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Been There, Done That, Learned My Lesson
Funny Potty Training Stories from the Trenches
By Kelly Burgess
Mom of twins, Cheryl Lage, author of Twinspiration: Real-Life Advice from Pregnancy Through the First Year (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2006), says she and her husband made a firm plan and stood their pee-soaked and poo-littered ground through much trial and error. What was the first error? Buying only one potty. After all, Lage reasoned, how likely was it that both twins would actually have to go at the same time?
"Two hours into Day One of our potty-training, Sarah sat wee-weeing on one potty as I chased Darren, scooping up the trailing poo nuggets bare-handed," Lage says. "Don't add to your twins' apprehension about the process by not having a receptacle ready to receive bodily output at any given time."
That first lesson learned and with both twins successfully potty trained, Lage has one more piece of advice: Don't believe anything you ever hear about potty training.
"Forget about 'girls train quicker'; 'boys are slow to poo-poo in the potty'; 'you can do it in a weekend'; 'you can't train two at once,'" Lage says. "All of the aforementioned proved false for us. As far as training two simultaneously goes, you do need to decide if you want twice the mess for half as long or half the mess for twice as long."
Busy working mom Michelle Mekky, president of Empower Public Relations in Chicago, Ill., says that her son was so resistant to potty training that she actually had to meet with the principal of his daycare center/preschool. Finally, she tried that age-old combination: bribery and ewards. She created a potty chart and gave him a sticker for each dry day, and then a lollipop for consecutive dry days. Her efforts slowly paid off, and he was finally trained. More important, she learned her lesson. With her next child, she went ahead and applied those methods before being called into the principal's office. Her daughter was trained in two days!
