This potty training thing is no joke.
I had heard from multiple trusted sources that I shouldn't potty train until I knew Baby was ready. So I waited and waited for a Sign that Baby was ready. I'm not sure what sign I was waiting for, specifically. Maybe something like, I don't know, Baby climbing on the toilet and using it?
Then, after Baby turned three and he became the only child in my acquaintance who was not potty trained, I started tentatively asking him, "so, Baby, do you want to try the big-boy toilet today?"
"No. No fanks," was his reply, always.
Baby's not really much sold on the big-boy thing. It's more effective to replace "big-boy" with "rocket." Turns out, Baby was slightly more interested in trying the rocket toilet than the big-boy toilet (or the rocket underwear, rocket toilet paper, whatever).
I'm really only on the potty training wagon now because of peer pressure. Diapers are convenient. Stick Baby in a diaper under his snow suit, and send him out to play for hours. Do you know how hard it is to convince a three-year-old to strip out of his snow pants to use the toilet? Diapers are a pain to carry around, but guess what, so is a plastic bag, a dry pair of pants, and a map of the city with post-its on the public restrooms.
But I am determined for whatever reason to get this child going on the toilet like the rest of America. We are potty training with a vengeance. After doing a bunch of reading on the subject (sheesh, there's a whole cottage industry built around potty training), I've decided to employ a number of methods at the same time:
threats ("if you wet your pants, you lose them for the rest of the day"),
bribes (movies, candy, popcorn, multivitamins, toys, books, what haven't I offered this child?),
songs (a certain song about fish worked for a while but now we've moved on to "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Five Little Ducks."),
dances (erm, don't ask about this one), and
Pavlovian psychology (at some point, I should un-train Baby from peeing every time someone says, "ready, set, blastoff,").
And I'm probably doing something horrible to Baby's psycho-social-whatever with this mish-mash of mish-mash. But now that Baby is very, very old, I think he can handle it.
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3 comments:
I bless you with patience..... and "Baby" with the desire to blast off all day long in the potty and not land in his pants.
Now I don't think I'll ever be able to watch a rocket launch, or even hear about one, without snickering and thinking of this little guy.
Good luck to you both!
Just so you don't feel quite as pressured, so far three out of four of the potty-trained children at my house were trained by the "Four-Year-Olds Don't Wear Diapers" method. Yeah, I made it up myself. It wasn't worth the fights, bribes, or my sanity to potty train before they were ready, so we totally went the convenient way of diapers. Until their 4th birthdays at which time all their diapers disappeared. One has had bedwetting problems but I think that has nothing to do with age of potty training and more to do with size of bladder and how deeply he sleeps. And I can pretty much count the times on one hand (okay, for each child) that we had accidents after that. My own mother teased me a bit, but hey -- I was not nearly so stressed. And that works for me.
Good luck!
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