We decided to give potty training a go last week. Yeah, it seemed a little crazy and many of my friends noted that it seemed a bit…early to them. But I’d gone to this thing on sign language for potty training at the library last month and THEY said your child could train by 18 months. And as the monkey is 19 months, CLEARLY I needed to get on board.
Hahaha.
So I picked a weekend that both my husband and I were off and would be home for several days (THEY recommend 3 days “intense training”) and marked it on our calendars. As it happened, we were both home Thurs-Sun. Plenty of time. Then my husband signed up to teach Thursday nights and Sundays. Ok, Ok. But Sunday would be day FOUR and we really only needed THREE. And he’d be home most of Thursday, right?
Then he signed up to take a class on Thursday. (I swear he doesn’t even look at his calendar. Seriously when he sent me the details on that class, he sent me his schedule for the fall. I looked at it and said – you know we’re in FL for a wedding for 3-4 of the dates you have listed, right?) Ugh! So day 1 is all me! I told him he could make it for it by starting on his own on Wednesday. Ha. (Actually, he did legitimately have some work stuff to do that day – though it wasn’t on his calendar…!)
Thursday morning the monkey wakes up and after breakfast I decide – ok, let’s start. I take her diaper off (THEY all say to leave them naked from the waist down for this) and set up the potty in the bathroom. I ask her if she has to go potty. No, but she really likes it. She sits on it for awhile, enjoys checking it out, squats down next to it to look at all the parts and – when she stands up the floor is wet! Right directly NEXT TO the potty! I decide to take this as progress – hey, you got close! Next time IN the potty, baby. But so close. Yeah!
A few minutes later, she squatting again, but I figure she’s ‘empty’ this time so we’re fine. She stands up and she’s pooped on the floor. I just barely got it up before she fully stepped in it. Ugh! But hey – close, yeah! Being a total idiot, as she hadn’t pooped IN the potty, I forgot all about poop etiquette and consequences and didn’t think to wipe her till I noticed some brown on her foot. Oh, yuck…
She’s still interested so we stay in the bathroom. She’s up and down on the potty, checking it all out and – yup, she’s peed on the floor again. (yippee?) Sigh.
By this point, she was done “looking” at the potty (and christening the floor all around it), so we go out to the family room (sans diaper) and start to play. It takes a little bit, but I start to realize that her crankiness seems to be related to her lack of diaper – maybe? Aren’t babies supposed to like being without a diaper? I don’t know, but man she doesn’t seem happy.
After half an hour, the timer goes off, so we head towards the bathroom and I ask if she wants to use the potty. NO! She starts to head towards a tantrum, so I immediately drop it (that’s what THEY say to do). But I also decide we better put a diaper on her. If she’s not going to try on the “schedule,” it’s just going to be a damn messy day. She must not be ready and we’ll try another day.
My Mom was visiting so I asked if she’d watch the baby while I went up to shower. While I was gone, the monkey looked at her and said – Potty! They went into the bathroom, she sat down the potty itself was finally christened! My Mom put her back in her diaper.
Twenty minutes later, we’re back in there (and now I’ve got it fully set up with batteries and turned on so when she goes it plays a song). She goes in the potty again and the song plays. She loves the song! Why won’t the song play again? A small tantrum ensues. She sits on the potty again – up and down. I empty and clean it and she tries again (almost right away). She pees another thimbleful and gets another song! So that became the pattern for the day. Running into and out of the bathroom all day and peeing every time she could get enough in her bladder to make the music play. My Mom asked if I thought she did these small pees all day long normally. Could she really have that much control to work out to only go a little really frequently so the potty would sing to her?
Sadly we had a few things come up this weekend unexpected that prevented any further potty training (she used it on and off, but I think we totally lost momentum). We’re contemplating whether to do a bare bottom weekend (when my husband does NOT schedule classes!) soon, but we’ll see…
Showing posts with label potty training. Show all posts
Showing posts with label potty training. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Potty Training
I know that most of you will think I’m crazy even starting to write about potty training when my daughter is 8 months old. My husband certainly thinks I’m crazy. But here goes…
Potty training is one of the things that scares me about parenthood. It’s completely uncharted waters (uncharted poopy waters…). How on earth does one go about doing this? OK, it’s not really uncharted waters. LOTS of people have done it before. There are tons of books. In theory I even have experience with it, being potty trained myself (I thought I should clarify lest you think I keep the Depends people in business, given my stated fears. I mean it scares the crap out me. But not literally.).
