Late last year, I was the lucky recipient of the Oh Crap! Potty Training book by Jamie Glowacki via my local Buy-Nothing group (it was a random number generator win of at least 10 hopeful parents!). Multiple parents, mostly colleagues and friends, had told me that this book was the only book/resource I needed to potty train Kaia. Many online summaries and knock-off methods existed, but this book was an absolute must, the parents all insisted.

I didn’t finally open it to read until a few weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised that I actually enjoyed reading the book itself. It wasn’t a boring “manual” that felt like a chore to read. It breaks down potty training into theory, methods, and steps, along with data-backed advice for what to do any time certain challenges or regressions came up. There’s a lot of empathy expressed for the child in terms of their attachment to the diaper/nappy (I mean, from their perspective, a diaper is all they’ve ever known since minutes after birth, right? So cut them some slack!). The part that I really did not expect (I read no reviews prior to opening the book) was the author’s humor. The author swears a lot (a lot of people negatively review the book because of this – it’s a style of humor, so they can get over themselves). She makes a lot of jokes about parents over-parenting, over scheduling, micro managing their kids (if you are upset by this, you are probably guilty of one of these offenses and should, again, get over your snowflake self). She is happy to call out bad parenting practices (over indulgence, coddling, letting children not get potty trained until past kindergarten, etc.) and how they can be harmful for children’s overall development. She can be very blunt. And I love ALL of it. There were a number of times I’d read this book before bed and chuckle out loud to myself. So when a close friend told me that this book gets slammed by a lot of parents and has endless negative reviews, I wasn’t the least bit surprised: people take things way too personally, especially regarding children and child-rearing, that of course a book like this was going to offend a large handful of parents out there. What ever happened to… reading a how-to book (written by someone who has thousands of data points to reference, as in clients she has personally potty trained herself, plus parents she’s consulted with through 1:1 and through her potty training classes), taking a grain of salt when applying it to your own life and child, and moving on? One review said that her husband was “in tears” after reading the book because it kept referencing “mothers” and only had “cliff notes” at the end for fathers, and he felt very left out. Oh, cry me a fucking river. The entire world has been targeted to men for all these centuries and left out women, and not until very recently were women included in the conversation (or research!). So get over yourselves.

We finally started her classic Block 1, three-day method on Saturday. Kaia ran around the apartment naked and will be through Tuesday morning, when we send her to school (ideally with no diaper or pull-up, just in shorts/pants, which is what Jamie calls “commando”). Each time she shows signs of wanting to pee/poop, we prompt her (or push her) onto the potty, so she gets the message/socialization that pee/poop is supposed to go in the potty. Amazingly, she actually has been self-initiating a LOT. This is what the first two days of data looked like:

Day 1: 8/3

Pee:

Potty: 8.5

Poop:

Floor: 2.5

Potty: 1

Floor: 0

Day 2: 8/4:

Pee:

Potty: 2.5

Floor: 1.5

Poop:

Potty: 0

Floor: 0

We’re also trying to night train as well, which means we have to estimate when she will pee, lightly wake her up and suggest she get on the potty to pee. Unfortunately, it’s been two nights of wetting the bed and missing her actual pee windows. But the good news is she doesn’t fight getting on the potty and goes willingly in the middle of the night. And to protect the bed (and keep from excess laundry), Chris has placed her play mat on top of her bed as a barrier, PLUS the hospital waterproof cover we had when Kaia was born. Chris’s creativity is paying off with less laundry loads. And Kaia is on her way to becoming diaper-free. I didn’t expect to feel sad and emotional at the thought of her getting to the next stage of development and becoming diaper free, but here I am. I am getting a little teary eyed that my little baby is growing so quickly into a big girl who no longer needs diaper changes. She loves to scream “JIA YOU!” and “I DID IT!” after a successful pee in the potty, and after she dumps her pee from her little potty into the toilet.