Wade told me next Halloween he’s going as, “Naked Boy!” Then he wiggled his bare bottom at me as he said, “Trick-or-treat!”
I guess that will make costume shopping easy come next October.
Wade regularly wakes up in the morning wearing only his night-time training pants, his pajamas discarded at the foot of the bed.
One afternoon he emerged from his bedroom after nap time wearing nothing but what God gave him. Wade streaked through the living room just as David walked in the door from school. What a welcome home!
“Did you take all your clothes off before you went to sleep or after you woke up?”
“I don’t know.”
The spot where he wet the bed in his sleep reveled the answer.
“I don’t care if you take your clothes off in bed, but you must leave your training pants on. Do you understand?”
He didn’t understand, because Wade woke up naked and groggy at 3 a.m. the other day. “Mommie, I went potty,” Wade said as he stumbled into my bedroom shivering. All his clothes were on the floor and there was another wet spot on his sheet.
Wade’s naked phase began when we got serious about potty training. Once he figured out how to take his pants off he wanted them off all the time.
Potty training is a God awful, thankless job. It’s the worst, hardest parenting job you will ever do. No one tells you about it when you’re beaming and starry-eyed holding your squishy, sweet-smelling newborn. They just smile at you, those experienced parents, all the while thinking, “Sucker! Just wait…”
Toilet training is frustrating because there really isn’t anything you can do about it. They pee and poop where and when they want. You can make them sit on the potty chair in the living room for an entire episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse with no outcome. Then the second you pull their pants up they decide to cause a flood.
And the mess! 99 percent of potty training is you washing, scrubbing, steaming, or wiping something clean.
It’s good physical exercise though.
Like when you’ve just buckled them into their carseat after leaving the grocery store and they say, “Mommy, I need to go potty.”
“Why didn’t you tell me five minutes ago when we were inside the store?!”
You consider telling them to just go in their Pull Up, but this is the first time they’ve actually told you they needed to go. And you don’t want to reinforce a bad habit. You don’t want them to have an accident either, so you tear them out of the car seat and run as fast as you can back into the store like they’re on fire and there’s a swimming pool inside.
Sprinting to the bathroom you leap over the old lady in the electric cart, shove aside and empty shopping cart and stumble into the first available bathroom stall. You yank down their pants, fling them on the toilet then…
Nothing.
“I though you had to go potty?”
“No.”
“Well, try.”
“I can’t get anything out.”
Ugh!
Back in the car on the way home and nowhere near a bathroom a little voice says…
“Mommy?”
“What?”
“I have to go potty.”
Wade is almost three and three-quarters. I feel the others judge me when they realize he still wears Pull Ups. Clearly I’m an unfit parent because my son refuses to cooperate with potty training. Somebody call CPS!
I’ve tried all the methods. The one-day, the three-day. The cold-turkey-put-them-in-underwear. The sit-them-on-the-toilet-every-15-minutes. I’ve bribed him with just about everything it’s legal to bribe a three-year-old with. I’ve taken the let-him-lead approach, giving him weeks at a time without even mentioning it to let him decide to do it on his own.
Nothing works.
I mean, I can’t even get him to keep his nighttime training pants on for heaven’s sake!
The truth is potty training is turning me into a lunatic. I don’t know how much more I can take before I’m curled up in the corner in a fetal position, rocking back and forth in some sort of frustration induced trance, wearing a diaper myself.
So help me.
HELP ME!
Tell me your best potty training secrets. Please.
Or get me a prescription for Zoloft.
I just found your blog and I’m glad I did! It’s awesome.
I’m just starting to get my toddler in the swing of potty training. He’s 18 months, but seems like he’s really ready for it! I’m still trying to figure out different methods to train him, but so far I’m just taking baby steps. I’m a Pull-Ups mom, so we’ve been using Pull-Ups this month to reinforce the “going to the potty” and not in the diaper, and so far it’s not working… but I’m not giving up just yet. My older sister is a child psychologist, so you would THINK that she would have this secret method for doing it, but… she doesn’t. Her daughter was potty trained the summer before she turned 4 years old in October! She said it just happened one day. She had been training her for years and nothing worked, and then one day it just clicked. I know that’s not the case for all kids, but if you feel like you’ve tried everything, just hang in there and give it some time. Don’t worry about what other moms might think about you. Just do what you can and hopefully he’ll get it.
