Open Thread: Help! What Are Your Best Potty Training Tips

(This is not safe potty-training procedure. FluxFactory/iStockPhoto)

Potty-training is pretty darn difficult. Or maybe it’s easy? I’ve been looking for potty training tips and I’m getting mixed signals from the parents around me. My mother, for example, insists that at the age of exactly 24 months I demanded a pair of underpants with lace on them, and she said I couldn’t have them unless I was potty trained, at which point I said, “Then I am potty trained” and that was it, and there were no accidents or relapses or anything.

My mother is not a reliable narrator.

Over on The Stir saw what seems like an absolutely brilliant potty-training hack, wherein a mother popped her son on the toilet seat backwards and let him draw with dry-erase markers on the underside of the toilet lid. In the pictures, the kid looks pretty entertained. He’s going to sit on that potty for hours.

But if they have potty training tips that worked, surely there must be more good advice out there.

My pediatrician’s advice was to just put the toddler in underpants over the weekend and see what happens. This sort of feels like playing spin-the-bottle with a Molotov cocktail, but I suppose we’ll try it. What have we got to lose? I mean, besides floors, clothes, and a bit of sanity.

I’m sure someday I’ll be missing the pre-potty-training days. Right now I can make a five-hour car trip to visit the grandparents without having to stop for anything but coffee, but once I have a potty-training toddler, I imagine I’ll have to stop alllll the time. And how do you even clean a car seat after an accident has been had in it? Maybe potty training is one of those things that can safely be put off for a while, because the potty-trained small-child years seem like they have a high potential for mess and disaster.

But still, we’re all going to have to go through potty training eventually. What potty training tips have worked for you? Share your tips, tricks, stories, and disasters in the comments.