We potty trained The Little Girl at about 36-39 months old.
Disclaimer: By potty training here, I mean training her to urinate into the toilet bowl using a toilet seat with toilet seat insert for children. Also includes personal hygiene and proper hand washing with soap, water and drying afterwards.
Further disclaimer: We are still working on squat toilet technique.
Final Disclaimer: This is NOT the best method.
Back to our experience...
It coincided with the final trimester when I was carrying Bean and if not for Miss K at the Playschool, I would not have initiated it (I had wrongfully thought it was too much for me to deal with!).
Surprisingly, The Little Girl was ready and she was able to stay dry both day and night with the caveat that we had to cue her potty calls initially.
We made it on account of trial and error - when we could have bought a book and read up ahead just like so many other area of parenting...tsk tsk tsk...
Excitingly, we had to repeatedly cue her before car rides (oh, we had an incident once where she told us she needed the loo when in fact she had already done it in her car seat - horrors!). On the bright side, I learnt how to handwash and dry car seat covers *pout*
We also learnt to never allow her too much to drink if we were dining out (rushing to the loo midway through an expensive meal and leaving a table full of our meal to be taken away - horrors!).
On the upside, her biggest achievement was staying dry from Kuala Lumpur to Batu Feringghi with only one toilet break at Ipoh. Score for that road trip!
Due to my own insecurities/laziness, we still gave her the option of a pair of disposable pull up pants at night but eventually upgraded her to one of those cloth training pants with cotton padded inserts.
Photo above- day time training pants.
Our secret was: We bought the most boring design we could find so as to motivate her toward the more attractive and comfortable cotton panties.
Photo above - night time/sleeping training pants.
Initially there were a few accidents at night around 5 or 6 am but luckily for us, the hospital quality bed absorbant liners protected our mattresses. A quick grab of all wet sheets and clothing, 60C machine wash and tumble dry were real blessings!
Slowly but surely those accidents lessened and one fine day, it felt as if she had been potty trained since...forever!
The biggest relief was not having to buy her anymore disposable pull up pants, compensated only by having to purchase one of those disposable toilet seat liners to prevent getting dirty at public facilities.
Was I ready to potty train her? No.
Was the effort worth it? Yes!
Do I remember how tough it was? Not really.
*sometimes I love having a vague memory of the difficult/challenging parts to parenting*
By all means, do buy that book on potty training. It just makes life so much simpler. Rule No. 1: Relax.
Happy potty training!
