Potty Training is the Worst

Once your child turns two, people stop telling you how cute your kid is and instead start asking, “When are you going to start potty training?” This is a loaded question because what I want to say is, “Why the hell is that any of your business? How about you worry about yourself and I’ll worry about my toddler’s bathroom habits!” Apparently though, this might seem offensive and rude so I usually just make some vague comment or laugh about how I’m not looking forward to it. Har dee har har, ha ha ha, move on people, there’s nothing to see here.

Nobody really wants to get into this topic of conversation because it never ends well. Either you get lots of unsolicited advice or you piss someone off by not living up to their expectations. Yes, vague acquaintance, please, let me toilet train my child according to how you think it should be done. You are either regaled with stories of how their precocious progeny was fully toilet ready at 18 months (Just…why?) followed by a ten minute explanation of how awesome their child is or you hear a horror story involving severe constipation, doctor’s visits and not being trained until they were 4 and what a complete nightmare it was. I’m never sure how I’m supposed to react to this. Am I supposed to complement/sympathize? How long do I have to stand there nodding my head and offering nondescript murmurings before I can escape this conversation unscathed?

You can’t compare two kids from the same parents, let alone two kids from different parents. It’s just not going to happen. They have different personalities, different levels of stubbornness, and a different birth order. (If you think this doesn’t matter, ask my husband how much more spoiled the fourth and final child is.) What works for one kid might not work for another. Your kid might think toilet training is awesome because he can pee standing up, but another kid might have a traumatic “butt-falling-into-the-cold-toilet-water” experience and have severe potty training PTSD. One kid might like a sticker reward, the other might like m&m’s. Just like everything else, it’s a crap shoot as to what will finally work and you just cross your fingers that you won’t get too many (more) gray hairs getting to the finish line.

But the worst part is that we seem to have time tables and schedules for these precious beings of ours. It’s like as soon as they are born we are already filling in their desk calendar. “Well, you need to eat solid food in six months and we’ll pencil you in for crawling around 8 months, but we can push that to 9 months if you’re too busy discovering how your hands work. And by the way, we will expect you to be fully toilet trained after a mere two and a half years on this planet. Three tops.”

Are you kidding me right now? I don’t even think my teenagers are fully trained, and since I am the one who cleans the bathrooms, I’m pretty sure I would be the one to know. But we expect our poor kids to get the hang of it by 3? The same kids who can’t even run without tripping and need help doing everything other than feeding themselves. (And some days even that isn’t even a sure thing.) Oh sure, that seems completely feasible. Until it’s not.

Unfortunately, the generations before us have already pre-filled those calendars with expected dates of when certain tasks should be completed. Then we label it the “normal” time. “Well, they normally start walking around a year old.” Puh-lease! Only two of my kids walked close to a year old, the other two figured out they could move faster crawling. Do you know what these guide line dates are? Ulcers for parents. The fastest way to stress a parent out, especially a first timer, is to mention that their kid isn’t on target for a milestone. Do you know what a fertile mom brain can do with this information? Panic. Worry. Stress. Search the web for support groups of parents of other kids who are clearly underachievers. Stress some more. Mistakenly go on WebMD and find twelve different ways your child could potentially be ill because of one ambiguous symptom they had one time last year. Panic some more.

See? It’s not a good cycle.

But parents are supposed to want to stop buying diapers and get their kids to stop killing landfills. People LOVE to say, “Just think, no more buying diapers!” and “How much easier will it be?” The answer to this is: It won’t be! It’s not easier. At least, not til they’re 5 and you’ve gotten the nightmare far enough behind you that you stop self-medicating with wine and chocolate. In fact, it’s probably the farthest from easy that you can get. Because this is potty training in a nutshell: Put your kid in underwear. Ask if they have to go potty 47 times an hour. Put them on the toilet once every 30 minutes because they said no the last 20 times you asked. Sit with kid for 10 minutes until you take him off the toilet. Turn around to wash hands. Turn back around to see kid has wet his pants. Strip kid, wash them up, put clean underwear and pants on. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Potty training is a gallon of “Do you have to go potty” mixed with 2 cups of frustration and 35 gallons of water….for laundry.

 Plus, based on the number of disgusted looks in my direction, I have to ask: Is potty training only a “Mom job”? Because I would totally be okay with it. If this was 1950. Sadly, however, it is not. We are in the year 2017. There are cool things called “Dads” now, who are active participants in their child’s care and upbringing. Huh. Imagine that. So instead of saving all of your judgmental comments on why my kid is 3 years and 3 months old and not toilet ready just for me, aim some of them pointed barbs at Daddy dearest too. We split child care AND snotty child rearing comments. We’re good like that. And if you don’t like it, maybe my kid will “accidentally” pee on your floor. You can’t blame the poor kid, after all he’s just getting the hang of this thing.

