2.5 and potty training?
we’ll try anything—even pandas
Six months ago, spurred by daycare anxiety, we attempted one of those rush, weekend potty-training things—you know, where all the kid wears is real underwear, in the belief that a couple wet panties will spur them to sit. Yeah, well, that didn’t work. As I went back to work and we stocked back up on size 4 Pampers Cruisers [both the leftover Pull-Ups and the licensed-character-festooned big-girl-underwear are stuffed in a drawer somewhere], we kept trying to encourage The Pumpkin to use the potty. Of course, the new daycare routine means that we’re not around for most bathroom breaks, and the daycare provider, with 8-ish kids to watch, can’t be expected to potty-train her for us when she still won’t tell her, or even us for the most part, when she needs to go. And that older-kids-modeling/peer-pressure thing, which we had hoped might work at daycare, ain’t happening either.
That’s not to say that’s it’s been a total wash. While the bribe-with-rubber-stamps method didn’t work, the bribe-with-candy [in this case, rainbow sprinkles left over from a sundae party] method at least has lodged in her brain. “That candy is for when I sit the potty,” she’ll say, pointing to the container of sprinkles on the kitchen counter. What it doesn’t do, seemingly, is provide enough motivation to actually get her in there and “put pee and poop in the potty” in order to get said candy. But at least she knows it’s there, right? [Of course, her reaction to the few sips of Coke I begrudgingly let her have in the Philippines leads me to believe that maybe that’d be a better motivator, but that would just be wrong. Right? And yes, I’ll be posting about the big balikbayan trip soon, I promise!]
But where was I? Yeah, how there actual has been progress. There have been at least a handful of times where she’s actually, of her own volition, sat down, waited, and done number two in the potty. [Interesting that most stories I read on the web are of kids who’ll pee in the toilet but not the other thing—with her it’s the other way around.] She’s done it with both me and her mom. I even have a voicemail saved at work of her mother ecstatically singing that The Pumpkin “put poop in the potty!” Heh. But most of the time, nada. You wanna sit the potty? No, she says. It almost seems like she used to at least sit, if not actually do anything and while still wearing pants and a diaper at the same time, more often before, and it’s gotten less frequent that she’ll volunteer to sit.
Sigh... I know, I know, every kid is different, and 2-and-a-half isn’t that old. But we’re still eyeing that must-be-potty-trained Montessori pre-school for the fall, and.... So, basically, we’re up for anything that reinforces the message. So, when the Parent Bloggers Network offered to send along an animated motivational DVD for my impressionable and TV-loving toddlergirl, I said, what the heck, sign me up!
And you know what? She freakin’ loves “Go Potty Go!” The 20-minute original musical cartoon features characters Paige and Peter Panda and a coterie of animal friends, all of whom are big kids who wear “big kid underwear” of assorted sizes, colors and patterns and who no longer need to do their business in diapers, ‘cause, as one song says, “diapers are for babies.” There are also scenes interspersed featuring a couple human cartoon kids instructing those transitioning to big-kid status on the finer points of potty chairs, toilet paper, hand-washing, and the aforementioned big-kid underwear, via cute little talk-to-the-screen games and deviously catchy sing-along songs.
Speaking of those songs, dude.... It’s enormously fun to watch the Pumpkin dancing around in front of the TV maniacally to the eponymous theme song or marching and singing along with the Panda twins and their animal friends to the showstopping reprise of a song whose chorus is “We wear underpants everyday!” You think I’m being facetious but I’m not—you seriously cannot get this song out of your head. “We wear underpants everyday!” I kid you not. And she loves it. She sees the DVD case and wants to watch it, she starts singing the songs, talking about pandas and potties and panties (oh my!)... She can watch this short video repeated, like, five times in a row. Not that I’d do that, or anything. [“Again! Again!”] Okay, on our driving trip to San Francisco, this was a favorite on the portable DVD player, but c’mon, it was a five-hour drive.
Now, the PR material, the website, the DVD box text, none of it promises any miracles. They talk about familiarizing your child with concepts, processes. And while she was by no means ignorant of this stuff beforehand—
several books, three potty seats, and countless repetitive “sit the potty” lessons attest to that—more back-up can’t hurt. But after a couple months of asking for the pandas and singing about the glories of bikinis and briefs, is she any closer to ditching those peskily juvenile diapers? Sadly, no. But one can dream, right?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007