High Maintenance Mom

The Wall Street Journal ran an article today about a growing trend in bathroom remodels for toddlers. Those supercute mini toilets at preschools and in the ToysRUs bathrooms are available for your home and it appears they are in demand. The Pocket Physicist and I thought about installing one in our "kids" bathroom because I naively thought there was something I could buy that would help B learn how to use the toilet. After some thought, I opted for two of the less expensive plastic models, which never really worked for us -- he still uses one of them, but not as a toilet.

The first time I remember B asking to use the toilet was on a trip to the Fire Truck expo in Delaware. We were sitting at lunch with friends of mine from the fourth grade and B said something like "poop, poop" or maybe "poop, poop...potty". I smiled at him. At almost 18 months he didn't have very many words that I understood and it was so out of context that I didn't really know what to do. He said it again and I asked if he wanted to use the potty. He said yes and I went back to my conversation. A few minutes later I looked at him, remembered that I had offered a toilet and then took him out of his chair. We went searching for the women's bathroom where I took off his pants, placed him on the toilet, and watched him poop and pee. I remember thinking, "wow, this is going to be easy" as I ignorantly gave B a high five and we walked back to the table...

He continued to use the potty at least once a day for the next month or so. Occasionally, he would go a day or two without wanting to use the potty but on average he went once a day. Then came the joy of finding toilets outside the house. He would ask to pee three times at Fresh Choice or on airplanes (my relationship with purell started when he needed to touch everything in the public bathrooms) and occasionally he'd use the potty enough to make me think he might be ready for underwear. We'd try underwear but he didn't care if he went to the bathroom in the toilet or his underwear so we went back to diapers. We bought pull-ups, feel-and-learn pull-ups, and more underwear but nothing seemed to move us towards self-sufficient toilet use.

Then one day around 34 months, he told one of his teachers, "when I'm three I'm going to be potty trained". We talked about it the next day and he said he was ready. That weekend he asked to wear underwear to his friend's birthday party and then had an accident during the party. I put him back in diapers. On Monday morning, I talked with his teachers and they asked if he had wanted to go back into diapers. I said no and within a few hours he was back in underwear. I was nervous for him for the next few weeks but he was fine.

While the transition to underwear was different than I expected, B is able to use a regular size toilet on his own. I guess we really didn't need the peewee potty, however, the bidet or Japanese robotoilet (click on TOTOKIDS, for fun) with which we had planned to replace it, is another story.