Got salt?

Although Little Nabi has been ready, and eager, I might add, to start potty training for a while now, we the parents have been reluctant to give up the convenience of diapers.  So we have been doing the Spotty Potty Training, a.k.a. "if she asks to sit on it, sigh a big sigh, take her upstairs to the bathroom, wait around while she forgets why she's sitting on the potty, wait some more, follow the bare bottoms around while the toddler muses on other things, return her to the potty hastily as pee or poo starts to rear (no pun intended) its drippy head" method.

We're going to bite the bullet and start.  Today.  Or maybe tomorrow.  Or perhaps it'd be simpler to do it during the weekend since I will be home all day and night and Papa Nabi seems somewhat squeamish about the whole ordeal transition.  Definitely some day before she turns sixteen.

All light-hearted bravado aside, I am concerned that she will more than likely be still in transition while we're traveling in the fall.  I suspect there will be some accidents and even a few laughters, probably in retrospect. 

So, thinking of Korea and potty training, I remembered that I was having accidents even in school.  In fact, many.  (Yes, I am aware that this revelation may come back to bite me in the rear end some day, e.g. LN's friends find this post and send her home with Depends or call her Daughter of the Leaky or whatever.)  I also remembered that much of it had to do with being afraid of the teacher because she yelled at anyone who raised his/her hand to be excused for a bathroom break.  I guess I preferred to create a puddle under my chair than be yelled at.

Fear and humiliation.  I believe they are neither the best nor the kindest instigators of dry bottoms.  In fact, another thing that popped in my head was salt.  If you wet your yo (Korean mattress), they said that you drew a "map" - and your parents sent you to the neighbors to beg for salt.  If that weren't humiliating enough, you had to wear this large bamboo-woven rice sifter on your head as you begged for that salt.

I believe the salt was to ward off something or another...?  But why the rice sifter on your head?  A specific fashion statement that says, "I peed my yo; I'm steeped (again, no pun intended) in humility"?

It was a tough call... but I opted for a package of Pull-Ups training diapers over googling for a rice sifter to buy.  Of course, if we utterly fail, you may see "Wanted: Asian style rice-sifter big enough for a toddler to wear over her head" ad somewhere on Craigslist.

Wish us luck.  We're getting serious... maybe not today... but most probably this weekend.  Really.

-Mama Nabi

Comments

[sarah jane rhee]

Good luck! And give me some pointers. Cadence still cries if we even mention the potty.

[kim]

My mom has a little ceramic figurine of a boy carrying a big rice sifter above his head with one hand and holding an empty bowl in the other. Perhaps it was a talisman to help train me as a kid? (No, of course it didn't work - I was trained via peer pressure from my best friend!)

Sending lots of patience and um, wet vibes to you and LN this week! Keep lots of special books by the potty - it definitely helps pass the time.

[halfmama]

Hilarious! Ok, never heard of the rice sifter thing. That is absolutely hilarious. Do you think our parents made this stuff up just to humiliate us? More importantly, do you think we can do this to our own kids?

JK. I know how traumatic that is for a kid. And your teacher sounds villainous! WTH?

Don't worry, it's not as bad as you think. Well... the first weekend is tiring, I'll admit. But after that, it'll get much much better. Whenever I took the twins out, I put pullups on them. And rolled my eyes whenever they insisted they needed to pee oh, three times during one dinner. One twin sits down, the other needs to go. They were on heavy b.r. rotation, just to torture us, or me, if I was by myself. (Something about public restrooms are fascinating to kids. It's gross.)

However, we are now at the point where we can take them out w/out the pullups. We also keep a travelling potty in the car (we can throw it in the bag or stroller as well). The one we have is great -- uses disposable bags, is small, comes with a case. Email me if you want more info. I also have disposable toilet liners. (I know these are not environmentally friendly but I'm just trying to keep their bottoms as protected as possible because I'm germaphobic like that.)

I know some parents aren't into the incentive thing, but if you are, stickers helped us a lot. Selective stickering, that is -- sometimes we gave two; sometimes one; sometimes none. No rhyme or reason. I don't know if that messes them up more or not, but when they were totally trained and we stopped giving them any stickers at all, they didn't seem to care or notice.

