The One Mothering Skill I Cannot Teach You
Jun 06, 2019
As you may know, I’ve been hosting a live class the past two weeks called, 3 Secrets to Creating Order in your Home while Homeschooling. It’s an hour long class where I share my heartfelt advice about how to get your kids to be a part of managing your home, how to incorporate rich actives into your days that will build relationships and memories and how to parent well in the process. That class followed a short Facebook live in which I discussed the 3 Myths that might be keeping you from Enjoying Homeschooling. And both free classes introduced my new course, Love your Homeschool, Simple Strategies for Quieting the Chaos so you can Enjoy Learning with your Children.
I had 5 chances to figure it out and I never did. Family songs and sayings were even written during the dark years of this potty chaos. I cannot account for why I failed. We read all the cute storybooks about going on the potty. We sat on the potty and read stories, we watched tv siting on the plastic potty. We tried the naked thing where you stay home for a week with no diapers on in hopes that the child won’t like peeing on himself. We even went to a hypnotist one time and came home with a cassette tape with calmly spoken imagery like, “Close the gates.” We did the “Dry Days” chart on the fridge, marking off good days until they had 10 in a row and had earned a special toy they had wanted for awhile. I set boundaries like, “If you choose to poop in your undies when you are perfectly capable of going on the potty at 4 years old, YOU will have to wash those undies out yourself..” And every. one. of. my. kids. calmly washed the poop out of their undies and still didn’t use the potty. Every once in a while, a chuck of dried poop would fall out of someone’s undies. One day when my boys were playing in the hall, one of them stepped in poop and it smeared all over the bottom of his bare foot. You would think that kind of grossness would create change. But no.I used to say that my house was the only one where you might accidentally step in poop INSIDE!
I’d like to say that I never lost my temper over this disgusting situation, but I did give a few furious cold showers to kids who were old enough to take care of business but chose to make messes anyway. Needless to say, by the time my youngest was at potty training age, I had given up. I decided she would eventually figure it out, that my kids must be genetically predisposed to soil their pants until kindergarten and that I was never going to find success. So my youngest wore pull ups until she was 5. And, since she was clearly old enough to take them on and off herself, we would find wet pull-ups under beds, behind the couch, in the car…. It wasn’t a much better deal than the potty training thing.
My kids were never mean to one another, but they did have a lot of laughs making up nicknames like “Smudge McDougal” and songs about our ongoing dilemma,
“Nasty Little Baby, what we gonna do with you. Every time you pee or poo you make me come and change you. Nasty little baby, what we gonna do with you?”
There were more hilarious verses, but I’ll spare you. The truth is, that nasty baby was so loved, the musicians named their band, Babies in the Sink, after her.
