Potty Training Adventures

by Tony Chen

I was getting ready to leave work this past Monday when I got a 5-word text message from my wife:

"poo poo in the potty"

After months of trying, then dropping it (no pun intended), and then bringing it up again with our little one, little Meme finally poo poo-ed in the potty this week at day care!   I can't tell you how much my heart was filled with pride.  It almost rivaled the day he started walking.  My co-workers must of thought I had lost it (again) as I just had to run out of my office and tell someone. "POO POO IN THE POTTY!"

The logical next thought, obviously:  did the day care teacher take a picture of it?

It's been an interesting journey to get to this point.  Potty training seems to be the topic that keeps going and going and going.  On our facebook page, folks talk about it incessantly.  Some Children's hospitals now offer "potty training school" for parents at their wits end.  Guess how many times "potty training" was googled last month?  368,000.   368,000!  I mean, that's almost as many searches that Brooke Burke gets.

My wife and I read all the tips - getting the right equipment, using rewards, scheduling potty breaks, etc.  My parents told me stories about how I was potty-trained in one day by my grandmother -- she was floored to see  your truly at 18 months, still in diapers.  Come on, the kids in China are trained by 6-12 months of age, right?  Apparently, all she did was strip my diaper off all day and lay some newspaper on the ground.  I went.  I saw it.  And I was potty trained.

When all is said and done, potty training is basically this: when they're ready, they're ready.  Yes, we could have done a lot of things (maybe even earlier than we thought) to get them ready.  And yes, it's hard to maintain consistency in our 2-days-per-week-in-day-care, 2-days-per-week-with-grandparents life, but potty training is not something to force, either.   We had seen more and more interest from him especially these last few weeks.  He'd pretend to go.  He'd look forward to the scheduled potty time.  He really wanted that reward lollipop.  The last straw was probably him seeing the kids at day care do it. 

Anyway, what a relief.  Now, let's see if we can get him to do it 2 days in a row.  Then 3.  Then a whole hectic week.  Then, it's onto bedwetting.