Good luck! LN will do great. And roll up your rugs! :)

[Angie in Texas]

i have to agree with halfmama. incentives worked well with both my kids.

AM really kicked it into geared upon seeing her older cousins go potty. JC got over it quick as soon as he realized he was the last of the cousins still wearing diapers/pull ups.

consistency is key (no pun intended). in the morning, plunk her down on the potty. again a few times throughout the afternoon and again in the evening before/after bath.

*one thing the kids really liked was flushing. they insisted on doing it themselves - which totally skeeved me out at public bathrooms . . .

either way, GOOD LUCK and remember, no one ever went to college not-potty-trained.

[Rachel]

Well, I would give you potty-training advice, but alas, my child has relapsed. Sigh.

[jooliyah]

i don't know the origins of the whole begging for salt thing, but i think at the core of it is to try to get the kid to stop wetting their bed through humiliation. when i first heard of the tradition on high school, i was horrified. but i guess the whole "it takes a village" thing was very real in korea. you could send your kid out knowing that the whole village will help you scold him. i'm thinking this method is only used in the countryside now.

anyhoo, we are also in the midst of this potty business right now. he's in training pants at home and a pull up when we are out and a diaper during sleep times. i'd suggest the training pants because it feels more like underwear. turtle was treating the pull ups just like a diaper. for awhile he'd only pee in the potty. no number two. then one day i got him to watch an older friend (he's 4) poop. and oh, boy was he interested! he's been pooping in the potty ever since (this is better than changing a yucky diaper at home, but pooping in public bathrooms can just get gross. think trying to hold your kid up on the toilet seat as they use their little hands to touch and grab EVERYTHING.) we are at the phase now where he will yell "poo poo!" from the back seat and i will frantically scan the street for the nearest startbucks to duck into.

okay, this is getting long so i'll stop. but remember i'm in the middle of this so i have a lot to say.

like you, i never want him to feel bad about anything about the potty. stickers didn't work with him so we used those teeny tiny mini m&ms that he only ever saw on plane trips before. one for pee pee. three for poo poo. but he doesn't seem to need them anymore. flushing it all down seems to be exciting enough for him.

i agree with my fellow wise commentors. the first week is hard. and i won't lie, it can get boring for you in that there bathroom. but consistency is the key! and besides their little bottoms look real cute in underpants! good luck!

[mary]

You are soooooo funny! And so on the dot. I HATED being humiliated for having accidents. Much later in life, I learned that it was inherited. Both my mom and grandma wet their bed too.

[myuneuri]

Love the salt story. My husband told me about that happening in his village when he was a child. However, he did not admit to doing it himself.

We just finished (cross our fingers) training our 2 1/2 year old. She wore pull ups for almost a year. They helped with going to the potty, but they didn't help her learn when she needed to go. We tried the cool-alert stuff, but that didn't do the trick either. Pooping was much of a problem. She was going quite consistently on the potty from about 18 months. Enter baby sister and the whole thing fell off track. She relapsed big time and was using her pull-ups just like a diaper for 5 months. Her specialty seemed to be pooping in the pull-up while I was putting her sister down for a nap.

I finally sucked it up and decided to go cold turkey on the diapers/pull-ups for daytime. We stayed home for a couple of days. She wore cotton panties and I set the egg timer every 45 minutes. If she peed on the potty, I gave her a sticker on her potty chart. If she pooped, I gave her a jelly bean. We had a few accidents, but she seemed to learn from them quite quickly. By day three, we could leave the house. She went with me to a playdate and used his potty successfully. Now three weeks later, she has only had three accidents and all were in the bathroom. Our next challenge is weaning her off the jelly beans. She has long since forgotten about the stickers.

I am relieved to be taking her to Korea potty trained. I can't imagine what my MIL would say if she were still in diapers by September. During my five years there, I never saw any of my three year old preschoolers in diapers and always wondered how mommies there were so successful.

Good luck Little Nabi

[FingKASIL]

Booper was an inconsistent and late potty trainer. He would be enthusiastic about it one day, then not at all interested the next. His quirk was that he needed to be naked all the time. I think he liked the easy access to the crucial parts when it was "go" time. So we let him be naked at home as much as he wanted, with the caveat that he had to put on clothes if we had anyone over. After a few days of this, he was a pro. I also bought him some underwear with Thomas the Tank Engine on it (his favorite at that time) and he wanted to wear them so desperately. BTW, I think starting preschool also helped a lot. He saw the other kids use the potty and that motivated him. Interestly, at school, most of the other boys still pee sitting down. Cooper has always peed standing up, like Daddy, and that meant it took him longer to get "the hang" of things.

p.s. we still have to wipe his tushy after #2. The glamour of motherhood is never-ending.

