We are in it, you guys. Knee deep in it. We are full-blown potty training and it’s not going well.
Maybe I should clarify a little bit.
We are officially in month 11 of potty training and it is NOT GOING WELL.
If I’m really counting back to the first time we had our Little Man sit on a toilet, we are actually on month 14. So yeah. We’re not doing well.
In terms of parenting milestones, this is officially the most trying and frustrating phase I have dealt with, and I’m including all of the teething, sleep training, and solo parenting phases I have overcome. It’s that hard. Undoubtedly, there is someone reading this thinking, “really? My angels never had an issue with it. Just one weekend of really setting our minds to it and they never had an accident again!” And to those people, I curse at you. I curse loudly at you and I kindly ask you to leave. While you’re add it, take all of the people whose kids slept through the night after 2 weeks with you too, ok? That is not my reality and I just want to be surrounded by the sleepless and frustrated parents who really know what I’m talking about. The Real America, if you will.
To understand why we have failed so miserably at this, you should probably know a few things about the last year of our lives. Through months of analyzing and reflection, I feel comfortable blaming these three things:
1) Constant Change:
Little Man’s been through the ringer this last year. Right before he turned 2 years old, we made him a big brother after taking his daddy away for the better part of 2015. After his birthday, he moved into the Big Toddlers classroom at daycare. During that time, they sent home a note on what to expect with this change in classrooms.
Our Big Toddlers are growing up! In addition to moving away from sippy cups and drinking out of open Dixie Cups, we will also be having them use the Potty! Please supply your child’s cubby with Pull-Ups and an extra pair of clothes in case of an accident.
Now, for most people, the daycare doing the heavy lifting on potty training is why you spent 40% of your income sending them there, but for me, I was worried.
“Look,” I said, “My kid’s been through a lot this year. His dad is away, he has a new brother, this is a new class… let’s not rush the potty training just yet. I’m worried it’s all too much for him.”
The thoughtful 20 something who was basically raising my child ensured me that they wouldn’t do anything he was uncomfortable with and that if I needed him to still be in diapers for a bit longer, that’d be fine. Under my mom’s pressur… er… encouragement, we did get him Pull-Up’s and an adorable tiny toilet that looked exactly like a real toilet. It even made a flushing sound when you pushed the handle down. ADORBS! I was starting to get into it and was ready to commit.
Then John came home. Then we pulled Little Man out of daycare. Then we put him in a big boy bed. This poor kid couldn’t keep up with all of the changes we were throwing his way. I didn’t want to pressure him too much to get potty trained because I felt like I was going to break his brain.
“He’s going to be one of those kids that plays with his poop and smears it all over the wall to regain control of his life!” I would say. This was my absolute biggest fear. I could see myself on my hands and knees, scrubbing his feces off the wall with bleach while he cowered in shame. I was determined not to create a feces-smearing child. Kids are weird enough with poop. He was already hiding every time he would do it. In the morning, like clockwork, we would hear him slam the door. Well, why wouldn’t you just take him to the bathroom then? Is what you well-meaning people are thinking. Yeah. Good luck. Kid would go into an epic meltdown if you entered his room before he was done. Then, trying to pin him down to change his diaper was another battle.
“He’s just not ready yet, honey” my husband would say. “Let’s just give him more time.” And that’s pretty much how we handled his life as a two year old. Sometimes he would pee in his potty. Most of the time, he wouldn’t. We stopped paying too much attention to it. But then, event number 2 happened.
2) A Sick Child:
In February of this year, we put our house on the market. Our real estate agent suggesting getting out of town during the first weekend since keeping a clean home with 2 kids under 3 would be “challenging”. We booked a staycation at a nice resort outside of Austin (seriously, if you’re not using hotwire.com for hotels, you’re basically just burning your money). It was a terrible weekend for a million reasons that I’ll either not get into at all or get into later, but if for no other reason, it was terrible because that’s probably where my son got Ecoli. We took him to the indoor pool and having never given him swimming lessons before (I swear, we are good parents) he didn’t understand that you don’t drink the water in the pool. He swallowed a mouthful of it, coughed most of it up, and we called it a night. The next day, he had some nasty diarrhea.
Before we go any further, if you’re not a fan of hearing about poop and/or vomit in fine detail, you should probably exit out of here.