Summer Time and the Living is Meh

Remember when you were a kid and it was summer vacation? The world was your oyster baby! No school, swimming all day long, watermelon, ice cream, fireworks, staying up late…and it seemed like it lasted forever. Long, endless days that stretched before you full of complete and utter summer bliss.

And then you grew up and realized that the real world doesn’t give you the summer off. Unless you’re a teacher and frankly, scoring the summer off isn’t enough incentive for me to deal with all those sticky handed, snot dripping, sass mouthed heathens. (I am qualified to assess my child tolerance levels based on the four sticky handed, snot dripping, sass mouthed heathens I gave birth to.) Until you have your own kids, summer is just that “Meh” time where you don’t have to wear a jacket to work. Most of that summer just joy gets sucked right out of your life. You go through your daily grind until the next holiday weekend or until your vacation, fondly thinking of the days of old when July and August were one endless party.

Then you have kids of your own and some of that joy comes back. You get to see those steamy, dreamy days of summer through your children’s eyes and vicariously relive the excitement and wonder that those two months bring. Unfortunately though, now YOU are the one who gets to finance the summer adventures and make sure they have something to look back and reminisce over. In between going to work and carrying on your regular, boring old 12-months-a-year-routine that is.

Unfortunately, my kids don’t seem to understand that functioning members of society require these pesky things called jobs in order to pay for their sun soaked adventures they’re concocting for the next two months. The three year old REALLY doesn’t seem to understand this as he we have the following exchange every morning when I’m getting him dressed:

3: Why do I haf to go to Nancy’s? (Daycare)

Me: Because Mommy has to go to work.

3: Why you haf to go to work?

Me: So we can have money.

3: Why do we haf money?

Me: So we can pay for things like food, and tv, and snacks and the iPad.

THIS he gets. You just have to speak their language. He could care less that we have to pay the mortgage or the lights or the car insurance. If I told him we wouldn’t be able to sleep in our house if we didn’t pay the mortgage he’d think , “Oh cool, we get to sleep outside.” To make it more relatable, you gotta hit him where it hurts most. (Mostly his stomach.) “Ok, so no work means no iPad. Got it. No money, no you tube kids, no blueberries, and no Bubble Guppies. Alrighty then. You just go on to work now Mom and make that money for me to enjoy my creature comforts. Oh and send Dad to work too because I could really use some more animal crackers and Matchbox cars.” (Until they start kindergarten, life is just one big summer for them. Lucky sons of a gun. (Sons of a guns? Son of a guns?)

Summer for kids is much different than summer for parents. Summer for parents means we now have to coordinate daycare, summer camps, plus try to find time to “make memories” that don’t involve rushing, swearing, and running 1,000 errands. (Which is literally our life in a nutshell most days.) We have to add an additional 10 minutes to any outdoor excursion to add sunscreen and bug spray. We have to bathe the filthy little ragamuffins every night. (Or at least hose them down in the backyard. What? It’s not like they’re going anywhere important for the next 8 weeks.) We have to stock up on bandages for the bug bites that will bleed because even though we’ve told them 30 times to stop scratching they won’t listen to us. We’ll buy ice cream and neat marshmallow sticks to make s’mores and slip n’ slides that they’ll think are so cool until they somehow slide on it the wrong way and give themselves red belly. We lose 30 minutes of sanity time every night because our kids get to stay up later on non-school nights. (Whose %$*!% idea was this anyway? It just makes ME more tired, not you. You’re still bouncing out of bed at 6:30 AM.) It means having half the neighborhood kids at your house sometimes and sometimes being able to send your kid to drive someone else’s parents nuts. It means we’ll make  a big deal out of small things like going to get ice cream, watching fireworks, or going to the park so that you believe it’s the best summer EVER and not just that your tired parents are trying to make you think you’re having an awesome summer.

Summer for parents is 45 reminders a day that you need to wear shoes outside so you don’t hurt your feet and about 20 of them your kid will actually hear. (Whether they’ll actually put shoes on is probably only like 10 of those 45 though.) We can become the cool parents by letting you have ice cream for dinner when its 90 degrees outside and by jumping in puddles in your bathing suit in summer rain storms and we will totally let you do that if only for the 20 minutes of restoration time we can get out of it. Summer is when we don’t have to pack school lunches but we have to buy A LOT of snacks because fresh air, sunshine and water make you hungry, hungry caterpillars. I know we will go to countless cookouts, picnics, and parties and it’ll be a struggle to feed all the kids because one is picky about food preparation, one is picky about who prepares it, and one is just plain picky and eats 10 things total (and none of them are on this table). They will eat too many popsicles, they won’t sleep as much as they should, and their feet will be permanently stained that dirt color. But that’s ok. Because one day they get to be the boring old parents, wishing they could be back in the leisurely days of summers past. So enjoy it kids. September is right around the corner.