Potty Training Marathon

We first started trying to potty train Sprout in June of last year. I figured we'd do the whole weekend potty training routine and we'd be done with it (more or less). Shows what I know! We're now about 9 months in and sometimes I feel like we've made no progress at all. Clearly she wasn't ready when we started, but now? I just don't know.

It reminds me of when she was an infant and I read all those books about babies showing their "tired cues" and how you had to catch them at the first sign and get them to sleep during the "magic sleep window." By all accounts some babies do have obvious tired cues and fall into these methods easily. Then there is my girl. I nearly made myself crazy trying to figure out whether she was "showing sleepiness" by twitching her eye. Turns out, some babies have neon signs and others like to keep it all a secret. My girl is the secretive type.

So it is with potty training. No warning. No poopy face. No pee pee dance. We only know after the fact. As we've moved along we have been able to recognize her needing to go sometimes, but she can still be pretty stealthy. And when she wants to use the toilet, she does. We just haven't managed to convince our little genius that it's a good idea all the time. She just can't be bothered. We've tried every trick in the book.

So for now, we've taught her everything she needs to know to take care of her accidents by herself. She knows where the towels are to clean up her puddles and how to put the dirty clothes and towels in the washer. She knows where the panties and pull ups are and extra clothes. She needs a little help with the stinky accidents, but otherwise, it's all her. If she wants to go to college wearing diapers, then she will just have to change them herself.

So, I guess, if independence is our goal, we've made progress, but she is also recognizing her need to go more and choosing to respond to it more often. One day, maybe she'll be more consistent. Until then, we'll continue to put off buying new carpet and get used to cleaning up accidents and smelling her before we can see her. Crazy girl decided to be completely clean and dry the whole day we traveled on airplanes and rental cars last week while wearing panties. I thought we'd had a major breakthrough, but three days later, it was all back to her normal ambivalent attitude.

My pediatrician husband reminds me that we can't make kids sleep, eat, or poop on the toilet, so we just keep trying new strategies and hope that something sticks. Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood potty episode helped more in 10 minutes than the last 6 months of our attempts, so it probably won't be anything we try that makes the switch flip. Like everything else, she's on her own schedule and she's not about to change it for us. Just seems crazy that the girl can read on a first grade level at age three, but can't figure out potty training.  Oh well! More material to embarrass her when she's a teenager.