Helping my little one off the nappies...

I have been think­ing long and hard about post­ing about this very del­i­cate sub­ject. It works dif­fer­ent for every­one. It took us now just over two months to get to the point where I can say with rea­son­able con­fi­dence that we have made it! Our daugh­ter not only wear no nap­pies dur­ing the day, but she also has min­i­mal lit­tle acci­dents. She still wear nap­pies dur­ing the night, though, and may be wear­ing them at night for a lit­tle while longer.

My daugh­ter is just over 30 months old now and goes to day­care three morn­ings a week. In Sep­tem­ber she will start going to Kinder­garten every morn­ing. She has to be dry and clean by then. This is one of my Kindergarten’s rules.

So, when the day­care said; just before Easter weekend; that they would start tak­ing the nappy off once she gets there in the morn­ings, after Easter, we decided to take the chal­lenge up our­selves! I ordered a book called Potty Train­ing in one week by a British Child­care Author called Gina Ford. Now, I have to be hon­est and say that I did actu­ally think that we could do it in one week! My hus­band was to be home from the Thurs­day through to the Mon­day, with my daugh­ter home from the Wednes­day after­noon through to the Tues­day evening after… We read the book and I thought and still think it is a good guide.

Gina Ford gives advice to start think­ing of toi­let train­ing a tod­dler once they are 18 months old. She does state not to start before they show the signs and lev­els of abil­ity that would indi­cate if the tod­dler is ready for potty/toilet train­ing. These are:

1. He/she is over 18 months of age
2. His/her nappy is often dry when he/she gets up from a nap or when the nappy stays dry for a cou­ple of hours.
3. He/she is aware when doing a poo. Look out for things like a tod­dler going very quiet or start­ing to con­cen­trate on noth­ing def­i­nite; point­ing to his/her nappy or says poo or pee pee once he/she has done it.
4. He/she can under­stand and fol­low sim­ple instructions.
5. He/she is eager to par­tic­i­pate in tak­ing off his/her own clothes and under­stands what pulling up or down means.
6. Can point to body parts when you name them.
7. He/she has the abil­ity to sit still and occupy him-/herself for 5 to ten min­utes with a toy, book or a video.

Gina say to not start train­ing if your tod­dler does not show all these signs. Also, don’t start train­ing your tod­dler if you are mov­ing within a few weeks or hav­ing another baby or if any life chang­ing things may hap­pen in your house­hold.  And do not potty train your tod­dler on holiday!

Fur­ther­more  Gina Ford advices to put time apart for specif­i­cally train­ing your tod­dler and not hav­ing any other oblig­a­tions or com­mit­ments. To limit out­ings at least the first few days and to try not to use the telephone.

This is why we decided to potty train our daugh­ter straight away. She showed all the signs and it was sum­mer so we thaught she would not get too cold if she was wet and it would be less clothes to wash! Less lay­ers to pull up and down for her also. As num­ber two is on the way it would also be a good idea to get our daugh­ter trained well in advance of the baby being born and her start­ing kindergarten.

We got the potty, we got the toi­let seat and I also found Gina Ford’s advice on get­ting some other things ready very help­ful. These were:

