Of course does anyone really like potty training. It can be nothing but frustrating and exhausting. However the flip side of it is that by the end of it - if you survive - you have a kid who isn't in diapers anymore. And let's all think a moment on the money saved not having to pay for diapers. Life is definitely a bit easier too.
However the act of actually getting to that point where your kid is potty trained is pretty dang awful actually. Somehow we got through potty training Addison and lived to tell the tale. But when Connor came around I dreaded it. Even though I did it once before I still felt completely clueless and was sure it had just been complete luck that Addison had gotten there in the first place. Not to mention I had heard that boys were much harder to potty train and could take longer. Something about them not minding sitting in their own urine and such.
Needless to say I was dreading potty training Connor, but when I signed him up for the peer program with the school preschool I knew I had to get him potty trained, ready or not - me, not him. All this being said, he has been potty trained for almost a year now so I'm just a little behind writing this all down. So spoiler alert - somehow he too got potty trained.
He was definitely more challenging in so many ways. First he didn't care to use the toilet which I had hoped he would be more interested since he had a big sister who use the toilet, but he just flat out didn't care. And secondly, without going into too much detail we struggled with constipation with him and that definitely added a level of challenges that I wasn't ready for at all. However I will stop here and say that this is all I'm going to say on the internet about those struggles because nothing dies on the internet and I'm not going to put it all out there. We did survive it so if you have a kid going through the same thing then I will be more than happy to share how we survived it but it's not going in such a public forum.
So when we started we decided we were going to do the same thing with him as we did with Addison and just use the timer. We would go every 15 minutes if he didn't go then every 45 minutes if he did. It's such a good idea in theory but add in the fact that we had a big sister who desperately wanted attention, a stubborn little boy with basically no interest, a new baby and a very tired mom in the middle of it all stressed that he wouldn't be able to actually take the accepted spot in the peer program. Basically we were a hot mess.
But we celebrated small victories and muddled through. We encouraged and twice had to take a complete break all together because nobody was handling it well. But then we started to get our feet under us. Addison was in school. Emma slept most of the time. I could just focus on getting Connor on track and it was finally working. He was still in pull-ups at night and naptime but I could handle that.
Then summer hit and it all hit the fan. We started having more issues with the issue I'm not discussing further and it became harder to get him to go to the bathroom at all. Rob got many calls during the day of me just sobbing because I was frustrated and upset. I was sure I was doing it all wrong and he would never get there.
But apparently Connor got his stubbornness from me and about late July we finally got our groove again. It wasn't perfect but it would hobble us through. It felt confident about sending him to school in just a few weeks. I was nervous but he was where he was and things were manageable. If we are being perfectly honest I don't know how we got through it.
Once he started going to school, we stopped having accidents all the sudden. It occurred to me one day that he hadn't had an accident in several weeks and we celebrated that mega victory. We finally got there. Of course he was still in pull-ups at night, but I had stopped using them at naptime because he wasn't napping as much and when he was he wasn't sleeping too long and he was dry.
Through September (he was three and a half by this point) we started noticing he was waking up dry in the morning. He went to the bathroom before bed and first thing in the morning and nothing in his pull-up in the morning. We in early October we decided to try underwear at night. We were excited about the thought of him only in underwear (we do have another one in diapers after all). Let's just say we haven't looked back. He does wake up us sometimes because he has to go to the bathroom - unfortunately he doesn't just go in the middle of the night by himself but he does wake up when he has to go.
It hasn't been complete smooth sailing. Sometimes there's a hitch but the constipation issue is behind us as well and Connor is in underwear all the time. He's even a pro at public bathroom - which is something Addison struggled with for a very long time. I should add that we haven't tried taking on standing to pee yet but he's still pretty young, so we'll get there. The important part is that he's potty trained and we survived it.
The entire process was completely frustrating and exhausting and I don't remember half of it to be honest because it was one giant fight for months and months. But we all came out better. However I'm sure I'll feel just as clueless when I do this one more time with Emma, but two out of three potty trained means odds are in my favor that I'll be successful.
If you want to read about how we did it with Addison check out here and here.
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