So I started reading books early – and a lot of them have suggested it’s possible to potty train early. Or, if not to potty train, to get your baby comfortable with the potty so that it’s less of a struggle when the right time comes. I guess I should give a little more background… Some time, several months ago, my sister in law mentioned a friend whose in-laws swore up and down that they could potty train her child of less than a year while the friend was away for a week or two (when you come back, he will be potty trained). Apparently they were not wholly successful, but it brought up the discussion and it turns out that other cultures (they are Eastern European) potty train much earlier than Americans do. She told me this and I thought – you’re crazy. How do you possibly potty train a child that can’t yet walk? It’s not possible. I dismissed it out of hand (because that is the type of open minded individual I am). But it must have been in the back of my brain because I decided to look up some information on potty training last month and found out that apparently other people do potty train much earlier. In fact, if the book I was reading last night is true, even Americans used to potty train infants (to some extent) until the 1940’s or so. In a world before disposable diapers (or “good” cloth diapers), it just made sense to potty train earlier. And children likely wanted to potty train earlier rather than be cold and wet (a feeling hidden by modern diapers). So from very early on, parents would learn to read the potty signals and hold a child over a toilet (or pot or hole in the ground or fill in the blank depending on the appropriate time and circumstance). This book suggests that babies can read their body signals to know that they need to go (or are going?), but because modern diapers remove the need to read that signal, they lose the ability / desire / etc. Hmm…
So this got me thinking… When my daughter was a newborn, you could always tell when she was pooping because she made a face as she went. (Yes, there was also a lot of noise and sometimes some poop on your jeans to let you know, but the face was consistent.) But she’d pretty much stopped making that face for pooping over the months that followed. However, she had her first solid poops recently and I noticed that the face returned for these – as, I guess, this is a new and different sensation – one she is none too happy with as she tends to cry then too. If the books I’m reading have any value then – well, she’s giving me poop signals right now and she’s unhappy about pooping / sitting in poop – maybe I could start getting her used to the concept of the potty.
I know, I know! My husband laughed at me when I told him this plan last night. And really – I don’t exactly think it’s going to work or that I’m going to have a potty trained 12 month old. But the stuff I was reading had some other points that seemed to ring true (to me!). The big one was that toddlers often don’t like the potty / are scared of the potty / or just plain refuse to sit still long enough to be on the potty. So it becomes a war – which the parent inevitably loses (or possibly EVERYONE does). It made the point that now might be a good time to start putting my daughter on the potty because she can’t walk yet and therefore will be happy enough to sit still there and get used to the potty. Then, as a toddler, she won’t be scared of it and she’ll be OK with the concept of sitting on it when she actually needs to.
So this is the great experiment. I haven’t bought a potty yet, but when I do - feel free to come back and laugh at this one – it does seem just a little bit insane to me too. But, whether it seems insane to you or not, please tell me about your own potty training experience – what worked, what didn’t, when you started (and ended!).
Potty training is one of the things that scares me about parenthood. It’s completely uncharted waters (uncharted poopy waters…). How on earth does one go about doing this? OK, it’s not really uncharted waters. LOTS of people have done it before. There are tons of books. In theory I even have experience with it, being potty trained myself (I thought I should clarify lest you think I keep the Depends people in business, given my stated fears. I mean it scares the crap out me. But not literally.).
So I started reading books early – and a lot of them have suggested it’s possible to potty train early. Or, if not to potty train, to get your baby comfortable with the potty so that it’s less of a struggle when the right time comes. I guess I should give a little more background… Some time, several months ago, my sister in law mentioned a friend whose in-laws swore up and down that they could potty train her child of less than a year while the friend was away for a week or two (when you come back, he will be potty trained). Apparently they were not wholly successful, but it brought up the discussion and it turns out that other cultures (they are Eastern European) potty train much earlier than Americans do. She told me this and I thought – you’re crazy. How do you possibly potty train a child that can’t yet walk? It’s not possible. I dismissed it out of hand (because that is the type of open minded individual I am). But it must have been in the back of my brain because I decided to look up some information on potty training last month and found out that apparently other people do potty train much earlier. In fact, if the book I was reading last night is true, even Americans used to potty train infants (to some extent) until the 1940’s or so. In a world before disposable diapers (or “good” cloth diapers), it just made sense to potty train earlier. And children likely wanted to potty train earlier rather than be cold and wet (a feeling hidden by modern diapers). So from very early on, parents would learn to read the potty signals and hold a child over a toilet (or pot or hole in the ground or fill in the blank depending on the appropriate time and circumstance). This book suggests that babies can read their body signals to know that they need to go (or are going?), but because modern diapers remove the need to read that signal, they lose the ability / desire / etc. Hmm…
So this got me thinking… When my daughter was a newborn, you could always tell when she was pooping because she made a face as she went. (Yes, there was also a lot of noise and sometimes some poop on your jeans to let you know, but the face was consistent.) But she’d pretty much stopped making that face for pooping over the months that followed. However, she had her first solid poops recently and I noticed that the face returned for these – as, I guess, this is a new and different sensation – one she is none too happy with as she tends to cry then too. If the books I’m reading have any value then – well, she’s giving me poop signals right now and she’s unhappy about pooping / sitting in poop – maybe I could start getting her used to the concept of the potty.
I know, I know! My husband laughed at me when I told him this plan last night. And really – I don’t exactly think it’s going to work or that I’m going to have a potty trained 12 month old. But the stuff I was reading had some other points that seemed to ring true (to me!). The big one was that toddlers often don’t like the potty / are scared of the potty / or just plain refuse to sit still long enough to be on the potty. So it becomes a war – which the parent inevitably loses (or possibly EVERYONE does). It made the point that now might be a good time to start putting my daughter on the potty because she can’t walk yet and therefore will be happy enough to sit still there and get used to the potty. Then, as a toddler, she won’t be scared of it and she’ll be OK with the concept of sitting on it when she actually needs to.
So this is the great experiment. I haven’t bought a potty yet, but when I do - feel free to come back and laugh at this one – it does seem just a little bit insane to me too. But, whether it seems insane to you or not, please tell me about your own potty training experience – what worked, what didn’t, when you started (and ended!).
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