1. Two pot­ties, that is if you have two bath­rooms… Keep them handy and you don’t have to rush around… (Get your tod­dler to pick them)
2. Child’s toi­let seat. These are designed to fit onto nor­mal toi­let seats but makes the set smaller for lit­tle bot­toms… (I once for­got to put the seat on the toi­let for my daugh­ter… poor girl sunk well down into the toi­let bowl! She was ok and dry, but I felt really bad about it but happy that I had just cleaned the toilet!)
3. A Cush­ion cov­ered with a poly­thene bag and then a remov­able cover (I used a old folded towel) to use in the pushchair or car seat or when every you are going out… In case of acci­dents! Gina says that if you make it a spe­cial cush­ion, the child is less likely to think of it as a safety net and more likely to try to keep it dry… Well, my daugh­ter never needed it until now…
4. Eight pairs of under­pants and shorts — basi­cally eight changes of clothes — per day!!! Elas­ti­cated is best and wide enough for tod­dler hands to pull down. Gina advises not using pull-up nap­pies as this may con­fuse tod­dlers… So I went for the eight pairs… Remem­ber to only use easy cloth­ing too. No vests with pop­pers or dun­ga­rees or trousers with belts! Speed in tak­ing clothes off is important!
5. Books, video’s, stick­ers, small toys. Any­thing that you can keep together and that would occupy your child for a length of time. I found that things my daugh­ter has not seen or played with for a while was bet­ter. Keep­ing these away and offer­ing one item at a time is good too. My daugh­ter got con­fused if she had too much at a time so she lost inter­est all together.
6. A star chart. A star for a use of the potty and a big star for sev­eral times because your tod­dler is so clever… This did not inter­est my daugh­ter at all! We had to use a dif­fer­ent method for mak­ing her feel she had done some­thing spe­cial… More about this later.
7. Face cloths for dry­ing small hands on. This is eas­ier for tod­dlers to use. If they are printed with car­toons or some­thing your tod­dler like, even better.
8. A Booster step to help short legs reach the loo seat. Be care­ful choos­ing this. I got just the first one I could find, but it was far from high enough! My daugh­ter is quite tall and I would not say our toi­let is high, but she could not reach! In the end I gave her the “Tummy Tub Two step stool” I had got­ten together with the “Tummy Tub” for baby num­ber two. This works per­fect as it even has two heights. She likes it for its bright design and it has stor­age for a spe­cial toy…
9. Two buck­ets. One for wet clothes — filled with cold, soapy water. The other filled with luke­warm water and a bit of mild dis­in­fec­tant to clean any misses.
10. A towel kept under the potty and around the potty was use­ful to me.
11. I kept sev­eral pieces of cloth avail­able to dry up any misses.
12. Wet wipes, baby wipes or even bet­ter flush able toi­let wipes designed for tod­dlers as well as facial tis­sues for wip­ing lit­tle bottoms.

We started with tak­ing our daugh­ter with us to the loo and let­ting her sit on the potty with her clothes and nappy on. We allowed her to watch as we demon­strated what hap­pens and we described what we did. We used sim­ple lan­guage, not using com­pli­cated words. It helped using words other peo­ple use too and that she may have heard before.

Then we started show­ing her what wet and dry was. Let­ting her play with wet and dry clothes and telling her when she was mak­ing a cloth wet with water etc. Just chat­ting to our daugh­ter when we were doing every day things like wash­ing and dry­ing our hands helped.

It didn’t take our daugh­ter long to under­stand these things. She quickly wanted her nappy off when sit­ting on the potty. Although noth­ing hap­pened most of the times, we moved on to stage two — this is when the long week­end started and my hus­band was at home so he could help.

On day one we just let her run around in one room. She didn’t much want to wear any clothes and we let her run around with­out. We kept all her favourites together and kept her occu­pied in the same room. This helped us not to have to run around too much with buck­ets and pot­ties etc. We kind of got a lit­tle area ready for the potty with every­thing around it. A lit­tle throne room!!! We kept drinks at hand to give her at reg­u­lar intervals.

We kept ask­ing her if she wanted to sit on the potty and took her to the potty every 10 min­utes. Some­times she used it straight away and we made a big fuss about her being such a big girl and using the potty. Some­times it took 10 min­utes and other times she would sit there for ten min­utes and get up just to wet the floor… We never got angry at her for miss­ing the potty or get­ting to it too late. We never made what she did look dirty or dis­gust­ing. We tried to make her feel proud of it. Never said it was smelly or hor­ri­ble. It is impor­tant not to make lit­tle ones feel they are doing some­thing that isn’t acceptable. Using insen­si­tive words or actions could put a tod­dler off using the potty.

