My friend Juliette successfully trained her toddler at age two years and one week old. I enjoyed hearing the story as it progressed and was inspired by it as well. I asked her to write a guest post for MaternityShare so that other families could be inspired as well. Around our house we started potty training Will a little differently and it was going very well but we let ourselves get interrupted by travel and a household move. One day I will blog about our potty adventures as well. In the meantime please enjoy Juliette’s fun tale:
A funny thing happened around our house lately and by “funny” I mean awesome. My toddler got potty trained. I say he “got” potty trained because, frankly, I feel like I had very little to do with the process. In fact I had braced myself to the idea of him being much older before he was ready to use the potty, he being a boy and all. Also, he didn’t seem bothered in the least by the fact that he was sitting in his own mess and didn’t think twice about making puddles on the floor when he was rocking his birthday suit at home. (Which was often) But a week after his second birthday he pooped in the potty, excitedly compared it to a hot dog and we never looked back.
Oh, what joy …. no more diapers! Sure there were accidents and lots of comparisons to hot dogs and I only recently had the portable potty surgically removed from my hand. I still have about 12 seconds to find a bathroom when little man announces: “I wanna poop!” But, did I mention? No more diapers!
A lot of my friends are now starting to think about potty training and I keep getting asked: how? So, as if I’m in the position to be giving any advice, here is my rough breakdown of our “strategy”:
Prepare Our prep work stemmed from the fact that we don’t have a whole lot of boundaries around our house, so lots of open door bathroom trips, bathroom talk and nudie play time (Um, him not us) were the norm.
Tasty rewards Do I really need to elaborate? Bribery rules.
Create opportunities for success We spent the first two days at home, naked. (Again, him not us) He got the hang of using the potty, and I got a feel for his elimination rhythms.
Get messy We ditched the diapers cold turkey. (Night-time excluded) I wanted him to know when he had an accident, how else would he learn? Was it messy? Yeah. Did we have to pay attention? Yeah. But in the end, I think it cut down on training time. And made sure we were …
Diligent While we were out I would make the poor little bugger sit and pee every hour. Excessive, yes, but it allowed for us to avoid many accidents and, I think, reinforced the idea that pee goes in the potty.
Mistakes happen. Well yeah, he’s two! There were and still are accidents. Mostly when he’s having too much fun playing to remember to go. Sometimes he wakes up wet in the morning. It happens, whatever.
Above all I tried to keep things positive and focused on the pride he felt for himself. I avoided at all costs using words that made it sound like he was going potty for me. Words like “have to “ or “please” or “Can you go for mommy?” I also never made him feel ashamed for having an accident. That would be so sad. But I never said it was Ok either. Most of all, I try to make potty time wicked fun. Stories, silly songs and I did mention comparisons to hot dogs, right?
