There were two main reasons I hadn’t done it “a year ago.” First and foremost, the circle of moms I knew were either silent on the subject or vocal about “waiting till she’s ready.” She did show some signs of readiness the year before: she LOVED public restrooms. There was a day we went to the zoo and she kept her diaper dry all five hours we were there, because she wanted to “try” in every single restroom we passed, and successfully peed at enough of them to do the job. It was tedious for me, of course, and I also had an infant with me, so I wasn’t terribly keen on making that system the norm yet. To solidify my own reluctance to jump into potty training, I had my second reason, my “excuse”: We were living with my parents at the time, and I didn’t want her to be having accidents all over their carpet. So I waited.

Umm, as for the #2 department, I’ll spare you every detail, but the gist is that Miryam hated to go poop. She could figure it out with the diaper on (although not entirely without issue), but once the diaper was gone, she started only going #2 once a week. Poop Day was on Fridays. Her attitude Wednesday through Friday morning was unpleasant, to put it mildly. Miralax, “café con leche” (I literally gave my 3-year-old coffee to help her go poop 🤦‍♀️), minutes upon minutes upon minutessssss of sitting on the potty. Finally, she would be able to hold it no longer, and then we all had a nice weekend!

I’ll never know if this particular struggle was caused by, exacerbated by, or entirely independent of When I Potty Trained Miryam. 🤷‍♀️ (Maybe it had more to do with the fact that I did not buy her a little potty, just the potty topper to make the seat of a regular toilet less gaping for a toddler, but her feet were still a-dangling. Since she was big and coordinated enough to not fall off in this arrangement, the little potty chair seemed like an unnecessary germ magnet, so I forwent it.)

Second Time

I decided to try potty training with Luke at a much younger age (just before he turned two). You can read about my reasoning for that, and how our first day of that went, here. And you can read about how it took forever to “get there” with him (almost a year, oh dear), but eventually we got there, still younger than Miryam was on her first day of potty training, here. In other words, my second experience with potty training was drastically different than my first.

I did get a little potty this time. Luke was just so small. I imagined him climbing up the step stool and onto the big potty and then falling and hitting his head on the adjacent bathtub. Yikes. Also, his enthusiasm for potties, which prompted me to try so young with him in the first place, was sparked by the little potty at my mother-in-law’s, so I wanted to keep that momentum going.

As a follow-up fun tidbit, though, I will add that potty training Luke brought just enough of an element of competition into the bathroom to cure Miryam of her aforementioned once-a-week #2-ing! I literally do not know what we would have done with that girl if it hadn’t. That wasn’t the plan, of course—how could we have known?—but it was a huge relief of a side effect, and, in retrospect, it justifies all of the puddles and laundry of Luke’s Long Journey to Potty Trained. So, yay for that!

Third Time

You may have noted from the linked posts about our experience with Luke that I had sworn not to mention potty training with our third kid until she was two-and-a-half. And you may know, also, that our third kid just turned two a few weeks ago. So there should be no Potty Training 3.0 yet, right?

Well.

Back in the early summer, when she was a mere 22 months old, she started being excited about the potty. She wanted to sit on it at every diaper change. She would sit for a few seconds, often push out a tiny fart, get a piece of toilet paper, pretend to wipe, and then happily go get her diaper back on. Three times she actually peed during one of her sits! I found myself contemplating potty training her soon. Like, maybe next week? It’s the magic window of readiness! But I was also first trimester pregnant (read: nauseous and so very tired). (Did you know that yet? Well, now you know. Due in December!) It was not a magic window for me, because, admittedly, the first little bit of potty training (and perhaps much more of it than that as well) is a lot of work for the attending parent. AND we had a long family-visiting road trip planned for about a month later, and I desperately did not want to be still in the tons-of-accidents / hyper-vigilance-required phase while traveling.

So I chatted with Justin and we came up with a plan: “We will attempt potty training with Cecily in August, and if it doesn’t go well, we’ll abandon ship and forget about it until next Spring, when the new baby is not a newborn anymore.” August. After the other kids have gone back to school, so my attention will be less divided. During my second trimester, when I have both the energy and the will to do things outside the realm of “strictly necessary.” Before the other big, looming transition of moving Cecily’s bed into the big kids’ room to free up the nursery for the new baby. (I refuse to demote The Playroom back to A Bedroom at this point in our lives.)

