The Potty Train

According to my post labels, I have only written about potty training once. That can't be right, but I know I've been kind of slack on recording the details of the process, so here goes.

To start at present and go backwards, I guess Amelia is pretty much potty trained. Yesterday, she was in her carseat without a diaper, and she said, with alarm, "I'm peeing!"

"Okay!" I said. "Can you try to stop and you can get out and pee in your travel potty?"

Dean pulled the car over and I rushed out to get Amelia. Her underwear were a little wet and she peed all over her pants trying to squat behind the car (she refused to sit on the travel potty: "Pee on the dirt!") but her car seat was dry. Score! In retrospect I realize I should have just removed her pants but we were in a hurry.

Amelia has been using the potty at home now for quite some time. As long as she is not wearing a diaper, she will generally ask to go when she needs to go. There have been several pee-on-the-floor incidents when, I guess, she has been too busy to stop and go. After one of these times I try to remember to ask her if she has to go, but overall she has pretty much been in charge of asking for herself. We were still doing diapers for outings until one day a week or two ago when I just forgot to put a diaper on her and she asked to go to the potty while we were out. Close call but no accident. After that I figured I should try to take the whole affair outside of the house more often. This takes more work on my part than Amelia's in that I have to remember to get her to try to use the bathroom before we leave, and remember to ask her use it while we are out and there is a bathroom available. This is one of the things that makes diapers much easier than being potty trained. It can be hard enough to get Amelia out the door and from place to place while we are out without adding a trip to the bathroom into the mix. But overall things have gone pretty smoothly. So far she has not peed on the floor of a public place and I hope this continues to be the case.


This travel potty has been key to the process. It works in two ways, as a child-size potty seat to use on adult-size toilets and as its own little potty seat complete with absorbent plastic bags you can set up and use anywhere. We mostly use it as a travel potty seat since Amelia is afraid to sit on a big toilet, even if I hold her on it. We have used it with the plastic bags once or twice and Amelia thought that was great fun. I keep it in a plastic bag in the diaper bag along with some Lysol wipes for public toilets and cleaning it after use in public places.

Overall, if someone were to ask me for advice about the process, I would say these three things. First, read a lot about potty training. I checked out about ten books from the library on potty training and there are a LOT of different methods and ideas out there. For example, I decided against any sort of reward system like star charts or M&Ms but I know people who have used them with success. Reading a lot about the process helped me pick the methods that I thought would work best with us.

Second, if you can, take your time. One of the first things I read about potty training was from a book that defined potty training as a very long process that begins when your child first becomes aware of potties and what they are for and ends when she can consistently use the bathroom completely independently. Obviously that is going to take a LONG time--I imagine it will be a year or two before Amelia is totally out of diapers and doesn't need me to help her on the potty and pull up and down her pants and wash her hands and sit there and play "bath toy animals pee" for half an hour every time she goes. We have had the luxury of not being in any rush at all--no deadline for any sort of program that required potty training, no feeling in my mind (and I had to fight against this for awhile) that Amelia needed to be potty trained by any certain date. This allowed me to follow the advice of several friends with older kids not to make potty training a power struggle or push it too early, which can backfire. It also allowed us to kind of ebb and flow (no pun intended)--some days we used diapers, some days not so much. If Amelia ever asked for a diaper, I just put one on her, and there were definitely some days or weeks that she just didn't want to use the potty.

The third thing I would advise, and this is connected to the second, is not to make having your child being potty trained some kind of marker on how good or not good a parent you are. This sounds obvious, but it is surprising how tempting it can be to feel good and happy when your child uses the potty, and to feel bad and upset when she doesn't. I have tried (and still do) to let this be about Amelia and not about me, and to not be in a rush.