Root canals.

Being stuck on hold waiting for customer service.

Wet socks.

I would gladly take any of these at the moment over the pain of potty training another child, but here we are again.

Juliet happy

A rare smile in this trying period

Juliet is close to 3 1/2 now, which was around when I began training Drake. I clearly hate potty training and everything that goes with it so I wasn’t eager to start. Juliet is in the township program because of her speech delay and there are no potty training rules, unlike many private schools that ask your child be potty trained before they start school. So I never felt any pressure to really start before I wanted to, and Juliet has not really shown any interest at all herself. I was hoping in some ways that the school would aid me in getting her ready or her gaining some interest while watching her peers in the class go. Neither of these things happened and I think if allowed, Juliet would wear diapers until she was seven.

I bought Juliet some Frozen underwear and started showing it to her about a week before we began to get her mentally ready. On the first day I put them on her she cried, and I knew this was going to be as wonderful as it was with her brother. I had emailed her teacher telling her about our beginning steps and told them that if it was clearly an issue or too disruptive for them to stick her back in the pulls ups I sent her in, and I would work on it solely at home. The school made her a potty chart and said they would update me about any successes (none as I type this), but for the most part Juliet has stayed dry in the few hours she is at school.

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Like Drake I couldn’t fully get on board with the naked method. I didn’t like the idea of my child running around bottomless sitting and touching things as well as possibly making horrible messes everywhere, especially since Fiona is crawling all over the place. After going through agony with Drake running back and forth into the potty every twenty minutes, getting nowhere, and frustrating both of us to death, I resolved this time to just let Juliet be. I knew the first time she was going to have an accident and I was hoping perhaps after having it happen a few times it would maybe help everything click together faster.

The first time Juliet wet herself she was beside herself and I thought maybe it was going to work; but alas potty training, at least with my kids, is anything but fast and easy. Juliet went on to have multiple accidents, large and small, and we would race back and forth from the potty many times not having any success, and like her brother Juliet would get increasingly agitated about staying on the potty. I would try to bribe her with the tablet but even that wouldn’t get her to stay. After some huge accidents she started to have some tiny ones where she would wet her underwear, scream pee, and we would rush to the potty. Seeing only a small amount of pee in her underwear let me know that she probably had more and would eventually have to let it out, but keeping her on the potty in that interim was the tricky part. Still this has lead to most of our success with keeping her on the potty using a mixture of the tablet, talking to her, comforting her as she sits on the toilet, and all other forms of bribery a three-year-old can grasp. We have had four successful pees and two number twos since then, which were highly celebrated moments in our home with a lot of dancing, praise, and chocolate for everyone.

The weekend lead to some small setbacks as Juliet had a sleepover with Drake at her aunt and uncle’s as well as several outings with them which lead to her using pulls ups for much of the weekend. The new week is starting again so I’m hoping that we can try again more consistently and have a few more success. I think this time potty training might be going a little better because I have stopped being so rigid. I’ve accepted the idea that it might take longer, and that it’s ok to have these breaks where we use pull ups to give Juliet and I both some breaks in our sanity. I think as second times go I am less worried overall knowing that we will eventually get there, and that it’s not worth adding to the stress and agony that this situation is already going to be. At this point if Juliet is at least mostly day trained by the new year I think I will take it as a win.