Adventures in Potty Training

Warning - Despite the beautiful pink potty chair with a dancing Disney character depicted on it, shown above, there is nothing pretty about potty training.  If you find any of the following words/phrases offensive, I recommend you read no further: potty, pee, poo, poopy, giant log, deuce, farted, explosion, yuck, yuck is right, turd ferguson, naked, butt cheeks...ok, ok I am not actually going to use all of these, ahem, expressions, in this blog post, but if you were to come around to our house these days I can't make the same promise.

Ok, so a couple months ago we embarked on what I now refer to as "it was the worst of times and it was the worst of times": potty training.  Elliot was starting to show signs she was ready to use the big girl potty, and let's be honest, diapers are freaking expensive, and it seemed like a win/win.  I decided it was time.  And it was exciting!  We made a big show of going out to pick out her potty.  We went to the potty aisle, laid out her options at one end and then set her at the other end and let her walk up to the one she wanted.  She picked Minnie, unequivocally.  Then we got to move on to the big girl underwear section!  Dora, Princess, Elmo, flowers...too cute and fun.  We paid for our items and headed home, excited for what was to come.

When we got home, we unloaded our purchases, set up the Minnie pot, and then I did what any well-researched, highly competent, potty-training mama would do; I called my Mom.  I believe my exact words were "Ok, we got a potty.  Now what is step 1?"  To my relief, step 1 was getting the potty, so we were already headed in the right direction.  (Side bar: For some reason, early on before we had even decided to start potty training, I decided I was going to do one of these "potty training boot camps" that guarantee your child is potty trained in one weekend.  Great idea, in theory.  However, when I actually looked into it, it sounded like a lot of nonsense.  First of all, one of the instructions was to get a potty chair for every room in the house.  What?  Those things are like $20 each.  If I was made of money I would have paid someone to potty train her for me!  Then, it said to go to a furniture store and buy some kind of special fur covering to put in the car seat.  No thank you.)

Big girl underwear!

 

So we started employing what I call the "Gail Method" (my Mom's name is Gail) to potty training.  And it was going well!  There were obviously many accidents, lots of loads of laundry, and plenty of frustrating moments, but for the most part she was getting it.  And let me tell you, even though it is the absolute worst thing about parenting I have experienced so far, potty training has lead to so much laughter in our house, albeit sometimes through fat, frustrated, tears.  (Mine, not Elliot's.)  There is the unavoidable increase of poo and pee related words to the toddler's vocabulary, so we heard a lot of "No poo poo!  No potty!"  My favorite though, is the phrase she really held on to: "Yuck is right!"  The background is, she had a number 2 accident and Erik (or was it my Dad?) was changing her and she said "Yuck!" and he answered "Yuck is right!" and from then on she has thought the name for the actual poo log is "yuck is right."  So whenever she would drop a deuce she would shout out "Mommy! Daddy! Yuck is right!"  In fact, recently we were walking up my Mom's walkway and there was an unfortunately shaped pinecone Elliot spotted.  She stopped in her tracks, shocked, and pointed at it saying "Yuck is right! Yuck is right!"  But I digress...

Anyway, I say it was going well because a few weeks ago she decided she was done.  D.O.N.E.  She had been having a few days in a row where she didn't make it to the potty at all.  Not only that, she made no effort to get to the potty at all, preferring instead to go in her pants and then tell us to change her afterward.  She was with my Dad when it happened.  I guess she was sitting there for a while and then suddenly stood up, slammed the potty shut, and promptly pooed on the floor in protest!  After that, she showed so little interest in the whole process we decided to put the potty away for a while and try again in a couple months.  Was this the right thing to do?  I don't know.  Was it was the easier option for these first-time parents?  Absolutely.  We figured, she's not even two yet, it's still acceptable for her to be in diapers.  Now, if she's heading off to kindergarten and we haven't resolved this yet...different story.  But for now, cost of diapers be damned!