As a new mom, I had anxiety about pretty much everything. While I was pregnant my main source of vexation was childbirth, “How is this thing supposed to get out of me again?”. After I gave birth that anxiety shifted to breastfeeding, “What if we just can’t do it?” and after we made it out of the first year unscathed my focus shifted to potty training. “She’s got a pretty good set up now. She does her business and her slaves clean her and remove all evidence of what happened. Why would she willingly give that up?” Luckily, after a while, I got so sick of buying and changing diapers that I was willing to do anything to get her out of diapers. That desperation leads to my husband and I declaring that the $30 box of diapers we bought earlier this month would be the last, by any means. This started our hardcore potty training and two weeks later our daughter is 80% potty trained!
There are many ways to potty train your child, all come with their own challenges, but we decided to go at it head on, no helmet or safety net. We went with the bare bottom method. From what I’ve read and heard in conversations with other moms my age, this is the most popular way to potty train now. It’s quick and dirty, literally. I think this method appeals to millennial moms because of the speed. You know we move on from things quickly and crave instant gratification like no other. According to many sites on the web, if you really put your mind to it you can get potty training done in 3 days. The basic concept is, you let your kid run around without a diaper and do 2 things: let them see that nothing will catch their excreta so learn that they need to use the potty and you learn their ‘tells’ so you can get them to the potty before they have an accident. My husband and I work full time, on opposite schedules, so we weren’t able to get this done at top speed. After a few modifications, we were able to get her down to one accident during the day and 1 diaper change during the night.
I titled this post potty training for rebels mainly because my mom was totally against our method. She and a lot of moms of her generation find it odd not to use pull-ups or training pants for days in order to ‘rush’ the process along. Honestly, I think if I would have done it any other way we would just be buying pull-ups instead of diapers with no real progress. Our way was very successful for us, so I’ll detail everything we did, and feel free to make tweaks for your own situation. There really isn’t a right or wrong way to do this.
How we Potty Trained
Prior to these last two weeks, we had introduced my daughter to the potty but with no success. Our past failure was mostly our fault as parents for not being consistent or confident enough to keep pushing. A few months before her second birthday she started showing signs that she was potty ready so we got her to use it a few times but it never really stuck. Because of this she was already familiar with the concept of using the potty when we started our serious potty training two weeks ago.
I started by letting her be diaperless from the time I got home until the time we went to bed each night. Obviously, in the beginning, there will be accidents so it’s best to do this on hard floor, or at least have a good carpet cleaner and towels on hand. During our first week, there were two big accidents of note. While sitting in her bed bare bottom, she got up spread her legs to pee on the floor then looked around, confused. On the second she stood up in our bed, did something like the downward-facing dog pose, and peed in my bed, much to my horror. On both occasions, I fought back screams (even though I kind of lost it after the bed thing), and had a simple conversation with her. “No, no no pee on the floor. You have to pee-pee in the potty next time. Okay? Pee-pee on the floor is bad!” She quickly learned the urinating on the floor would get a bad reaction but going on the potty would get endless praises, singing, and dancing! In the beginning, she would ‘hold out’ on us a lot. Meaning she would go just enough to relieve some pressure in her bladder but wait until we put the bedtime or nap time diaper on her to empty her bladder. She quickly got over that after we started increasing the amount of time she spent diaperless.
What’s next
For the most part we have daytime accidents behind us. Our toddler hates holding in even a little bit of urine at this point. Our next challenge will be getting her to go #2 on the potty. Oddly enough, during our first week of training she did successfully do #2, which was met with cheering and a potty parade. But since then she absolutely will not! She holds it in until the last possible moment, ponders using the potty and ultimately brings me a diaper or pull up to put on her. She then hides in a corner to does her business, sometimes while covering her eyes. It is my assumption that this will go away with time so I am not actively pressuring her to use the potty yet. We are currently in the balancing act of making the potty accessible and fun new habit, not a scary requirement. After this, or perhaps simultaneously, we will need to get her night trained. Occasionally she does wake up on her own to use the bathroom during the night and she has had a night or two where she had no accidents. I was super stoked about these nights but I think they were just a stroke of luck. One night she will be dry and the next she will soak through every pull-up we put on. I’ve really been enjoying my nights of uninterrupted sleep so my plan of action is to see what she can do naturally before I step in with my own nighttime wake schedule. So far potty training has been a gratifying journey. I hope that within the next few weeks we can boost that 80% up to a strong 95%