Hitting the Potty-Training Hard

The Lone Star Baby turned two and a half this month. Since she started attending her school at the age of eighteen months, she has been required, by the school, to wear cotton underpants while there. They have a happy attitude about cleaning it all up and learning to use the potty. Although I do know that there is certainly a true window for potty learning, as they claim, between 18 months and 24 months, I still find it all a bit nutty. The window in question requires a full-on, dedicated effort on the part of adults to observe a child's elimination habits and get them to the potty on time so often that the child becomes habituated to it and can eventually do it on their own. I am more of a fan of the sort of developmental windows during which a child takes charge of mastering the next step with less need for adult pushing. Somewhat unfortunately, that window for potty learning happens rather later...like after the age of 3, creating a rather interesting cultural scenario involving which way to go.

We, feeling not so friendly about laundry, have kept the Lone Star Baby mostly in pull-ups at home, except when she requested panties, as she sometimes did. The laundry load from school started out quite high, but has diminished to rarely any recently, so I have come to the conclusion that it is time to do my part. The Lone Star Baby often balks at using the potty at home, so we were not really enthusiastic about it, but we utterly sucked at potty-training her sister, so I feel duty-bound to get on the ball. Another thing that is hard about doing it is that the Lone Star Baby spends a great deal of after-school time out and about with her dad and her sister and it is much harder for Daddy to do the potty -every-half-hour thing in public. Still, it is time.

We are now keeping her in panties except at night and making her go regularly whether she wants to or not. Her resistance is still there but is waning and she is still having way more accidents than she does at school, but she is doing pretty well...just one or two a day and they are minor ones. I wish I didn't feel pressured to push it before it worked itself out, so she wouldn't either, but such is life. Some of these battles seem more worth holding out on than others and I'll choose natural weaning over natural potty training any day.