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    Adventures (Times 2!) in Potty Training

    By | Parenting – Fri, Jul 1, 2011 4:51 PM EDT

    By Heather Cocks, REDBOOK

    The other night after the boys' bath, we were diapering them when Liam decided to go ahead and urinate on his bedroom floor. "I missed!" he shouted, breaking into riotous applause. We are not sure what he thinks he missed. The potty? Unlikely, but accurate. The carpet? Unlikely and inaccurate. Our faces? His brother? Maybe I don't want to know, but it reminded me of the parenting milestone I have been dreading the most: potty-training. Two of them. Simultaneously. Twice the accidents, twice the cleanup, twice the headaches, and-not for nothing-twice the competition for the toilet. The constant battle as a twin parent is, what do I have to get two of, besides cribs and blankies and martinis? I deeply hope training potties are not one of those things, or else we might as well add a hand-dryer and an attendant who coughs gently in search of tips.

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    Despite my assertions that Kevin should handle this, being a fellow dude and all, he is not falling for my logic. So it'll be on my shoulders, as I'm home the most, to set the patterns and make the plan. And I have no idea how to do this. A baby book suggested letting them drag their portable potty around the house at will, getting comfortable with it, and ultimately then using it wherever it happens to be. This seems crazy to me-don't we want them to associate the bathroom with the toilet and not the living room? I don't want to come into the room when they're five and find them tinkling into my Tupperware because it's easier than walking away from Toy Story. And it's giving me strange visions of people in the house-friends, relatives, the piano tuner-having to endure the boys dropping trou and making a deposit right in the middle of the room. Am I overthinking?

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    Other friends say it worked to let the kids run around sans-diaper for a weekend, creating a reward-based system wherein successfully using the potty nets a present and an accident removes one. It'd be Lord of the Flies up in here for a couple days. Between nibbling on my shoes and upending the trash cans in the kitchen, my kids already have enough in common with puppies. I know parenting is about what's best for the child, not what's easiest for the mommy, but I find there are times when paying heed to the latter yields the former. Dylan and Liam probably won't ever want to use the potty if I'm giving them a rare opportunity to tinkle on the Weber, and that's no good. Emotionally, I can't endure that type of weekend only to have it fail.

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    It has me saying something I never thought I would: Diapers aren't that bad. I wish I could keep the dudes in Pampers until they're old enough to discuss rationally how to use a toilet. (Although I don't think they make Huggies for high schoolers.) The diaper is my security blanket. But now that the boys are two, it's time to confront giving that up. We plan to start with a gentle routine-sitting on it in the morning, before and/or after bathtubs, before naps, before car trips and before bed, trying to establish that those are all sensible times to use it. I'm sure that will last about a day, at which point I will be incessantly Googling better strategies that don't involve letting them run roughshod all over the lawn while I chase them with a plastic baggie. Step one, of course, is getting the boys to stop pulling the rubber seat off the Cars training potty and trying to eat it. Once that's done, soon, we'll get down to brass tacks.

    Maybe today. But probably tomorrow. Ish.

    What are your best tips for potty training, and how did you get through it without losing your mind?

    By day, Heather Cocks blogs daily-and sarcastically-about celebrity fashion crimes on Go Fug Yourself. She and her blog partner Jessica co-wrote the young adult novel Spoiled, out now.



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