Love Duckie

I very rarely do a mummy blog type post. I’m just not meant to be a mummy blogger and to be honest, that’s fine with me, I prefer it that way. But this topic I am about to speak of is something that I just needed to blog about. Feel free to skip it if your not up for reading about my daughter being toilet trained.

I started potty training at about sixteen months old. She was doing great using the potty even though she had a problem with having no nappy on. We had a little episode that I won’t go into and it scared her off the potty and we completely went back to nappies full time with no potty breaks. I always said I would definitely have her potty trained by the time she was eighteen months old but that came and went so I then said definitely by two years old. Her birthday came and went and still no luck with it. I tried, really I did. She screamed the house down every time I asked her to use the toilet or the potty and screamed even more if I left her nappy off for more than one minute. I gave up for about three months with advice from the health visitor to just ignore the subject completely until she started to show an interest.

She’s never really shown an interest at all. She doesn’t like praise when she does use it and she will use it once and then do nothing for weeks and weeks. Her third birthday came and I started to get frustrated with it. Around 90% of the children at her pre-school are completely toilet trained or are wearing pull-ups and using the toilet with them. She has to wear them at pre-school because that’s the rules and I would rather she didn’t. Since her birthday I have made her wear them for an hour at day just to practice.

The one thing I have noticed over the past week is that she will ask me if she has knickers or a nappy on. When I ask her why, she says its because she needs to go. I’ve realised that my daughter is extremely lazy and although she can actually hold herself and knows when she’s needs to go to the toilet, she would just rather wear a nappy and not have the inconvenience of having her play interrupted!

Last night I was writing my shopping list for this morning and I did a estimated calculation of how much my shopping would cost. My face fell when I saw the cost because I’m behind with bills and I really need to keep my food bill at bare minimum. I had both nappies and pull-ups on my list last night because I’m running out of both and I thought to myself “Why should I be spending £16 on something that she doesn’t need because she knows how to do it?”

From today we’re going cold turkey. I have seven nappies and one pull-up left. I’m letting her have a nappy on at bedtime until after breakfast in the following morning and she’s wearing the last pull-up tomorrow. I proved myself right today as she had knickers on from 11AM until 4PM when she finally gave in and went to the toilet. I took her twice while I was in town and once at home before she actually did something. If she can hold herself for that long then she definitely knows how to do it. We did have an accident later on but she went to the toilet again before her bath.

I’m keeping up with it even if I have her screaming the house down over the next couple of days. Pre-school will be told tomorrow that on Thursday she will no longer be in pull-ups and to keep an eye on her. It’ll be so nice to get rid of that changing mat and to finally stop changing nappies after three years of doing it. I wouldn’t mind changing nappies if I had another child but I really planned to have her out of them by two years maximum. There’s no going back with this now - I have bribed her with books and ice cream next week if she carries on!