It’s September now, of course, but last week was still August. I went to Target and bought a little potty and a big bag of m&m’s. (We’d thrown out Luke’s little potty sometime before moving. It wasn’t worth moving and storing in the condition it was in by the time he was done with it.) (I’m firmly in camp Use a Little Potty nowadays. For leg angle/foot support for #2, and for generally encouraging independence for a very small kid—Cecily is a 10th-percentile-sized barely-two-year-old.) (I’m also all for the positive reinforcement. Hence, tiny candies. The number you go is the number of m&m’s you get. Siblings who are home at the time also get to partake with you, which has the twofold effect of both curtailing their jealousy of the reward and fostering their enthusiasm for the tedious process.)

The first day-and-a-half, a few things became clear:

1. She was capable of “holding it” for a long time.
2. She didn’t know how to release pee at will.
3. She liked privacy.

Regarding point 1: Opposite of the first day with Luke, which involved mopping up so many pee puddles that I stopped counting them, Cecily was only peeing one time in between the morning diaper coming off and the nap time diaper going on, and likewise between nap diaper and bedtime diaper. I was giving her juice, water, milk, pedialyte we happened to have in the fridge, hoping to give her more chances to “practice,” but she was a champ at holding it. I was a little flustered. As each minute ticked by—dry—I knew a puddle was imminent. I wanted her to go try. She spent a lot of time sitting on the little potty those first two days. But she wasn’t puddling all over the floor, so, Okay. 

Regarding point 2: In spite of all her potty-sitting time, she just couldn’t seem to go, even when I knew her tiny bladder must be full. We brought toys and music and FaceTime with grandparents into the bathroom with the little potty, hoping to distract her enough to let her stop holding it, so she could learn the sensation that way (since she wasn’t making a multitude of puddles I could point out and say “Let’s do that in the potty instead”). We had little success with this. She just couldn’t release it at will.

Back to point 1: The first few “accidents” (in quotations because she’s obviously so new at this, I can hardly call it a mistake on her part; more of a learning moment) were spread over a few days and mostly happened while she was sitting at the table eating. While distracted from continuing to hold it, I assume. But even those times, I had her go sit on the little potty immediately after the accident, and she was able to put more pee in it relatively quickly. So! She was noticing she had started to pee, and was stopping it mid-flow! I think this helped her identify what I meant when I said “go pee,” “let it out,” “push out your pee,” etc. Being a toddler must be hard, y’all.

And regarding point 3: Within half an hour of the little potty being unboxed, she successfully went #2 in it. I showed her the potty, put it in the bathroom, asked if she wanted to sit on it, and then left her in the bathroom alone. She came to find me and voila! There was poop in there! Then began the mind-boggling holding-it of the pee (and temporarily no more poop) for the next 36 hours. It took a new toy—a late birthday gift from a friend that happened to arrive so opportunely on the second day of potty training—accompanying her to the bathroom without any siblings encouraging her in pursuit of m&m’s, or mommy singing, or anything else that helped her chill out and go. I suppose this was on the distraction-from-holding-it wavelength, and it finally clicked for me that privacy was a key for her.

Now, just over a week into this gig, I consistently leave her alone in the bathroom (and make her siblings leave her alone too, lest the bathroom become as cluttered with “fun stuff” as the Playroom is) and she consistently goes pee upon my prompting. And she’s not getting constipated. 🙌🏻 There have been more potty poops than naptime diaper poops. And we can take Luke to school drop off, or go to the grocery store for the full weekly trip, and she’s happy to pee in the potty before and after, with no drops while we’re out. We’re not using pull-ups except for when she goes into childcare for my moms group meetings (for the convenience of the volunteer childcare workers), and this morning she kept her pull-up dry the whole time and had a nice big pee in the potty at home afterward. She’s been to church commando with success. She is even giving clear signals that it’s time to go and able to hold it in those instances till we get her onto the potty, when I haven’t already prompted her before it’s time.

There are still some occasional wet shorts and socks. But she’s coming straight to me to get cleaned up and finishing on the potty afterward. My mind is blown. Bottom line, I am SO IMPRESSED with this girl!

Perhaps there is truth in the adage that girls potty train more easily (slash successfully at a younger age) than boys. Or maybe Cecily is just an amazing kid, lol! But do you see what I’m saying? That potty training can be so different for different kids, even within the same family. It can be really stressful. And it can be a little bit fun, if you happen to have an adorable, tiny champ like my Cecily. 😉 Hopefully the novelty won’t wear off. She seems like she was legitimately ready for this promotion. Time will tell!

Tell me in the comments below: a potty training horror story, or a potty training success story!