Based on a recommendation from fellow quad mom Suz Steece, we used the 3-day potty-training method. Basically, the author says that if you follow her method to the letter, your kid will be fully potty-trained in 3 days. She also claims that the best time to potty-train is at 22 months. I figured that since my mom would be in town around the time the kids hit the adjusted age of 22 months—and since the girls, in particular, have been so interested in removing their clothing and diapers over the past few months—it couldn't hurt to try!
A few days before my mom arrived, though, I chickened out of training all four kids at once—and I am so glad I did. Even with three adults on potty-training duty, taking care of the girls while not neglecting the boys was nearly impossible. And forget about getting anything extra done around the house! All we did while my mom was here was watch for signs that the girls needed to go; say "Tell me if you need to go pichí in the potty!" about a million times; and run the girls to the potties for every accident, success, and false alarm (of which there were many).
The first couple of days were a nightmare, with big accidents left and right. (We did decide to go against the 3-day method's advice and use pull-ups during naps and nighttime; I can't even imagine how much worse it would have been if the girls had been sleeping in their panties!) After the third day, though, we were rewarded: Lucy got it!! (The pee part, anyway—we're still working on putting #2 in the potty.) She has now been accident-free for a week, and we are very proud of her (but probably not as proud as she is of herself!).
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| Potty sisters: Lucy and Dahlia (you can see some of the tattoos they got for going pichí in the potty) |
Dahlia, however, has been a different story. She knows when she has to go, but she refuses to relieve herself until she absolutely can't hold it any longer. Unfortunately, this usually ends up being when she is not sitting on the potty. During the last couple of days, she had even starting throwing tantrums when we tried to sit her on the potty, so today (with the blessing of our pediatrician) we finally threw in the towel and put her back in diapers. We will try again in about a month or when she lets us know that she's ready to be a big girl like Lucy, whichever comes first.
Looking back, I wish that I had tried training just Lucy first, since she is the one who showed the most awareness of her wet or dirty diaper. And I have decided that, going forward, I will definitely train one kid at a time (the jury is still out on whether we will use the 3-day method again). I don't know how other families of multiples manage to train everyone at once with the 3-day method—call me a wimp, but trying to train both girls together (even with the help of Ted and my mom) was truly one of the worst weeks of my life!
Oh, and did I mention that all this was going on during the crib-escaping drama, the Christmas holiday, and the birthday party? Yeah, we could really use a vacation right about now!