The Disadvantages to Potty Training

I want to know why we put so much pressure on ourselves to potty train our children as quickly as possible.  Is it because we don’t like to pay for diapers, or is it because we find some sort of sick pride in being able to say “oh little Tommy was potty trained by 18 months!” Whatever it is, I think there are some disadvantages to having our kids out of diapers and I’ve got the perfect example.

Last week when I was driving to Staten Island with Charlotte, she announced that she had to pee on the Belt Parkway.  This would never have been an issue if she was in a diaper, but because she now wears underwear it quickly became a code red emergency.  So I did what any normal mother would do in this situation being far from a bathroom.  I pulled over on the side of the ride and tried to get my child to pee into a cup in the backseat.  Oh, is this not what you would have done?  Yeah, probably not my finest moment.  However, I will forever get a chuckle remembering Charlotte’s face while I held a cup between her legs in the backseat of my car.  Her eyes as wide as saucers, screaming at me that she didn’t have to pee anymore.  And so I decided then that if she peed herself, I’d deal with it, because I couldn’t find a gas station or anything like that in the vicinity.

But THEN, miraculously, there was a shopping center with a Dunkin’ Donuts and a diner.  We shuffled out of the car and ran into Dunkin first, where Charlotte yelled at the man behind the counter, “I gotta go peepee!” and he informed us that there was no restroom.  So to the diner we went, where the sign said “restrooms are for customers only.”  But, bless the man’s heart, as Charlotte continued to scream “I gotta go peepee!” he let us through.  And then she danced around the diner because the Justin Timberlake song from Trolls was playing on the radio and she was pretty excited about that.  Crisis averted!

Honestly, diapers weren’t so bad.