Unintentional Potty Training

I’m a planner. It’s kind of hand-in-hand with the ‘recovering Type A overachiever’ description that you see in my headline bar with the booty sniffing cow.

I have a spreadsheet for what we need to pack when we go on vacations. I write down a list of weekly meals when I’m preparing my grocery list. I make a ton of notes in my phone so that I don’t forget about doctor and dentist appointments.

Since Jack turned two in February, I had planned to start potty training over the summer. I figured that timing would be great since he’d be the right age, shorts are easier to pull down and I would be spending some additional time at home with vacations.

I bought two potty’s (one for my mom’s house) a couple months ago and have pretty much ignored them since then. We occasionally talk about them with Jack in vague terms like, “oh, when you’re bigger that’s where you’ll go pee.”

No big deal.

I had on my list to read some potty training books, have him pick out some big boy underoos and maybe buy some sort of sticker chart… because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?

Well, much like Jack didn’t feel like waiting for his due date, he obviously didn’t really give a damn about my potty training schedule.

Jack started daycare about a month ago (blog post coming soon, I promise) and some of the other kids sit on the potty throughout the day. Jack does not.

Saturday morning, Jack wandered over to me and told me that he needed to peepee on the potty.

Um, okay, whatever you say kid…

So, to appease him, we walked upstairs to his bathroom. He helped me pull down his pants. I removed his diaper. Then, he sat on the potty like he’d been doing it for years and immediately peed. It’s possible that my eyes bugged of my head. When he was finished, he reached around to grab a piece of toilet paper, handed it to me and waited expectantly.

WHO is this kid?!

After I gave him a little wipe and disposed of the mess, he wandered away and asked to brush his teeth. It was SUCH a non-event that I almost didn’t believe it happened.

A couple hours later, I asked him if he wanted to use the potty again and boom… he jumped right on and did his business. In fact, all weekend he used the potty at home and only had a couple wet diapers (except for nighttime, of course). He’s not doing quite as well at his Mimi’s house (my mom), but yesterday he woke up with a dry diaper and used the potty first thing in the  morning.

A couple of my Facebook friends said pretty much ‘they know when they know,’ but I’m still waiting for Jack to run over in his drunk-baby style and tell me that he’s been punking me.

I have no idea if this is permanent. For all I know, he’ll lose interest and go back to wetting his diaper. However, as long as he’s down for it… well, I guess we’re potty training. I figure I’ll kind of wing it though and just follow his lead. If he wants to use the potty, cool. If not,  no biggie. I’m not really sure what we are supposed to do while we’re out though — do you bring the potty with you? Or maybe he is supposed to somehow balance his kid-sized heinie on a grownup-sized toilet?

Have you potty trained a kid? Was it the fight-to-the-death that I was expecting or did it just happen one day like they’d taken a secret potty training online class?

PS. Within about 2 minutes of posting this, I got a text from my husband saying that Jack was NOT interested in getting on the potty today. So maybe it’s over as quick as it started…

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13 thoughts on “Unintentional Potty Training”

  1. Mine (just turned 2 in March) uses the potty almost every day – sporadically, I don’t push the issue – and he loves to sit there and read his Joshua potty book. His school (his age class at least) doesn’t do anything with the potty – so i’m trying to hold off until my mom retires and starts watching him in June so that he won’t get confused about doing it at home all the time and never at school. I really do think that they just know and are ready when they’re ready 🙂 so keep it light and just follow his lead and keep up the good work mama!

    1. I worry about the lack of consistency too and I love your plan of holding off until you can be consistent. I think it really helped us that other kids in Jack’s daycare class use the potty!

  2. My daughter was really hard! She potty trained at about 2 1/2. I started at about 18 months with placing the little potty in the bathroom and having her watch me go. Sometimes she would go, sometimes no. It was never a thing we pushed at that age especially but it was more of a thing where we wanted to “introduce” the concept to her. Come about 24-26 months where we really wanted to train. Sometimes she would be great, other times not so much. I’d say she was fully trained at 2 1/2. My son on the other hand…he trained himself! It was about a week before his 2nd birthday and at night we were getting ready for bed and he just simply asked “potty?” So we went. He woke up the next morning and first thing he says was “potty?” and he went about his business. Since he was asking and eager about it, I would just leave his pants off during the day and place the training potty wherever he was playing and he would stop playing and just do what he needed to do!(ok, mom brag a little here. He turned 3 in January and has never had an accident!) I did do the same approach with my daughter and just leave diaper and underwear off and place the potty wherever she was playing until it became 2nd nature to her to just turn to the potty and then eventually I put it back in the bathroom and put the underwear on. Its a process! first they learn when they need to go, then they learn how to pull the pants up and down, then (with boys at least) they learn to do it standing up.
    I’m sure Jack will be a pro in no time!

  3. Mine is about to turn 24 but I had discussions with his dad and my mom that culminated in my throwing my hands in the air when they were together in the same room and declared “Both of stop stressing him out! I’ve never heard of a child getting married in a diaper. He WILL be FINE!” A couple of months later he announced “Mommy, no more diaper” and that was that except for night times and then about 2 weeks later he announced he was done with that and we were done. He had once accident 3 days after his announcement and we were totally done. They will when they are ready. 🙂

    1. Yes, that’s totally what I told myself when I was waiting for Jack to (finally) walk. He won’t be holding onto the walls to walk between classes in high school!

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