It has come to this moment. Mini Speaker7 has hit the age where he needs to find a pot to piss in or be resigned to a life full of diapers, so sayeth some parenting blog that routinely makes me feel I fail as a parent. I probably am more of a C-minus kind of mother.
Mini Speaker7 is a few months past 3. He’s a boy, and apparently boys are harder to train than girls, dolphins and some species of monkey. It has been slow-going, which I partially attribute to my laziness, but, hey, those reality television shows aren’t going to watch themselves.
For the past few months, I’ve been regaled with success stories of child-size shitting and urinating on other “friends” Facebook pages. These children–much, much younger than my son–are pooping prodigies:
This has been discouraging because while reading my Facebook newsfeed for two hours, my son shat through another pair of underwear.
I honestly have no idea what I’m doing, and was hoping that my skilled toilet use would be enough. In fact, I recently earned a doctorate in urination from the University of Phoenix.
Some potty training experts say you should just lay down some tarp and let your child act as if he was a drunken idiot at an all-day outdoor concert, glowsticks included. Others exalt the potty “sessions” where the child alternates between screaming “I’m not wearing underwear! I’m not!” and “I’m not wearing diaper! I’m not!” until you suffocate yourself with a diaper genie.
This headline is a bit of a misnomer. A better one would be “How the fuck do you potty train a toddler because, seriously, have you met a toddler? They are out of their fucking minds.”
This is what I’ve attempted:
- A potty training incentive sticker chart
My son screamed “Take it off! Take it off!” when I stuck on a sticker.
- Bribes. At any given moment in my household, you can hear either me or my husband stating the following in a sing-song voice: “If you go pee-pee on the potty, you get a truck. If you go poopy, you get two trucks!” These are the moments you hate yourself.
My son has consistently been a late-bloomer. He arrived early, but has since taken his time in doing many tasks. He walked at 20 months. He crawled at two. He learned to jump about a month ago. He will get there. It is likely he will know how to spell “toilet” before he actually uses it. But he will get there.
As my father likes to say: “Small kids, small problems. Big kids, big problems.”
That is true, but small kids can really produce some massive turds.
Speaker7 