For three days you give your toddler lots of salty snacks and all the juice she wants. The idea is to make her pee a lot. For those three days she does not wear diapers except to bed. You watch her like a hawk. When she starts to pee you put her on the potty. If some pee gets in the potty you give her a treat, we chose lollipops. If all goes as intended, after three days she will be potty trained enough that she asks to go potty when she needs it and you can go on short outings without accidents. That is the plan anyway.
I must also mention that my wife was not on board with this plan. I told her that we were going to try the plan for three days, if it did not work we would try again in a few months. While she was very vocal in her opposition to my plan, to her credit, she made every effort to make it work.
The first day (Wednesday) was rocky, most of the pee made it onto the floor. To our chagrin every time she peed on the floor she would shout "peed just like doggy!" You see, two days prior my elderly shih-tzu walked in front of the entire family, squatted, and peed all over the floor. Lila found this very funny. An even bigger problem was my 11 month old daughter who not only tried to climb on Lila's lap as she was using the potty, she tried to sit on the potty like her big sister. Watching two toddlers, one without a diaper, was difficult to say the least. Lila ended up actually going on the potty once. By the end of the day we were exhausted, discouraged, and my wife was livid.
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| When she is 14 she will kill me for posting this! |
Day two I had planned on going hunting. However, I knew my wife couldn't take a full day of potty training by herself, so I canceled my trip and stayed home to help. Day two went awesome. No accidents, asked to go to the potty well before things started squirting, a dry diaper after nap, and even pooping in the potty! Day three (today) went even better. We are beginning to trust her and not watch her like a poodle watching a baby eat a cookie. I'm glad I stayed home. Had I went hunting I'm fairly sure my wife would have given up and we would be worse off than when we started.
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| The sixth lollipop of the day! |
You may be wondering why I am writing about potty training on a hunting blog. It is all about priorities. Hunting is great. I day dream about it constantly, it is a passion. If I could hunt every day I would. I spend almost all of my spare money on it. I have an active blog about it. And if my family needed me to stop I would never hunt again.
I've met many hunters that put hunting over their families. Once I was on a three day hunt, that I needed to cut short by a day. My family had plans to go to the zoo. One of the guys on the hunt said, "You can go to the zoo anytime. This is hunting season." I just smiled and thought to myself, "I have the rest of my life to hunt, my daughter is only 2 for one year."
Hunters - remember what is most important.
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