We recently decided that our three-year-old triplets needed to
be potty trained.
Not that we weren't already half-heartedly trying; we were. We gave rewards and encouraged them,
but otherwise we kind of left them up to their own devices. Because, you know, we apparently think our three-year-olds are autodidacts.
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| They aren't laughing at you, they are laughing with you. |
We aren’t exactly tiger parents, in case you can’t tell. That goes double for big issues involving what
could be lots of tantrums, toilets, urine and feces.
They might not be potty trained to this day had we
not been sending them to a preschool requiring pupils with proper porcelain skills.
But the school required students to have at least a modicum of
potty training, so we set about at it.
My wife did all the leg work and research. She is great at stuff
like that and frankly, if it weren’t for her, the kids would probably be
waddling around in diapers half a size too small, sucking on binkies and
playing with toys designed for 2 year olds.
I don’t know how, but she stumbled upon what has to be the most boring
and simultaneously terrifying program I’ve ever heard of: a three-day boot camp
where you essentially sit on your child for three days, rushing them to the
potty whenever the urge strikes them so that they associate the urge to “go”
with being on the potty.
If spending three days cleaning up bodily function mistakes from
clothing and floors sounds like a chore; and spending 95% of your long weekend
running toddlers to the potty sounds insanity inducing, I can confirm for you
that it ain’t exactly fun. But its also
insanely brilliant.
You wake up, throw out the diapers and that is it, the long slug
through potty training boot camp begins.
A sample:
7:00 a.m.: Wake in anticipation of
Potty-Boot Camp
8:00 a.m.: Wake kids
8:05 a.m.: Have kids throw out diapers.
8:06 a.m.: Celebrate!
8:07 a.m.: Begin panicking just a bit
at what you have done.
8:10 a.m.: Underwear for everyone! They love it!
8:11 a.m.: This is going great!
8:13 a.m.: You want them to sit where?
8:15 a.m.: R sits on the potty!
8:18 a.m.: L sits on the potty!
8:20 a.m.: S sits on the potty!
8:22 a.m.: Remind them that they have
to tell you if they need to potty
8:23 a.m.: take S to potty
8:24 a.m.: take L to potty
8:26 a.m.: take R to potty
8:30 a.m.: You realize this is going to
be a longer day than you thought.
So … yeah, that is the first hour. Wash, rinse, repeat for the next 35 hours. And I mean that literally. You wash a lot of furniture and floors; you rinse
a lot of clothes; and you repeat the phrase “does anyone feel pee coming?” - a
LOT.
At first I kept track of how long I was spending in the bathroom. I wish I could tell you how long it was. I can’t because I eventually surrendered and
just took up permanent station in the bathroom.
This after realizing I was wasting my time getting up off the floor and
going into the playroom, only going to have to get back up off the playroom
floor and return to the bathroom minutes later.
So I just sat in the bathroom.
Minute after minute.
Like I said, I lost track of time. It might have been 15 minutes; it might have
been an hour.
All I know is that first day was what you might call a mixed
bag. We experienced some success;
probably more than we experienced failure, but it wasn’t exactly like we hit
the ball out of the park, either. Also, I
think a little bit of my soul might still be in the bathroom, waiting solemnly
for some little creature to say “I feel it coming.”
The second day, though; ah, the glorious second day.
By the second day, the light somewhere turned on. Oh, I still spent most of the day in the bathroom,
but we had less accidents. And then even
less on the third. After three days we
weren’t 100 percent there. We still had
accidents now and then and we had to have a separate intervention for a pooping
issue, but it was snow-ball-down-a-hill progress from there.
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