Potty Talk

When I was pregnant with Emma, I assumed that, with proper focus and example, I could easily train my daughter to use the toilet like a civilized human with relative ease. After all, in some countries babies are toilet trained well before their first birthday. My own sister—my mother’s first born—trained herself at thirteen months. I set a goal for eighteen months, and contentedly envisioned a world where I wasn’t buying Size 6 diapers for four years.

The plan was simple. I set up a training toilet in the bathroom I frequented most and encouraged her to sit on it anytime I was using the facilities. The association of our respective seats was obviously going to become clear to her, and she would be begging to pee in the toilet before I knew what was even happening.

This did not happen.

That training toilet played a variety of roles in that bathroom, most notably, step stool, tripping hazard, storage bin for random junk she collected from around the house, and decorative furniture. Only once did it actually collect the child’s pee. I may or may not have actually cleaned it. It’s hard to say. I’ve had a kid since then.

I decided that eighteen months was a crazy goal, and accepted that I would be purchasing diapers for a while more. After all, at that point I was nearly halfway through my second pregnancy and was lacking energy in the severest of ways. Nevertheless, there were still a few ill-fated attempts at potty training. I bought the girl a package of training panties. They are so cute! Flowers, polka dots, pink trimming…you know, everything a girl could possibly need to pee on after she gets off the toilet. Every once in a while I get a wild hair and think, “Ooh! Today I will put her in panties and sit her on the toilet every 20 minutes. That’ll do the trick! And I love watching her touch her hands all over the toilet seat and try to see her own hoo-ha while yelling, “Mommy, see? Hahaha! See?!”” It’s amazing how she can maneuver on that toilet seat.

So I put her in a pair of training pants and carefully explain to her that when she needs to pee like Mommy, she needs to tell me so that we can run to the toilet and pee on the toilet. The latest example of this was complete with changing “pee” to a sound effect: “psssssssshh”. I'm still not sure how that sound effect became a thing... 

“Hey Emma, do you need to pssssssshh on the potty? Let Mommy know when you need to psssssshh on the potty, okay?”

“Pssssssshh on pah-ee? O-tay!”

“Go ahead and pssssssshh on the potty Emma, okay? You will get a sticker if you psssssshh on the potty!”

“Yayyyyy!”

*15 minutes later*

“Emma, are you going to psssssssshh on the potty? Because you need to get down if you aren’t ready to psssssssshh on the potty.”

“Mommy, I psssssshh on potty.”

“Let me check…no, you didn’t pssssshh on the potty. You can do it later though, okay? Remember, if you need to pssssssshh on the potty, come and tell Mommy.”

“O-tay!”

The next thing I knew I was sitting on the couch nursing the baby when I suddenly noticed that Emma is sitting on the rug in front of me, furiously trying to remove her undies. I tried to talk her through it, but tiny dictators don’t respond well to direct orders. After they were removed, I further inspected the situation and found that they were, indeed, soaked with pee  psssshh and that my daughter still isn’t potty trained.

I wonder how long she will be a Size 6?