Potty Training: This is Real Life

If you employed the miracle three day potty training method and your children miraculously were 100% potty trained in just three days – congratulations! This blog post is not for you.

This blog post is for families like ours. Where this sensational system jump-started us into a season of potty training. But, my child was not suddenly diaper and accident free after just 3 days. You are not alone. AND it is totally normal. Go ahead and take THIS blog post with a grain of salt. 

Some may argue that we started potty training too early, and they may be right. There is a good case against us that we didn’t follow the method exactly and therefore that is why it did not work. My thinking is that just as not all children are alike, not all parenting methods work for all families.

A novel concept, I know.

We began over Memorial Day weekend – 2 weeks before Ella turned 2. And 6 months before baby #2 was to join us. I was hell bent on not having two children in diapers full time. I am stubborn and, well, so is my daughter. It is just one of the many traits she inherited from me.

She is going to kill me one day for posting this

It is now 10 months later and it would seem that she is finally “number 2” trained. This was a loooooooooooong process. Many weekends spent plying her with every laxative imaginable, natural and medicinal. Sleepless nights spent consoling her and her ailing stomach which was simply begging for relief. Me cursing the three day potty training method and our kind and well-meaning pediatrician who advised that “she will go in her due time, don’t push it.” Purchasing more pull-ups than I ever thought I would because I believed we would go straight from diapers to underwear (ha!).

As with most parenting, we went into it thinking it would go one way and we were sorely proven wrong. I wish that somewhere along the way I would learn to stop attaching expectations to parenting experiences. Things RARELY go as planned. I tell myself to roll with the punches, but the planner in me secretly and subconsciously will create a vision for how things will go and then I find myself cranky and unable to enjoy the moment until I realize what is going on. Oh, how I wish I could push a button and *poof* I would learn my lesson and change my ways. Still working on that one.

Next up: sleep training. God help us all…