potty training

The most important part of potty training: your cat

/ Shane / 3 Comments

(Notice the colon in the title there, I’m not talking about potty training your cat)

Sara pointed out that Evie was potty trained by the time she was Oliver’s age. Potty training Oliver started well, then immediately went downhill. Absolutely no luck with that one. It had gotten so bad, we decided to lay off for awhile, to try to avoid putting pressure on him.

One day I remembered a trick that we had used very successfully with Evie: use the cat. Nala likes to “listen” to hear pee pee go in the potty. At first, Oliver was very excited about this. “Nala listen! Nala listen!” he’d say. I thought, “The cat potty trained our children,” and prepared to write this blog post. However, Oliver’s ardeur has since re-cooled (although I did one time get him to go poo poo by having his toy fish listen instead).

Le sigh.

Everybody says that boys harder to train. Is this true? It seems silly to me, and the differences between Evie and Ollie seem to be just regular differences in their personalities, rather than gender differences. Evie was just more interested in the potty. Also, Oliver was using the potty back before we had to quit on cloth diapers, but Evie always had cloth diapers. The theory goes that it is easier to potty train with cloth diapers, because they feel more uncomfortable when they are wet. So maybe that’s the difference. But then again, here we have a boy who is a little behind where the girl was at, so maybe I’m just trying to justify it. I don’t know.

Like I said, we are not putting the full court press on him at the moment, but when we do we will certainly try putting him back in cloth diapers for a little bit. It will be a race to see which happens first: he learns to go on the potty, or his diaper rash / eczema gets so bad that we feel too awful to keep him in cloth diapers. Hopefully the former, rather than the latter.

Anyway, long story short, so far Ollie is a no go on the potty, but if you are potty training you should definitely consider how best to use the family cat to your advantage.

19 months is too young to potty train, right?

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Oliver went on the potty SIX TIMES today!!

The Week of Pee

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Evie has been potty trained for well over a year now, but still wearing a diaper at night. She quit wearing diapers for her nap a long time ago, but every morning her overnight diaper was soaked. Every once in a while she would have a dry diaper or two. For the longest time we told her that, if she had dry diapers for 7 nights in a row, she could switch to panties overnight. She was excited at the prospect, but it was never quite enough motivation to go for it. She also got to pick a prize from the prize bucket for dry diapers. Every now and again we would give a little push to try and get rid of the diapers (for example, having her go potty a 2nd time after her bath), but we weren’t really that concerned with it. We thought she could do it, but if she didn’t want to, we were fine with that.

Then, something happened that clued us in.

When she started back at daycare, she got a diaper at nap time. She hasn’t had a diaper for her nap in probably 6 months, and she never has an accident. However, when they put a diaper on her, she wet it. Ah ha! Having the diaper on made her feel like she didn’t really need to worry about it, almost like giving her permission.

So we decided to just go for it. No diaper at night, and if she wet the bed, she wet the bed. We’d try it for a week, if it worked it worked, if it didn’t, it didn’t. We even bought extra sheets in preparation.

It only took 2 nights.

After the second night of wet sheets she was done going overnight. She’s had one accident overnight since then, but that’s it. There’s nothing like quitting cold turkey! I have to say, it was WELL worth those two nights of extra laundry!

Potty Update

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I realized I hadn’t really had a good post to close out the potty training.

Evie is just the super most awesome in the world. She is doing so great. We had our rough patches, but we pushed through them. We still have some power struggles now and again, especially if we try to force her to go, but if we just leave her alone about it, she takes care of everything.

She hardly has any accidents, maybe one a week at most. She doesn’t wear a diaper during her nap and her overnight diaper is dry most nights. She has been going poo poo in the potty for weeks now. We discovered the magic formula for that was to put her on the potty, tell her to hold on tight, run and find Nala, toss her in the bathroom, go out and shut the door. Usually she was going before the door was even closed. The privacy part is very important, even though I am always a little nervous about leaving her perched precariously on the edge of the toilet.

