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What Not to Expect When You’re Expecting: Potty Training
Sometime around David’s second birthday, my oh-so-helpful mother gave me a present. It was a pair of tiny red boxer shorts with little trucks on it. The message? David would be toilet training soon.
For years, my mother proudly told everyone who would listen that I was toilet trained at a year and a half, because as the ultimate girly-girl, I wanted to wear fancy underpants.
Looking back, and knowing my mother the way I do, I suspect it had more to do with her being anal than my fashion sense.
But I was hopeful David would learn to “make poopy on the potty,” as he referred to it, at an early age. He walked at 10 months and talked at a year. He was special. He was gifted.
He was a nightmare.
Joel and I bought the requisite plastic potty chair soon after the Gift of the Red Boxers. But David refused to use it. We weren’t going to sweat it. He would use the potty when he was ready. Meanwhile, we bought the “Everyone Poops” books and the “Once upon a Potty” videos. We sang songs and told stories.
David loved the books. He loved the videos. But when it was time to go to the bathroom, he had his own idea of “using the potty.”
He went into the walk-in closet and closed the door.
Eventually, David outgrew the XXL-sized Huggies. And celebrated another birthday. Prompting my mother to ask, “What’s wrong with him? YOU were toilet trained at one and a half!”
We asked the pediatrician, who assured us this was, in fact, completely normal. So we kept plugging away, kept singing that god-awful “Potty Song” from the “Once upon a Potty Video,” kept putting him on his little plastic toilet, only to have him stink up our closet again and again.
And then one day, at the age of 3 ½, it was over. David went to the bathroom – on the big toilet. And that was it. He was trained.
I can’t even tell you how relieved Joel and I were. But the best part was, we knew, we absolutely, positively KNEW in our hearts that it would be different with A.J. No way would it take him 3 ½ years.
We were right, of course.
It took him three years and seven months.
It appears we have the same mother. Mine insists that both of her “gifted children” were trained by 18 months, day and night. Both of mine were day trained by two years, and this was, according to my mother, very obviously a sign of having less than bright offspring. Either that, or my mother wants to compete in the Mommy Olympics 30 years later….
I feel your pain. My daughter has sat on the potty and peed in it for the first time this week. She turned four last week and has a two year old brother. I’m praying that the end is in sight, but I don’t want to jinx it by assuming.