Potty Training Yucky-ness

My fourth child will be turning four in February. I’ve been trying to get her to potty train since she turned three. I have learned over the past ten years that my children potty train between ages three to three in a half. I personally think this is a proper potty training age, they are able to better understand what is going on. I know there is those exceptional children that train at eighteen months or age two, and I can only wish my kids would have, but alas they do not.


My fourth child has been the hardest to train thus far. She has not mastered peeing in the toilet yet. Some days she will poop in the toilet, some days she will not. I’ve tried pull ups but I think those things are worthless, they absorb like diapers and she doesn’t feel wet, which I think is an important part of the potty training process.

I’ve tried using those Gerber training pants. Those worked really well with my other children. If they peed in them they felt wet and they knew that they did not like feeling wet. It would only take a matter of days before the figured out that they would rather use the toilet than pee in those training pants. Faith is different. I am starting to think she doesn’t care if she is wet. She will pee in them and then not say anything.

I ask her all the time if she wants to use the potty and she says no most of the time. When she poops in a diaper she fusses when I change it. I’ve tried the “if you don’t like having your diaper changed then why don’t you use the potty?” She informs me that, “I don’t want to use the potty.” I usually then ask her, “why don’t you want to use the potty?” and she usually says, “I just don’t want to.”

Faith has expressed interest in going to school. She has asked me over and over when she can go. I had actually hoped that when she turned four that she would be able to attend preschool and who knows, maybe she will get it figured out by then. I’ve tried to use the idea of going to school to help the potty training process move along but it hasn’t done any good either. I’ve told her that they don’t change diapers at school, she would have to wear undies. This has not encouraged her to use the potty either.

I wouldn’t say potty training has been a complete failure. Like I mentioned above she does poop in the potty sometimes. She has even graduated from pooping in a potty chair to using the toilet, sort of, she puts the seat from the chair onto the toilet, she is still scared that she may fall in. I’m fine with this though, any progress is good and not having to clean out the potty chair is a bonus for me.

Today I told Faith right before her rest time that I needed to change her diaper. I asked her to take off her pants. I have been thinking that maybe if I make this wearing and changing diaper thing a bit more work for her maybe she will want to just go ahead and wear undies and use the potty instead. So Faith took off her pants and (without me asking) she took off her diaper, threw it away and then told me she needed to go potty. Thank God, I’m always encouraged when she goes to the potty without being ask!

After Faith spends some time in the bathroom, my eight year old daughter, who is home sick today, decided she needed to use the bathroom and walked in on Faith. The next thing I know there is a big commotion in the bathroom. I hear the door opening and closing, Faith laughing and Kaelyn yelling at Faith to “put it in the toilet!” By this point I just knew something gross was going on.

I get up to go see what is going on and find Faith with a wad of poopy toilet paper in her hand and she is threatening to put it onto Kaelyn. Of course it didn’t help that Kaelyn was making a game out of it by returning to the bathroom after running away. This only encouraged Faith to do it more. I tell Faith to put the toilet paper into the toilet and I pray that this wad of paper hasn‘t actually made contact with anything or anyone.

I wish this was the end of my story but after dropping the toilet paper into the toilet Faith proceeds to put the same hand that was holding the paper into her mouth. I screamed, “get your hand out of your mouth! It has poopy on it!” While I didn’t know if it actually had poopy on her hand or not, just the idea that it was possible to have poop on it freaked me out when I saw her hand head towards her mouth. I didn’t mean to scare her by screaming but I was glad it made her promptly remove her hand. We immediately washed both of our hands!

Do you have any good potty training hints that have worked for you? Leave a comment and let us know!