By late in the after­noon we felt quite tired and felt that we could just not con­tinue and needed to get fresh air. We put a nappy on our daugh­ter and took her to the park, quite against Gina Ford’s advice of not giv­ing up half way through as it could con­fuse a lit­tle tod­dler. As it hap­pened, she stayed dry all the time and we got a breather.

On day two we started again. We got every­thing together and started giv­ing our daugh­ter stars for every tri­umph. Soon we realised she could just not be both­ered by the stars, how­ever shiny and bright they were! She started “act­ing out” when we took her to the potty so we read the “trou­bleshoot­ing” part of the book and decided to give her a small treat for every tri­umph… quite against our nature… We do not believe in teach­ing our daugh­ter that she would get some­thing for being good or doing some­thing we want her to do. This worked. Later she asked for the treat and we said only if she used the potty. Then she would ask for the treat after­wards and once she was using the potty most of the times, the treats sim­ply ran out! This only worked because she was not used to get­ting treats as a nor­mal part of her day. She really was not used to sweet treats…

By day 3 we could see a defi­nate pos­i­tive turn. Our Daugh­ter started using the potty at reg­u­lar inter­vals with us just remind­ing her to use it if she needed it. At the end of the day she was very red in the face when she for­got to go to the potty and had wet her­self. Through­out train­ing our daugh­ter to use the potty, we would take turns at tak­ing breaks so that nei­ther of us got too tired or dis­heart­ened by accidents.

When it was time to go back to child­care on the Wednes­day, we didn’t put a nappy on our daugh­ter. We had put the towel in the buggy for her to sit on and it was dry by the time we got to the day­care. There they kept her out of a nappy and she was dry all day.

Since then we always kept a change of clothes and wet wipes as well as a plas­tic bag on hand. Some­times we needed two changes until we got to the point of rare acci­dents. It was more the poo that she had a hard time with. It felt as if she just did not under­stand the way it had to hap­pen. My daugh­ter kept doing it in her pants. Not on pur­pose but just because she just did not under­stand that she had to work to get it done some­times. She did not under­stand that she had to push. Maybe she was a lit­tle con­sti­pated too. So we kept an eye on her when she got quiet and when it was due to hap­pen and took her to the toi­let. Most of the times, she would sit there and get up, not doing it. Some­times she would run to the toi­let just to pass wind. Then she realised that noth­ing really hap­pened… Some­times it took two days or longer for her to have a poo. I got wor­ried and even thaught of putting her back into nap­pies to see if it would help. It may in some cases help. We gave her more fruit and fibre. We lim­ited dried apples and bananas as well as any refined foods.

Then, just a cou­ple of days ago, her face got red again and she seemed to be begin­ning to do the poo in her pants again… I jumped up and asked her to go do it on the toi­let. She ran to the toi­let and did it on the toi­let! She proudly told her dad that it had hap­pened. Then the next day the same thing hap­pened again. Slowly I am get­ting less wor­ried that she would be dry and clean every day. Yes, our daugh­ter still sleep with a nappy every night, but she wakes up most morn­ings ask­ing for her potty. Most of the time her nappy would be dry. Some nights she would wake up ask­ing for it. We try not to give her a big drink within two hours of her going to bed and if she has one, it would be only a sip of water. This hepls with the wak­ing dur­ing the night as she usu­ally slept through the night.

At the moment, our daugh­ter still wakes up really early to use the toi­let and wants us to help her. So she wakes up fully and does not go back to sleep. It does not help that it is already light out­side by 5:00 in the morn­ing… Hope­fully this will change some time…

I liked hav­ing Potty Train­ing in one Week by Gina Ford. I believe it helped us a lot. The lit­tle book is not expen­sive and has some really good advice. There is plenty of exam­ples and advice for when things isn’t going to plan. Gina Ford does not guar­an­tee potty train­ing in one week, just says that it could be pos­si­ble. Well, it didn’t hap­pen for us, how­ever hard we worked at it. I would refer any of my friends to the book for help with potty training.

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