guest post: one family’s toilet training experiences

This week’s guest post is all about toilet training! We’re nearly wrapping up our toilet training adventures here, and I found it interesting to read another family’s experience. I hope you will too!

Toilet Training!

Those two words are enough to strike fear into mothers everywhere.

I must admit I was lulled into a false sense of security. My first child was super easy to train. She picked it up so quickly. Straight to the big toilet, I read her a toilet training book a few times and away she went. There is only 19 months between my first child and my second. So Hannah was next and wanted to do everything that her big sister did. She was even easier to toilet train.

Next was Angus. He didn’t want to sit on the toilet. He didn’t care if he was messy. At three years old he was no closer to being toilet trained than he was at 2! He didn’t even seem to realize when he was going. I was pulling my hair out!

But then I took him to a naturopath. She discovered that not only was he lactose intolerant, we also had Guardia in our tap water. This was making everyone in the family feel a bit yucky in the tummy.  So we got a filter jug for our water; put Angus on a low lactose diet and things started to pick up.

I got a container and filled it up with dinosaurs. Every time Angus was successful he could have a dinosaur.

Dinosaurs started appearing all around the house, in the strangest places!

He preferred to use the potty. So we put it in the lounge room and let him sit and watch a bit of television.

I gave him lots and lots of praise and encouragement. This is something I didn’t need to fake at all, as I was ecstatic! I gave him a round of applause each time. Hehe!

I took him shopping and let him choose his own big boy pants. These are the ones he chose! Not something that I would have picked but hey, it was all good.

So if you are having problems with your little one and their toilet training adventure, please don’t get too frustrated. It will eventually happen. Don’t listen to those people that say my child was toilet trained at 15 months old. Every child is different. Every child has their own time. Sometimes like Angus they just need a bit of extra help.

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Melanie Graham has been blogging for 11 months at A Welcoming Hearth. This blog is a light hearted, homely place where she can chat about parenting, children, life, schooling and a wide variety of other things that can come up in a typical stay at home mum’s day. She is 43 and has four young children. She blogs about the highs and lows of a busy household, trying to organise her time, her finances and about depression. But mainly about the joy and wonderful experiences that her children give her every day. With boys who are 2 and 4 and girls who are 7 and 9 things are never dull.

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