She also knows that going poo poo means she gets to pick out a prize from the prize bucket, which is mostly stickers and toys from cereal boxes. Believe me, it doesn’t take much, one of her favorite prizes was a thing of travel size Kleenexes. Another good reward is singing the “potty song” which is a nice little conga that goes, “Pee pee in the potty! We listened to our body!” Sara is quite proud of the second line. 🙂

Evie has always enjoyed going out of the house more than in the house, so taking her to new places isn’t really a problem. In fact, the problem was that she enjoyed strange potties a little too much and would insist on going over and over again at every stop. I think the thing that fixed that was only allowing her to wash her hands if she actually went potty. She thinks that washing her hands is pretty exciting, and she especially likes to see what color soap a particular place has. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has every bathroom in the city memorized and categorized by soap color. Using this as a “reward” seems to have calmed it down to 1 or 2 trips instead of 4 or 5.

Evie is something of a clothes horse, so it should have come as no surprise when she started wanting to change her underwear about 10 times a day. It can be pretty frustrating, but we quickly learned to let her change whenever she wanted or else she would pee in them just so she could change them. This has been lessening lately though, and she has some days where she stays in the same pair all day.

She has even started going by herself now, I mean completely by herself, up until the part when she calls you in to show off her handy work. So I think we can say she is officially potty trained! Well, I would have said it a while ago, but it’s not official until it is on the blog.

In summary, hard work, persistence and out smarting your enemy, those are the keys to potty training!

Did you miss me?

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Of course you didn’t, because you didn’t know I was gone.

It’s been a long week and a half or so. Evie and Sara were in MI all last week until Thursday when we met for camping. Always when Sara is going to be gone I think to myself, “I am going to have sooo much time to do whatever I want!” and then I end up being busier than I normally am trying to get all the stuff done I’m supposed to get done while they are gone. So I was actually staying up late every night trying to finish everything I needed to do and didn’t get a lot of free time.

I ain’t complain’ though, because Sara had it much worse. Evie has taken it into her head to have some real tantrums, screaming, kicking, the whole nine. I remember a particular phone call in which I could hear Evie in the background yelling gems like, “It is nice to bite mommy!” Most of these tantrums involve the potty in one way or another. She is very willful and doesn’t like being told what to do, therefore, every little thing becomes a battle of wills. I understand this is pretty typical of her age, so once we are through it, we’re hoping it will go dormant again until she is a teenager.

Many of the problems are exacerbated by being on vacation. First off, she doesn’t have her usual routine going on around her. Second off, she is getting less sleep since her sleep schedule is off and her naps are often shortened because of stuff that we’re doing. Third, she is having a really good time and doesn’t want to do the things she needs to do (like sleep). Finally, when we are busy trying to do things she has more power to disrupt our life and she knows it. And she does not use this power for good. All of this lead Sara to proclaim it the “worst week she’s ever had as a parent” and seriously think about canceling the vacation altogether.

All that unpleasantness aside, there have also been some bright spots on the potty training front. She doesn’t really have a lot of accidents and she is starting to stay dry through naps and even through the night sometimes, despite her diaper. One night she even got Sara to take her to the potty in the middle of the night so she could go.

The actual camping went really well. We were going to tent camp, but the prospect of a wet weekend caused us to upgrade to a cabin and I think it was a wise choice. We were basically unaffected by the rain. One of the highlights of the trip was going to a u-pick strawberry and cherry farm and picking our brains out. Each strawberry was better than the last and I probably ate a pound of cherries.  We may have overdone it a little bit on the strawberries; I don’t know how we can eat them all before they go bad. We’re doing what we can though and even as I write this I am eating fresh strawberries!

Evie also had a great time. When we got home she stayed in the car for about 15 minutes hysterically crying for us to get back in the car (right now!) and drive back to the camp site. She has also been asking to do some of the things we did while camping, such as “see the doggies” or “go swimming”.

So that’s about it, back home safe and sound, at least until the next vacation. I don’t have any quotes for you today, although I’m sure she said plenty of hilarious stuff over the long weekend.