[big sister]

When we trained five of our six kids (one arrive pre-trained at age 4) we put a big silver bowl full of tiny wrapped gifts - stickers and dollar store items - in the bathroom. Everytime some one went - even a drop - they got to choose a gift. Usually they would pee 30 times a day at first but they trained themselves and eventually stopped asking for the little gifts. Maybe that will help for some of your little ones.

[The wrong MJ]

My DH still remembers having to go to the neighbor's to beg for salt. The neighbor then laughed in his face. He did admit that he never peed his pants again and half jokingly mentioned using this tactic with our own kids. He never mentioned the rice sifter, I'll have to ask him about that.

Anyway, some PT tips for you, if you want them. Our oldest PT'd when he was just under 2.5 yo. First of all, pull ups are evil... kids can't seem to let go of them. All of my friends warned me of this before we PT'd, so we stuck wih cloth training pants, which you can still find at target, and probably kmart/walmart stores. We did use pull ups at night, but that was it. During the daytime just use regular cloth underwear or cloth training pants.

Secondly, I accidentally found a DVD called, "potty power." We had tried other potty videos and they kept my son's attn, but didn't work and omg they were soooo annoying. The potty power dvd worked, he watched it once and wanted to use the potty right away. Compared to all of the other potty videos, it isn't that annoying. DH and I actually think the jester part of the dvd is hilarious. We would show our son the dvd every day to reinforce PTing.

OK, there is also a book called, "Toilet training in less than one day" by Azrin and Foxx. Yes, I know, it sounds gimmicky. The book is really outdated (written in the 70's), and I didn't agree with some of parts of it, BUT I did feel that it was a good basic guide to follow for PTing. It's one of those cheapy $7 paperbacks you should be able to find at your local bookstore.

Did my son PT in less than a day? By the end of the first day, he understood what he was supposed to do, after another 2 days of reinforcing PTing and a couple of accidents, he had it down! We were amazed that it only took three days. I had so many other moms tell me horror stories of their child undergoing the PT process for MONTHS! For the doll, we used the elmo potty doll.

BTW, we tried lots of different, "prizes" for motivation. Turns out the best thing was POPSICLES!!! Not only did this motivate my son to use the potty, BUT since popsicles are a liquid, it resulted in more potty, "opportunities" which ended up working out perfectly, since our son didn't drink as many fluids as other kids his age.

Oh, and the best potty seat are the baby bjorn brand potty seats and chairs. You probably already have one, but honestly the BB ones are worth the extra $. Get the one that is bigger with the lift out bowl for PTing. They are soooo much easier to clean than other PT seats. Once PTing is down, you can transition to a potty seat for on top of the toilet. The BB brand is again the best one, b/c it has a knob that adjusts to fit any toilet (we tried cheaper ones that just didn't fit corectly on on kohler toilets). Warning: Whatever you do do not get the seats with the soft padded seat. Why? I found out the hard way that if you have boys, they can spray all over the place by accident and the pee collects inside the spongy padding and cannot be cleaned.... it's really gross. We had to throw it out.

One more thing, don't worry too much about the pooping part. It will come later, this is normal. I think most kids who are PTing think that the pooping part is scary.

We'll be PTing our younger son some time in the next few months and plan to follow the same methods. Good luck with the potty training!

[stebujiji]

Hey MN, no worries...it'll happen in its own time. Goobs will be four in October and has finally gotten it. We were going back and forth between big boy underpants and pull ups for the longest time. We have been talking about preschool for the longest time and he's very excited about it. We told him that if he wanted to go to preschool, he had to use the potty. For him, that worked pretty well. He has had some accidents, but overall he's been very good. The daytime potty training seems to be done, but the bed wetting continues off and on. He's not wet his bed in a week and a half, so we are hoping this is a trend. We are using getting him a big boy bed as motivation. I am actually picking up the bed tonight. He's very excited and has been telling everyone he's getting a new bed...our neighbors, people in stores...