As I was saying, he had some real bad runs. Beyond runs. Pure liquid. I even think about the “pool water cocktail” being a factor at that point and just thought he ate too much fruit. We checked-out and went home and made him some oatmeal. That night, he came in our room crying. I thought it was just a nightmare and he let him crawl into our bed. A few minutes later, and he threw up everywhere. A more accurate depiction is that he coughed up solid food. We stripped the bed and disrobed him. When I went in his room, I discovered the same scene in his bed. It was weird. Maybe it was something we ate? About a month earlier, our household got a bad case of the stomach flu. It was a 24 hour bug. Could it have returned?
The next 6 weeks are a blur of diarrhea, night time vomiting, phone calls with nurses, visits with doctors, frantic internet searching, and everyone who should have known better telling me that Little Man just had a virus and I should wait it out while keeping him hydrated. Finally, after our son lost 10% of his body weight, and our pediatrician admitted she had no idea what was wrong, we checked into the Children’s hospital.
A quick side note about healthcare: our current healthcare system is not designed to help you find a diagnosis. It is designed to help fix the problem right in front of them and to treat the symptoms. Case in point, because our son was so dehydrated and bloated when we arrived, his scans showed a semi-obstructed bowel. I was initially thrilled because I thought that meant we knew what was causing this. As it turns out, that just told doctors that our son was constipated. So, the entire first two days, they were trying to treat CONSTIPATION. Even though we told EVERYONE there that he had diarrhea for six straight weeks. It wasn’t until an NP told me exactly what “semi-obstructed bowel” meant that I asked “How does that explain his constant diarrhea?” and she actually stared blankly into my eyes and I could see she was thinking “oh. Riiiiiiiight. Yeah. Um, it doesn’t. Back to the drawing board!”
Short story long, after 6 nights in the hospital, they decided to treat him for Giardia. We put him on antibiotics for the next month and his condition vastly improved. Then we found out that he didn’t have Giardia but Enteropathogenic E. coli. Same difference, right?!? The point is, for months, pooping was the scariest thing in the world for LM and he closely associated it with being sick and in the hospital. So, once again, the ole potty training business was put on hold. After all, we were getting ready to sell our home and move across the country, which brings us to reason number three:
3) Lack of Structure:
This is where I will take ownership for my part in my son not being potty trained. Although the last year was tremendously difficult and stressful, I was the one that shied away at every turn. His first daycare pretty much offered to do it for me and I declined because I was worried what it would do to him. Um, it would have potty trained him! And yes, his illness certainly made things worse, but once he was getting better, we didn’t want to rush him back into the toilet routine. We’d casually say “do you want to try to sit down on the toilet?” to which he would respond “no thank you” and we’d just stop right there.
But with all of the change, we did say that once we got moved into our new house, we’d really start sticking to it. We kept telling him that there were no diapers allowed in the new house and that he’d have no choice but to use the toilet. Again, I think we just expected that he would just start doing it on his own because we didn’t want to “rush” him into it. Turns out kids don’t work like that! They will always do what they can get away with, and right now, he was getting away with us cleaning up his shit for him every day.
So what did we finally do? Something that my husband suggested back when we were only pregnant that I was completely horrified by: Putting him in the backyard naked. “That way, when he poops or pees, he’ll be so grossed out he won’t want to do it anymore and he’ll just use the toilet,” is how my husband teed it up. That’s not exactly how it works, but it did show him what it looks like and feels like to have to go to the bathroom. Did we have a child that only wanted to pee outside for a while? Absolutely, we did. Small price to pay. When he was inside and had to poop, we would catch him before he hid. Then finally, like all men, he thought pooping was really funny and cool. So, he finally got into it. We were doing it! It was actually working!
And THEN we put him back in daycare. Accidents came back. All progressed regressed. Hiding continued. Underwear and clothes were ruined.
Can I live??? Can I catch a freakin’ break! How have I done so poorly at this! Nothing has made me feel more like an unequipped parent than having an un-potty trained 3 year old. Managing rage and frustration was so hard every time he would waddle up to me with urine soaked clothes. I’d love to say I never yelled or made him feel bad. I’d even love to say that I didn’t let him eat whatever candy or junk food he wanted when he did finally use the toilet again. I was a complete prisoner to his bathroom schedule. I was full blown negotiating with this terrorist. I felt this would be the case forever and I’d always have to explain to people why my 5 year old can’t go use the toilet like everyone else.
I thought this would be the case, but then things started getting better. I’d pick him up from school and he would be in the same shorts and no report of an accident. He’d come home and use the bathroom when necessary. He even woke up the other night and went to the bathroom all on his own. And I guess, all of a sudden, we have a mostly potty trained child. Hell has seemingly frozen over.
Now, if only he could learn to wipe his own ass.
DailyDebs 