The great potty miracle

One of the sweetest moments of parenting I've ever had happened yesterday. I was sitting in the living room and heard a little tune.

It meant success. Sweet, overwhelmingly triumphant success.

It was the sound of Mela peeing in her (musical) potty.

Over the last few years, there are a lot of things that we've done wrong or, more often, just muddled our way through.

This time, we finally got one right.

You hear a lot about potty training and how miserable it can be. Apparently the average kid takes about three to six months to train, with some taking a lot longer than that, and often tons of frustration, stress and even tears.

Not us. We waited. One by one, other kids her age shed their diapers and while we envied their stink-free houses, we looked at our cautious little girl and said, not yet. We watched for signs of readiness and concerned ourselves with packing, and moving, and guest-ing, and then moving and unpacking, etc.

Finally this weekend seemed right. Mela actually said, "I don't want to wear diapers anymore. I want to wear underwear."

That's about as good as it gets for readiness.

So we followed my mom's advice, which after having trained four kids of her own, comes down to: take off their pants and let them run around (outside in the summer, if possible). This has also been called the "bare bottom and 75 bucks technique (the money is for dry cleaning your carpets).

Luckily, I also found a book last week ("Toilet training in less than a day"), which sounded ridiculous but laid out a really clear method for success with the bare-butt approach.

It's not really one day of work, because it takes some real preparation (take your child shopping and buy a musical potty, get a peeing doll, have them pick out nice underpants, talk about the whole thing leading up to it, etc). By the way, it seemed a little weird to spend money on something like this but in our case, it was totally worth it.

The thing I liked best was that you start the day by having the child teach the (slightly disturbing) doll the potty technique first. And at one point, the doll even "has an accident" and the child sees the consequence (over-correction by repeated practice runs to the potty and having to clean the mess, plus lots of talking about important people in the child's life who "don't like wet pants.")

So when it's the child's turn to learn, they've already seen the whole sequence and they know what to expect. And they already have a couple treats in their belly (dolly earns treats when she pees in the potty but the kid gets to eat them - awesome), so they're feeling pretty positive about the world and a little more ready to try something new.

It's still tough, though. The book's authors totally ignore the situation where your child is dancing naked around the house, refusing to wear the underwear or do a single "practice run" that they make sound so easy.

And you have to totally clear your schedule, evacuate the house (the boys had an adventure together!) and it takes almost every minute of the whole day.

But we took a kid who had never used a potty before and by the afternoon, as I was sitting (exhausted) in the living room, she stopped playing, ran to the potty BY HERSELF, got her pants down, and made that little potty play its musical tune.

It made my heart sing.

The best part was the bonding time we had together. We've had some rocky times over the past few months, most of it just because she's two and that's what two year olds are all about (god help them). Most days consist of her doing stuff just to annoy me (I swear) or being overlooked compared to her "squeaky wheel" brother. We have some laughs together but nothing like yesterday. Yesterday I HAD to devote my attention solely to her all day and we had something positive to focus on and we both loved it. We laughed and played and celebrated each full potty like she'd won the lottery.

I have to say again, I couldn't believe how fast she got it! At one point in the afternoon, I was cooking and she ran past me, whipped down her pants, sat down and said, "Phew! That was close!" Again, this is the kid that until yesterday had never worn underwear.

Don't get me wrong ... we're not out of the woods yet. Today we had to take the next step and learn how to do it all while wearing pants. And with distractions around, like playing with friends. She had one little accident but did great all day. The next step will be to ease off the treats (Reese's Pieces!), which are really the main reason she did any of it in the first place.

And we haven't left the house yet - I have no idea how that's going to happen.

But we travelled a great distance in one single day. And we had fun doing it.

It was about time we had a win!

*****************************
Say click:

Nate & the gate:
I have a new strategy for keeping the kids occupied while I try to do the breakfast sprint: they "cook" breakfast for me!
Nate is FINALLY getting to the age when we can skip eating at the table and have a "picnic" once in a while (i.e. sit on the couch and watch TV). It's not often but it's a great break for the Mama from the endless drudgery of up and down and bibs and boosters and the whole routine. Check out the cuties eating their scrambled eggs:
My precious baby:
Mela checks her potty progress:
She decides all is well and goes back to eating her tuna fish sandwich:

And finally ... I have friends who read this blog and think Nathan does nothing but smile all day long. Which he sometimes does. But he also sometimes cries all afternoon. Today I was trying to cook dinner and get Mela to get some sleep and Nate was a wreck. He'd had an awesome nap and a good snack but has a bit of a cold right now and was just plain out of sorts.

Here's a small taste of unhappy Nate (context: he was mad at me 'cause I wouldn't let him go upstairs to see his exhausted, non-napping sister):


Five minutes later, he's crying again, but at least his sister's downstairs and happy now: