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Potty Training — Not As Hard As Everyone Said It Would Be

Jessica Delfino
4 min readJan 6, 2020
Not my child. Photo credit: Henley Design Studio / Unsplash

My son is in the throes of potty training. He seems to be enjoying it a lot for someone who is basically just hanging out in a bathroom.

I was told and I read and, thus, I assumed that potty training would be frustrating, horrible, painful, sad, upsetting, difficult, a lesson in stretching your last shred of patience, maybe itchy, and all kinds of other miserable things. I was told to expect a lot of bodily fluids on the floor. But actually, it’s been kind of fun. I even put it off for a bit longer than I probably needed to because I was dreading it so much.

I remember a false potty training start a few months back, wherein I tried to explain to him what “number one” and “number two” meant. He got it right away. “I have to go number 10,” he told me. I gave up right there and then and opted to leave the diapers on for a bit longer. I am a caring and patient mom, but even I am not emotionally or mentally capable of handling the ramifications of a mysterious “number 10”.

I was surprised (and I admit, kind of delighted) to find that my toddler gets extremely excited when he uses the bathroom. I only wish such a mundane act like urinating would bring me the kind of joy it brings him. Maybe one day it will, again. He screams, “Yay! I did it!” every single time. I echo his observations, usually…

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Jessica Delfino
Jessica Delfino

Written by Jessica Delfino

I write about life with 1 husband, 2 kids, 1 cat, sometimes funny. Instagram.com/JessicaDelfino Bylines: TheNew Yorker, The NY Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s.

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