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I am in the process of potty training my laatlammetjie. She is three years old. Being a third child, it would actually be more accurate to say that I am letting her teach herself, because my older children are in the middle of writing exams and I don’t really have time to follow her around with the famous yellow potty.
This potty has been in our family for over a decade now. I bought it when my son Roald was two years old, because he seemed to be taking an interest in his bodily functions. Being quite young myself, I didn’t know the first or last thing about potty training, so I took the advice of my mother-in-law: “Get it over and done with, it will only take two weeks.”
Thing is – we had a brand new baby at the time. I should have known it wasn’t such a good time. This is how it went:
I sit down to feed baby Aniek. Roald suddenly shouts, I WANT TO WEE!! So I hastily put Aniek down (she would start screaming, of course) and Roald and I run to the bathroom. He sits on the potty waiting for something to happen. He insists on a story. Then another. All the while there’s the baby’s yelling in the background. Nothing happens in the potty. So we accept that it was a false alarm, and we leave the bathroom.
Ten steps down the passage: WEEEEEEEEEE!!!! Huge puddle on the carpet, pants, shoes and socks wet. Sigh. Here we go again.
I tried putting a nappy on him again for a while, but by this time he wasn’t having any of that. So we had to press on. He was able to feel when the wee was coming, but could not hold it in for even one second, so it inevitably came in his pants. It was up to me to take him to the potty every half hour – and children don’t like being interrupted every half hour when they are playing. It was a whole year before he really could help himself completely by both knowing it was time to go and managing to get to the potty and have the pants down in time. Not to mention the test of my patience. I think he realised that saying “Weee!!” was a way of getting instant attention and getting Mum to put the baby down and be with him instead.
At night, I would sit him on the potty at midnight and he would wee without really waking up. But it was a hassle and it was often too late anyway. We had to change his sheets many times.
Looking back, with the wisdom of hindsight, I should have just left it for another year. It was crazy to start potty training when he was barely two, and when his baby sister was a month old.
Moving on to child number two: When Aniek was 22 months old, she said that she wanted to use the potty. As you can imagine, I wasn’t keen. I was happy to wait another year! But she was quite insistent. She was doing splendidly by her own little self for a whole month. Then she regressed and wanted nothing to do with the yellow potty. Six months later we tried again, and this time it worked, although she couldn’t really be trusted to go by herself and I still had to take her to the potty when I thought it was time for a wee. I left her in a nappy at night until she had gone for several weeks without wetting her nappy at night, before leaving that one off. It was never necessary to take her for a wee in the middle of the night.
Back to Mila the laatlammetjie: This time I vowed to WAIT. The potty was hidden away until she was almost three. I would even have waited some more if I hadn’t decided to enrol her in a playschool that required the kids to be (more or less) potty trained. The teachers were willing to help train her. So off she went, wearing her new panties. I felt a little guilty about it: just because she’s not wearing a nappy doesn’t mean she’s potty trained! She had lots of puddles at school and still doesn’t like doing a poo in the potty. That always ends up in the pants. But I decided to just let her be. The great thing about having waited, is that I don’t have to chase after her with the potty or interrupt her every half an hour to see if she needs to wee. She goes all by herself! Because she is a little older, she can hold it in for a minute, leaving enough time to reach the potty. She still wears the nappy at night and naptime. These will stay on until they stay dry throughout the night or nap.
Pretty soon she’ll be using the toilet (she is practising at school) and the yellow potty will probably be thrown away after ten years of service. I won’t be sad to see it go, to be quite honest!
© Erica Neser-Nieuwenhuis. Erica is the author of Baby Sleep Guide. See www.adept.co.za/~erica for more info.
