She Went to School in a Pull-Up and Came Home Wearing Underwear
Sep 27 2007

We are in the midst of potty training our almost 2 ½ year old girl. Just last week, I sent her to pre-school wearing a Huggies Pull-Up (yes she likes the Cars ones) and 3 pairs of Happy Feet underwear that I got at Target. She came back wearing underwear and had no accidents that day. I was impressed. Unlike our son, who mastered the poo poo part first, she seems to be going for the pee pee part first, which makes for not-fun underwear clean-up. 🙁

Erin was stressed that we missed her sweet spot for training a while back because we tried a few weeks ago and she didn’t seem phased at all about soiling her underwear so we went quickly back to diapers for a little while, but I wasn’t worried. I knew she’d eventually get it…definitely before she was 13!  🙂

Some of the techniques we used on our son didn’t work for her.  Apparently we really lucked out with our son. I heard horror stories about how hard it was to train boys. Thankfully, our non-sleeping son (he’s 5 and he still wakes up at night) made the potty training part of his life fairly easy for us. He started going poo poo in the potty a few months after his 2nd birthday…which I’ve been told is unusual. I’ve heard that most kids get the pee pee part down before the poo poo part.

When he was 2 ½, I was about 8 months pregnant. He was going to pre-school so the teachers had a system of lining up all the kids against the wall and having them take turns going potty. The teachers then said “He’s ready. Send about 5 pairs of underwear and we’ll work with him.” I was thinking to myself “Well OK, I don’t know. I want to wait until after our daughter arrives to start training him because there’s no way I can make a mad dash to the bathroom while carrying him being 9 months pregnant!”

So I reluctantly agreed and took him to school in a diaper (because I didn’t want to be cleaning a car seat mess) and gave them some Spiderman underwear. He had a few accidents and then within days they even took off the Pull-Up during nap. I would pick him up and put a diaper on him for the 25-30 minute ride home because there was no-way I was going to clean up a car seat!  Erin dropped him off one day and the teacher asked him if we were putting our son in a diaper when we got home and he said “Well my wife is 9 months pregnant and she can’t…” and the teacher, who has helped train hundreds of kids, interrupted him and looked at him with a no BS look on her face and said “If you don’t go all the way right now, you will live to regret it.” You have to know the teacher…if she says something, you do it no questions asked, and I’m so glad we did.

It was a bit inconvenient at first but we muddled through it and he was trained before our daughter was born. Phew. It made life much easier for us. I think he had day-time one accident after she was born which was understandable given all the changes going on.

Important: When someone says their kid is potty-trained they usually mean during the day hours when they are awake. Before starting the process I kept thinking “Wow that kid is only 2 and she’s potty trained…even when she naps and sleeps?” In 90% (unscientific generalization on my part) they still wear a diaper or Pull-Up at night and/or nap. Our son was not night potty trained until just after he turned 4.  We put him in underwear the night of his 4th birthday.  A couple of accidents later, he was done and we haven’t looked back!

So our daughter looks like she might figure out the whole pee pee thing in a few weeks but we’re still working on the poo poo part. She just won’t tell us when it’s happening. You have to be right there and see the look on her face and rush her to the potty just in time. She’ll go when she’s there but she won’t tell us before hand. If she’s quiet for too long, I ran frantically around the house to find her to see if she’s in progress. 🙂

Also, she will just sit on the toilet to sit there, laugh, and pull the toilet paper out. Our son would sit there (and pull the toilet paper out) but 95% of the time something came out!  I actually purchased one potty book when we were training him and found the techniques the author presented to be very useful. In particular, we picked a book he liked to be his potty book (which happened to be Who Lives in the Pond – baby einstein book), and we read it when he sat on the toilet.  However, she wasn’t too into that book or others.  Although we bought one of those small potties, we barely used it because it’s not pleasant cleaning it up.  See link to the toilet training book below:

I hope our luck holds out with our daughter with regards to potty training. The process further goes to show that every child is different. If you have any ideas to share, please feel free to leave a comment.

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