Hindsight

Having small people who still wear diapers is a bummer--buying diapers, running out of diapers, regretting leaving the bag open so the wipes dry out, stinking up the house, adding to the landfills or using water for washing, and longing for the day diapers are done. The problem with potty training (once it’s done, of course) is realizing you didn’t appreciate the convenience of diapers when you had the chance. Anyone who has ever gone anywhere with a newly toilet-trained small person knows that needing to pee, being willing to pee, and having the opportunity to pee are rarely all in the same place at the same time. I had one who never met a public bathroom she didn’t want to visit. I had one who held dry pants hostage by “forgetting” to go pee-pee in the potty chair if she wanted something she didn’t get. I had one whose “Wolverine” costume had to turn into a flannel shirt and jeans “Logan” costume when he (that narrows it down, doesn’t it?) didn’t quite make it in time. I also threw perfectly good panties away on a trip to Disneyland because I wasn’t willing to swish them in the Happiest Toilet On Earth. And now I have one who wears her princessy pink potty-chair on her head. Sometimes diapers look really nice in hindsight. In Robert Munsch’s I Have To Go!, Andrew makes everyone crazy until he and Grandpa figure the potty thing out. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

http://www.amazon.com/I-Have-Go-Classic-Munsch/dp/0920303749

http://robertmunsch.com/

The Potty Dance

Potty training is the bane of toddler parenting. Much like the end of pregnancy has to be really unpleasant to make labor even vaguely worth considering, two year-old diapers become gross and tedious enough to make the often frustrating and seemingly endless experience of potty training worthwhile. It is the very definition of not fun. Even if you are lucky enough to get a kid who will co-operate fairly well, everybody else is tripping over each other to criticize, critique, expound and advise. Not to judge, naturally. Always with best intentions, of course. But, still…Yeah, right! Potty training is one of those times when other people make it clear on a regular basis that they feel you are doing a poor job in comparison to the paragon of effectiveness they were and their method is. No matter when you start training, their well-adjusted child was ready earlier. Any problems you encounter are a mystery and completely foreign to them. Regression and set-backs were never an issue for their self-assured and confident pee-pee prodigy. And accidents were unheard of. In short, if you and yours don’t sail smoothly through the toilet training process, it is because of some personal deficit or character flaw and never because learning to use the potty is just a complicated and emotionally taxing suck-a-thon. Maybe Kelli Kaufmann could playfully write the whimsical sound-story Potty Time With Elmo because she’s never had kids. Or maybe she just went a little batty during toilet training. It could happen.

http://www.amazon.com/Potty-Time-Elmo-Liittle-Sound/dp/141273486X

http://www.amazon.com/Interactive-Play-Sound-Blues-Room/dp/1412733294