oh crap! potty training. my thoughts exactly.

No one prepared me for potty training!! I mean, I don’t know what preparation would have looked like exactly, but man, it was a PROCESS. Any new milestone that I approach with Evangeline (eating solids, sleep training, climbing out of the crib, etc) I go through this angst (CHANGE!). And potty training was no different.

In July, I made a friend who has a girl Evangeline’s age, like week apart. I noticed her taking Coral to the potty one day and was like WHAT! She’s POTTY TRAINED?! I didn’t know we could do that yet! And my friend said, yep, I trained her at 19 months.

MIND BLOWN.

She told me that she read this book and followed that method. I was intrigued because approaching any big change, a book is comforting. So I thought about it a lot, thought about how much it would suck to have to take the time to train Evangeline when right now it was just so easy to let her pee and poop in a diaper. And how would car trips work? How would I go anywhere? 

But then I started listening to the book and was won over by the author pretty quickly. She’s funny and she frames it as a really cool milestone and “your first glimpse into how your child learns.” And I’m all about that. And then she started going through the steps and I was like wait, wait, slow down and Amazon Primed that book ASAP. Help me. 

Her intro and first couple chapters made me realize, Evangeline is totally ready to learn this. I am the limiting factor. So I braced myself, marked the start day on the calendar (September 1, just to give us a few days to calm down after her birthday, and nice clean start date) and cleared our schedule. Honestly, our schedule is going to the library, etc, little fun morning outings, but even letting go of this was hard. Totally home bound for several days? Yikes. 

A couple things were working in my favor with this venture.

1. Our 500 sq foot apartment set to be demolished in June. There’s always a potty within reach! There’s already years and years of pee soaked into this carpet and it’s going to be destroyed soon anyway!

2. Summertime. When I couldn’t keep her inside anymore, I let her go out to the playground with no pants on and brought a potty along. There were many accidents out there, and it was possibly a questionable parenting choice, but other moms were sympathetic.

But still, the first week was SO HARD. Like, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Similar to childbirth, I think there is necessary amnesia associated with potty training. 6 months later, I’ve already forgotten some of how exhausting it was to strike the balance between complete focus and total casualness. I’m watching you super carefully to learn your pee pee dance, but it’s no big deal to me if you pee on the floor, you do you, gf, this is not a power struggle. But I do remember thinking at some point towards the end of that first week – Shoot, if I have more babies, I have to potty train them too. (I did not have that thought after giving birth, btw.)

One of our first trips out, on Day 9, was a walk to campus for a ND football tailgate with seminarians. Got one pee in the potty and one pair of wet pants. I called it a win.

My friend also recommended this portable seat to make big toilets accessible and it was CLUTCH. Basically, all credit goes to Katherine. 🙂

Overall, I recommend Jamie’s method. It’s super intense, but it works. Potty training was all I thought about and talked about for 2 weeks, and then it got more normal. There were (and still are) accidents here and there, but I really liked not having to change her diapers anymore (just down to one baby) and not buying them (!) and throwing them into landfill any longer. After Christmas, when Evangeline had a total regression at Grandma’s house (my fault), we got home and got right back to it and she picked up again in no time.