Potty trained — finally

Posted in Potty Training
by Alicia Castelli

My husband and I finally decided we’d had enough after trying to potty train our first child, Ryan, off and on for nearly a year and a half. He was going to be 4 in three months and was still using his pull-ups almost exclusively.

After doing still more reading and Internet research, as well as consulting other parents almost everywhere I went, I decided to simply take his pull-ups away during the day.

What followed is a three-day blur of pee and poop the likes of which I hope to never encounter again. Not only did our little genius simply pee and/or poop wherever he happened to be, he was not shy about doing it right in front of us.

No more hiding in corners, behind furniture, or behind the drapes. He wanted to make darn sure we knew he was still refusing to use the bathroom.

On at least one occasion, he actually used the toilet for leverage as he squatted and peed on the rug in front of it. OK, message received — not happy that mommy and daddy took away your pull-ups.

Armed with a spray bottle of Oxyclean in one hand and a rag in the other, we stood firm and came up with a new rule. If he wet his pants on purpose, the toys got put down and the TV went off until the mess on the carpet/chair/couch/ was cleaned up. And guess who was holding the rag now?

After only one and a half days of cleaning up his own messes, Ryan decided to pee in the toilet. His father and I were delirious with the hope that our 18-month-long trek to the ninth circle of hell and back was nearly over.

Ryan only had a few genuine accidents during the month that followed.

And as a little something extra for mommy and daddy, Ryan made the transition from sitting down to standing up when going to the bathroom all on his own.

That Oxyclean bottle stayed close at hand, however, as Ryan’s aim needed some improvement. A sound beside or behind him usually resulted in a sweeping arc of pee across the wall and floor as he turned to investigate.

“Watch the toilet, not the cat!” we’d yell, which was followed by a startled jerk, and another less graceful arc of pee on its way back into the toilet. Still, after what we went through to get to this point, I wasn’t complaining.

Pooping in the bathroom took another four months. Ryan would sneak into his room, put on a pull-up and use it instead of the bathroom. We put the pull-ups in our room where he couldn’t get them.

You’re really not a parent until you’ve been elbow-deep in the toilet dunking dirty underpants before heading for the washing machine. The first time I had to do this, a memory surfaced of my mother doing the same thing with dirty cloth diapers when I was a little girl. You know, those things we use as burp pads now that diapers are disposable? How did she DO that for four children?

I still remember the day I was changing the baby’s diaper when Ryan came into the nursery with his arms hanging in front of him in a bad Frankenstein imitation.

“Mommy, I don’t want to wash my hands.”

Oh, God, no.

“What honey?” I asked as I readjusted the diaper for the third time on Sir Squirms A Lot – also known as Ethan, our second child.

“I pooped in my pants and I cleaned them in the potty, but I don’t want to wash my hands,” Ryan patiently explained.

Oh, God, no.

“You what!?” I asked, trying to keep the panic from my voice as the baby began to get fussy at having been too long on the changing table.

“It’s OK, Mommy,” Ryan said. “I flushed.”

OH, GOD, NO!

“You flushed the toilet with your underpants in it?” I asked while silently praying.

“Um hmm,” he mumbled while looking around, already losing interest in our conversation.

I prayed harder, listened for the sound of water sloshing onto the bathroom floor, finished the diaper change in record time and rushed into the bathroom. Thankfully, my son must have held on to his underwear while flushing because they were in a sodden heap on the floor, and the toilet was mercifully unclogged.

I put the baby down, washed Ryan’s hands in spite of his protestations, and dried them off. Less than three seconds later, he stuffed the towel into the toilet as well.

“No!” I yelled, and scrambled over his wet, dirty underpants just in time to grab the towel out of toilet and fling it into the bathtub before it caused an overflow. After a brief conversation about how only Mommy “cleans” underpants, or anything else, in the toilet, I handed off both kids to my husband while I took a much needed break – to clean the bathroom and do some laundry.

All in all, everyone who told us that toilet training was one of the most frustrating things a parent would deal with was right. But we reached that light at the end of the tunnel, and it bathed us in its warmth as we enrolled a fully potty trained Ryan – daytime and nighttime — in preschool.