Potty training at home can be a stressful task.  Going out and using public restrooms can add another hurdle to an already strenuous task.  If you are like me, you try to avoid public restrooms altogether, they can be smelly, dirty and just plain ole nasty.  However when you have little ones it is very likely that the need to go potty will arise in a public place. When this happens you need to be ready to take them to a public restroom to avoid having an accident.  Here are some tips that will help you along that journey.

1.  Always, always, always use the bathroom right before you leave the house.  I cannot stress this enough.  Make it a rule, a routine, a habit that is hard to break.  Do not let this be an option for your children but a requirement or part of the routine.  Even if your child says they do not have to go, have them sit on the toilet for a few seconds anyway.  Having them use the restroom before you leave home gives you a longer stretch between the next time they have to go.

2. Plan ahead, know the types of restrooms that are available  in the various locations where you take your kids.  Check the restrooms of places where you may have never thought of using the restroom, like the grocery store, banks, post office, everywhere.  You never know when the time may arise when your little one has to go to the potty and you do not want to be stuck anywhere confused looking around for the restroom or conflicted about using dirty restroom.

3. Try to avoid drinks in the car, especially if you have a long drive ahead of you.  Do not dehydrate you children, but space their drinks out so that when they have a any liquids there is a restroom readily available.  Also in case of car seat accidents, it is a good idea to place some chux on their seat.

4. In the event that an accident does happen always have an extra pair of clothes available and a plastic or Ziploc bag to place wet clothes in.

5. Carry a travel size disinfectant spray, travel disinfectant wipes (not baby wipes) and hand sanitizer in your purse or diaper bag.  Unfortunately you may come upon a toilet that needs a little clean up before your child uses it.  Make sure you are prepared.

6. Have a travel potty seat that folds up.  A travel potty seat helps out in three ways.  It gives the child a familiar experience that they will have with each public restroom visit, which makes potty training on the go a lot easier.  It also helps them not fall into the toilet, because the seat fits their small size. Lastly it acts as another barrier between their bottoms and the public toilet seat.  You can find plain fold up seats or ones with charters on them as well.  They fold up very nicely and can fit in a purse or diaper bag.

7. Don’t forget the baby wipes and/or flushable toddler wipes.  Sometimes bathroom stalls run out of toilet paper, always keeps extra wipes on hand.

8. Teach your child proper hand washing techniques.  According to the CDC we should scrub our hands for 20 seconds before rinsing them off.  Count down while washing hands, or sing a song to help keep track of the 20 seconds, make it fun. ?

Here is a good song to learn and sing while washing your hands:

If the restroom has a blow dryer instead of paper towels,  sing and dance while drying hands to ease the tension, sometimes the loud blow dryers can scare children.

9. Have a trial size soap available as well as towel to dry hands on in case the restroom is out them.

10. Always have lotion available.  You will notice that with busy toddlers and potty training on the go, you will end up doing a lot of hand washing.  Most restrooms do not carry lotion.  I hate the feeling of dry ashy hands, so I try to never forget my moisturizer.  I need my lotion!

Mommies, what has been your experience with potty training on the go?  How do you handle taking your little ones to public restrooms?  Please share.

Angele is a wife to a wonderful creative husband, mother to two beautiful intelligent daughters and a lover of art, education and laughter.  She is the creator and author of ABC remix.

Запись 10 Tips for Potty Training On The Go and In Public Restrooms впервые появилась Baby & Blog | Celebrating Black Mommyhood.

The baby she held was wearing a hand-crocheted dress, but she kept referring to the baby as a “he”. If that was not strange enough he had no diaper attached to his bottom. He had on socks, tights and what looked like a dress. She kept him bare bottom on what I came to learn was a pre-folded diaper, sitting on her hand and every few minutes she kept peeking at his boy parts and she would feel the diaper. Curiosity got the best of me so during the break I kindly asked her what she was doing.

The woman said, “Oh, I’m working on EC with my son.” She saw me eyeing the dress and she volunteered, “This makes it easier to access his bottom so I can know what is going on down there. We are in the first stages so I’m also learning to time it.”

I said, “Wow, I’ve never heard of anything like that before, that’s… cool. So, um does it really work?”

