Did the Men in Black stop by to do the memory erasey swipey and I don’t remember? Because here we are back with our second kiddo at a challenging milestone and I can’t remember what happened with our first. It’s time to potty train our little guy. First, I’ve got to give credit where it’s due to a little guy who keeps his word. The last few months we asked him if he wanted to try sitting on the potty. He strongly answered no and said he would when he was three. He consistently answered this way every time. And within a day after his third birthday, there he was sitting on the potty and giving the whole thing a real try.
It has been a week and a half and he loves sitting on the potty. Really loves it. What a source of entertainment for him. After a long day of work, which is a time of day I feel extra exhausted and hopeless, my son joyfully ran to the potty and it was time to start the whole shebang. The sitting on the potty, the praising, the flushing, the praising, the hand washing, and the praising. And then within 20 minutes he wanted to do it again. We had to let him! We’re potty training after all!
The dialogue started in my head pretty quickly…how long is this going to take…it took his sister two days to potty train… are we going to make it through this? I also love to go down the road where I think about how the next step is going to be even more difficult. I have visions of reminding him every thirty minutes to listen to his body and go potty, the many accidents we will have, and well don’t get me started on the transition to going poop on the toilet.
Note: Look I want to be one of those bloggers who actually tells you the truth and gives you life changing wisdom. And here it is, when anyone says how quickly they potty trained their child they are only talking about number ones and not number twos. That part takes way more time. WAY MORE. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. If they do they are absolute liars.
Here’s the thing. There’s no way my daughter potty trained in two days. I must’ve felt annoyed and hopeless during her potty training. I imagine being confused and unsure how we were going to make it through the process. But I don’t remember it. We tend to remember the good that pushed us through the hard. It seems like it would need some sort of alien magic mind erasers to do that but it really doesn’t. The sheer exhaustion of parenthood and the million mile an hour speed of it all does the trick on its own. The one constant for me with parenting has always been that every time we master one thing, the next hard thing will present itself. Even if it’s a hard thing we’ve done before. So let’s check back in a few months when I have an awesome little potty trained dude and have a whole new thing to figure out with him. I can’t wait to see what it is.
