Poop.

Our latest endeavour is to have Danica housebroken, err… potty trained. ASAP. We actually might have been able to begin the process five or six months ago, because she was fairly in tune with when she had to go, and she used to make faces when she was pooping. We put off potty training her because 1) we thought she was too young, 2) she couldn’t pull her pants down herself, and 3) we thought she might regress when Colin was born.

Unfortunately, that might have been a mistake. Potty Training: Day 1 took place on Thursday, June 26. We were prepped and ready for The Girl to take the next step and dump her diapers. We picked up a potty chair (Safety 1st Potty ‘n’ Step Stool – wait for the forthcoming blog about potty chairs), some Pampers pull-ups, and panties of several different varieties.

Now that I think about it, we went a little overboard with the panties. We’ve probably got about fifteen pairs total in every style, which is probably more underwear than I own. We bought Curious George panties, Elmo panties, pink panties, purple panties, panties with butterflies on them, panties without butterflies on them, and I think we even bought that kind that tennis players wear with the pocket for a tennis ball (just in case).

Did I mention the Training Pants Saga? I’m not super sure it deserves to be capitalized, but it was a pain in the ass. See, as a guy, I know nothing about anything baby or toddler until my wife explains it to me (duh). Of course, I’ve heard of training pants, but just figured they’d stepped aside for pull-up diapers, which, for the most part, they have. Long story short is that I went to Target, Mervyn’s, and Wal-Mart looking for them until I stumbled upon a post on some parenting website about them being available at K-Mart. So I find that there’s still a K-Mart about ten minutes from us and had to go there.

Beyond the supplies, Kindra picked up the book Toilet Training in Less Than a Day, which her friend Martha had said worked for her kids. Newsflash: potty training CAN take just one day… you just have to pick the right one. We’re pretty sure that day was not the right one (I might add that I was a bit skeptical of this book due to the fact that it was original published in the mid-1970’s and had a section about “retarded” children).

Anyway, the idea is that you sit the child on the potty chair, feed her drinks, and keep her there until some pee-pee appears in the potty. From the point of success, you praise them for being dry, not for going to the bathroom. Problem #1 of this method was that we gave her so much to drink, she was constantly urinating. Problem #2 was that while we kept her on the potty for 15-20 minutes at a time, she wouldn’t actually pee while on the chair. Of course, 30 seconds after she got up, she’d pee in her pull-up. Problem #3 is that Kindra tried putting panties on Danica to see if she’d keep those dry. We ended up going through pretty much the entire stack of panties that we’d bought. In less than four hours.

So… we kept trying throughout the weekend, without much success. Danica will tell us she needs to go to the bathroom, but only after actually wetting her diaper. We’re pretty sure Danica understands what she’s supposed to do. After all, she keeps asking us for the chocolate we were rewarding her with, but we figure the real problem is that she just doesn’t mind sitting around in a wet diaper. *Sigh* I guess like pretty much every other milestone so far, she’ll just get around to it when she feels like it.

Hmm… Who knew I would ever wax on about potty training?