I think you’re right. There’s no secret. It just takes time. Thanks for the encouragement!
Um. I SO feel your pain. In the middle of potty training warfare at my house with my 3-and-then-some boy. Everybody warned me about teething, the sleeplessness, tantrums. I seriously would’ve loved a heads up about the doozy that is potty training!
Here’s my post. It’s probably (definitely) not helpful at all, but at least we can try and laugh about it, right? http://torinelson.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/piss-poor-a-guide-to-potty-training/
I wish you could just send them out to potty training school! 🙂
Gah. They’ll make you blow a gasket, huh? My youngest wore diapers at night until just 6 months ago. And he is six. Just couldn’t be bothered with learning potty training. I actually just chronicled all of our potty training crazy on Care.com this past week. Take heart Colleen, at least Wade did not throw a loaded diaper at his friends on the playground. http://www.care.com/child-care-potty-training-tough-kids-p1017-q23191291.html
That article was hilarious! I guess if nothing else potty training gives up some great stories to tell!
The opening line was so funny-gotta love what kids say sometimes!
It’s been awhile since the potty training days, but I do remember seeing a ebook out there that claiming to potty train in 3 days that works wonders. You could probably just google that phrase to find it. Hope that helps!
Thanks for the suggestion!
Yes, yes, yes! When you find out the secret…LET ME KNOW! I have this same scenario every day! I ask her…”Do you have to poop?” Her: “No mommy…” 5 minutes later, she walks up to me and says…”Mom…I pooped..” Grrrr…
Ugh! So, SO frustrating!
Incentive? He can’t come to my house anymore until he has mastered the task.
Bribe? How about the I-Pad potty chair?
I’ll by the iPad potty chair if you buy him the iPad.
You’re not the only one. I had huge difficulties in potty training my older daughter (the younger is still in diapers, hopefully it’ll be easier with her since she’s imitating the Big Sister in everything). First of all I started too early with her – she was about 2 years old when we tried and that was a huge mistake, since she wasn’t ready (I misunderstood her saying “I don’t won’t diapers” – it was the beginning of “I don’t want to” phase, and not her readiness for potty training). So I gave up that first time, waited for another few months, untill she said “Look, Mum, my cousin doesn’t have a diaper, I don’t want it either)
But it took us some time to finally succeed.
The things that finally helped were the bribery (every time she used the potty succesfully I gave her a sticker for a reward chart). The stickers were so appealing to her that she wanted to go on the potty even if she didn’t have the need to go. Also, when she managed to do “the number two” (meaning the poo – sorry, English is not my mother tongue, I’m not good with rude words, but I think you get what I wanted to say), then she got a tatoo. That was also a big hit.
I also read these two articles which have helped me a lot http://domanmom.com/2012/07/things-you-can-do-with-your-baby-to-make-it-easier-to-potty-train-later/
http://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/potty-training/tips/potty-training-tips/?page=5
Good luck!
Thanks for the tips. We are trying a reward chart this week. It seems to be helping. 🙂
I don’t know if my potty training secrets are that great since all three of my boys trained right at or just after four years old. And one of them was in training pants a lot longer at night because of bed wetting.
But here goes–for my first, right before 4, Iknew he knew how but he just didn’t want to take the time. So I ditched the training pants and put him in underwear. One very gross accident and he was at least trying to get to the potty every time after that.
Tried that with my second, and learned that he didn’t really care less about walking around in wet or soiled underwear. I honestly don’t know how he was finally trained…it just happened eventually, and I can’t say what I did in the end to help.
For my third, the underwear worked too…but only once I could get him to wear them. It took dressing his stuffed doggy in underwear and having the dog talk about how much he loved his underwear to get him to put them on. After that, everything wen’t smoothly.
Now, if I could only get them to AIM!
Wade is like your second. He just doesn’t care, but I know it will happen one day.
I’m a bit rusty but I know I have some blog posts about it. I know that my husband was involved with the boys. During the day I was on my own but once he got home they would go to the bathroom together whether they needed to go or not. It became a “big boy” thing!