Goobs does like public bathrooms in malls and grocery stores. If he has to do "numero dos", he will go from stall to stall, inspecting bowls to see if they meet his standards. You hear a succession of doors swinging and "nope, nope, nope, yup... Daddy, I want to poop in this one." After everything is done, everyone in Cub Foods or Kohls hears him say, "Mommy, I pooped a big one." It seems like his voice booms down throughout the store. We are now working on his post potty discretion.

[Lily]

Whenever LN is really ready, she'll let you know. Of course encourage along the way. We also used incentives. Just like jooliya, we used M&M's - one for pee, two for pooh. Diva #1 was excited about her treats and really worked at going to the potty to get her treats. We didn't need to do that after a couple of months.

Good luck.

[Mama Nabi]

Thank you for all the suggestions! So far, LN's favorite incentive are candy or the Wiggles so I will have to use those.
As I wrote on my own blog, I did learn my first lesson already: No, Pull Ups don't work. (Thank you, jooliyah, myuneuri, and MJ...) Sigh. Off to get 'real' underwear... I better make sure we stock up on laundry detergent as well.

[Kady]

In China, as my mami endlessly likes to remind me, the kids are trained early because they go diaperless as soon as they can walk. How do they do this, you ask? Well, the parents cut little triangles out of the crotch of their little pants. I kid you not. In China (actually, at this point, mostly rural China), you'll actually see tons of toddlers walking around in crotchless pants. Then, when they have to pee/poo, they just squat down and relieve themselves (yeech!). After a while, parents see/learn the pattern, get them to the potty and *voila* potty trained!

Um. No thanks.

My oldest has a weird foible: she refuses to pee and poo at the same time. So she'll go to the potty, do #2, and then 5 minutes later, go back to do #1. Anyone ever deal with this before?

[twizzle]

Thanks for sharing this humorous Korean potty-training tradition! We, too, are in the throes of potty training, however I'm rather a late adopter to the game in that I didn't know about pull-ups until a month ago... and my kid is 3!! I have never tried any type of cajolery - but like the idea of offering rewards for progress.

My daughter is still in diapers, but uses a potty seat on the toilet, which she insists on putting up herself. She must also must climb up on the toilet herself or else she has a meltdown.

The trick is to get her to tell me when she has to poo rather than after the fact.

Ah, there are so many poo stories I could tell. The topic of pottytraining is simply rife with comic potential!

[Jujujojo]

WRT the other comment about kids being potty trained in China, we moved to Beijing last month and my daughter became potty-trained in about two weeks. She's not yet two. And I mean she's potty-trained completely. When she needs to go, she goes to sit on her potty and does her thing, then proudly presents her "products" to us as well as her stuffed animals (the odor can be quite vicious sometimes but we've never cheered so loudly). Only thing is that she's not very good at wiping her poop off completely.

In fact, even in cities (and we live in a fairly posh complex) kids, mostly boys, wear crotchless pants. We let my daughter go bottomless in the house at first (our house doesn't have a shred of carpet so cleanup is easy) and she did have a few accidents. But once she made the connection it was really easy.

What really helped is the fact that little kids can pee freely on the street so we didn't have to put her back in diapers when we went out. If she's at the playground and needs to pee, we pull her pants down and she goes by the bushes. All kids do this so nobody bats an eye, as long as it's not number 2. There's no pressure on the parents or on the kids. Let's admit it--I don't know about you but I ain't gonna ask my not yet two year old to hold it in for 10 mins while I go look for a public toilet. Public toilets are not that available in this part of the world, and diapers are a luxury for most families. Plus they don't come in large sizes anyway. However, it's not accurate to say that she just goes wherever she wants. She (as well as the other kids I've observed) will tell us ahead of time so we can take her to a fairly private corner. I can't put her in crotchless pants--it's considered crude for girls. Now, my son...I've already got a stack of crotchless pants waiting for the day when he starts walking.

If you want you can read about it on my blog (and about our other adventures in Beijing). Yes, I know a lot of Americans find it repulsive that kids pee in trash cans and on the street here, but it really isn't a big deal here as it's part of the culture. Chinese people think it's ridiculous AND shocking that kids older than three wear diapers.

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