I was 32 years old and in love with a beautiful young woman who had two kids, a four-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy.
I had never been a father myself. I went into the relationship a little reluctant because of the children.
Truthfully, I was a slightly afraid about even being left alone with them at first. But that rapidly changed as I found that the kids fast became something that I actually loved about the relationship.
They were wonderful children and a joy to be around.
However, the two-year-old boy was not yet potty trained.
After some discussion with their mother, we decided that we should really tackle that issue.
Years earlier, she had successfully potty trained the four-year-old girl. Nonetheless, she gave me the lead on this one. I love to solve problems, so I gladly accepted the challenge.
I went to the store and got supplies. I found a big black and white poster of a racetrack that he could color, some racecar stickers and a potty seat that had racecars on it.
He loved racecars. This was going to work great, I thought.
When I got home, I explained to him what the poster of a racetrack was for. As we colored it together, I told him that every time he used the toilet, he would get a sticker to put on the racetrack.
My thought was that the cars would go around the track eventually reaching the finish line.
When I showed him the potty seat, his face lit up. He did, indeed, love that potty seat.
That evening, we put all the diapers away and put him in some big boy underwear.
After some hiccups, it actually worked fairly well.
He quickly got the hang of sitting on the toilet to go to the bathroom. He would get a sticker each time.
Of course, he stuck the first sticker in the stands with the people watching the race on the poster.
That’s okay, I thought, I will show him where to put the next one.
The next one he stuck on the finish line. The next one after that was stuck on the toilet.
Way less than half of the stickers ended up on the poster and of those, only about a quarter ended up on the track.
It was not at all like I had pictured in my head.
Oh well, I thought, at least he is not going in his diapers anymore.
After a couple of days of that, my girlfriend mentioned that really should teach him to potty standing up.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
I don’t know why that had slipped my mind. I was so excited to have him just go in the toilet.
The boy had only seen his mother and his sister use the toilet, so he assumed everyone just sat down for everything.
“Why don’t you demonstrate for him,” she suggested.
No way. Absolutely not. He was not my actual child. I was not about to demonstrate for him.
With some effort and some awful misses, we were able to explain to him how boys potty and he eventually got the hang of it. Well, mostly anyway. On any given occasion, I would say a majority of the potty went into the toilet.
I was quite proud of myself for being somewhat successful at my first potty training gig.
However, one day I walked into the bathroom and there was potty all over the floor. When I asked my girlfriend about it, she said the four-year-old girl had just gone to the bathroom.
I showed my girlfriend the mess and as we cleaned it up, we talked about why we thought it happened.
“Maybe I have been giving so much attention to the boy, she was jealous. Perhaps she has regressed for attention?” I pondered.
“Maybe,” was all my girlfriend said.
“I know, I should get her a poster and some stickers, and we can reward her for positive things she does,” I said excited about finding a solution.
“That sounds complicated,” she answered, “Why don’t we just ask her what happen?”
I hadn’t thought of that. My girlfriend was a natural at this parenting thing.
We went to the little girl’s bedroom and asked her what had happened in the bathroom.
“Oh, I was just trying to potty like my brother,” she simply said, “It didn’t work. I made a mess.”
Of course, that was it. The poor girl just wanted to try to pee standing up. It didn’t work out so she never tried it again.
Problem solved.
It was messy, but we eventually got through potty training.
For years, however, I found racecar stickers stuck to everything. They ended up stuck to windows, furniture, appliances and even one on the dog. They mostly ended up everywhere except the poster.
Oh well, at least I learned what didn’t work. I may not be an expert on potty training, but I certainly learned how not to potty train a young boy.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Jas Min on Unsplash
