Christmas 2011: In Which The Klein Family Crawls Their Way Out Of The Pit Of Despair

This, by the way, is the pit of despair. 

The Internets pretty much agree: wait to potty train until your child is ready, interested, and has a positive attitude about trying. They will do it in their own time. Well the people who wrote that have never met our daughter, who does .NOT. .LIKE. .CHANGE.

I have a much longer, more detailed version of this story, where I chronicled every terrible detail. I felt like it was important to write down because these things have a really survival-of-the-species way of fading from our memories, the same way pregnancy and graduate school have faded. I wrote it down because I wanted to remember what we have survived as a family. But I'm not going to share it on the blog.

The short, public version is this: over Christmas we potty trained Nory. It was the worst 10 days of our lives. She had been physically ready for over 6 months (able to hold it when she wanted), but had a lot of fear associated with using a potty. We couldn't wait any longer because she was throwing (loud, brother-waking) tantrums with every diaper change, as well as getting terrible rashes. We took her diapers away overnight on December 23rd and by New Years she was potty trained. She has never had an accident, not ever. We discovered the hard way that she can hold it in for over 10 hours. We waited around the house all day every day until she just couldn't hold it any longer and would finally use the potty. It took about 7 days of this before she started peeing throughout the day instead of holding it all day. Having the entire family stuck at home made us all completely stir crazy (I think this might be when Dan's requirement of a ping pong table was born). Watching our stubborn daughter dance around in circles all day trying to hold her pee in made us despair. But in the end, Nory was potty trained.

By the way... she loves using her potty now. She says things like "when I was a baby, I used to wear diapers! That was really silly!" We don't ever even have to remind her, she just stops whatever she is in the middle of and runs over and uses her little potty, puts a sticker on her chart, occasionally remembers to ask for an M&M, and then we help her clean up and we get back to whatever activity we were working on.

Parenting. Sometimes you shine, sometimes you survive. This time, we survived.