She replied, “Women in Africa and Asia have been doing it for millennia. Babies are born knowing how to control their elimination. We train them to go in diapers and to be comfortable feeling soiled. Then we wonder why we have so much trouble with potty training later on. Also, once you both get used to it, it’s pretty convenient.”

The set up that she was using looked anything but convenient. I have a pretty expressive face so she must have seen what I was thinking, and she continued: “I catch two or three pees per day and usually poop too. At home it’s easy, but since we are at this talk and we were making such good progress, I didn’t want him to get accustomed to a wet diaper. This way I know the moment he is wet and I can change him right away.” Then the announcer ended the break and the woman excused herself saying that she was taking him to the toilet to poop. I sat down to listen to the rest of the seminar.

At the end of the seminar I asked her how the poop worked out. She looked like a proud mama and said the words that stuck with me: “Great! We’ve been using this same diaper all day!” I looked and indeed the diaper was so clean it looked like it had never been used.

I asked her how she knew that her son had to poop. She said that the baby gives signs, and that she could tell by looking in his face. She also told me how she prompted her son with a pee sound: she would lock eyes with him and made a “psst” sound like she was calling a cat. For poop she would squint her eyes and make a grunting sound. But she also said that every baby is different, and in the beginning the easiest way to do it is by “timing”.

Speaking of timing, it was time to go. She asked me about a possible playdate and I let her know that we no longer lived in the area, and that I was just there to attend the talk since I signed up for it before we moved two hours away. She told me that there were websites and books on the subject of EC and that I should Google it if I wanted to learn more. I thanked her, and was on my way.

Hmm. I was intrigued.

I did Google it later on and read about the basics. It was so out of this world that I asked my mom if she had ever heard of EC. She said she hadn’t. When I explained what it was, she said, “Oh… I guess I did that with you when you were a baby.” So I asked her to explain. She said, ”You would always poop twenty minutes or so after you ate and you would cry with a dirty diaper as soon as I went to bathe. I started waiting for you go before I would take my bath. I used to wash your diapers by hand so after a few days I thought ‘Why dirty a diaper?’ and I put you on the toilet, and you went. After that I would just put you on twenty minutes or so after you ate and drank, and you would go.” I asked her how old I was when she started doing this. She didn’t remember, but she said that I was completely diaperless, day and night, at eighteen months old.

Now I was even more intrigued.

I thought the process sounded neat but looked cumbersome. I also thought that poop and diapers was the only area of infant care I felt I had “under control” as a new mother, and I didn’t want to make any changes.

Of course my son had other plans.

I had started cloth diapers a week or two after we got home from the hospital. My reasons were economic and environmental. At two months old, my son was sleeping eleven hours at night and nursed exclusively, so when he woke up in the morning he nursed a lot. I fed him three times before his first nap, and I changed a wet or poopy diaper three times before I put him down again.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I did notice that he was beginning to skip pees on his own sometimes. Also, somewhere around two months he stopped pooping in the middle of the night and instead he would wait to poop until I came to get him in the morning. But every single morning, when I went to get him from his first nap, he would be covered head to toe in pee. It was a lot more fluid than he expelled overnight! I didn’t know what was going on, but I started using the overnight inserts for naps (and ordered the toddler inserts, since I was concerned that my two-month-old was already a heavy-wetter).

That worked for about three weeks, but at three and a half months he began to overflow those too. I thought of that woman from the seminar who had her son in a dress, and I decided to find out “what is going on down there”. Instead of putting my son in a diaper during his last feeding, I held him as usual, but this time I had his bottom in a foot basin, and I left the snap undone on his onesie… it  looked kind of like a dress…

I don’t know about you, but I thought that infants had a semi-constant flow of pee going on in those diapers. Not so! It actually took my son 45 minutes to pee after feeding. He stopped what he was doing, and got a certain look in his eyes like he was thinking of something far away… and there it was: ⅓ cup of pee in the basin and a big smile from the little guy!

Wouldn’t you know it, he did not overflow his nap diaper that day!

After a few days, he started to pee sooner after eating, about 15 minutes. I was impressed with the amount of awareness and control he had (but since then I’ve learned that this control is very common in young cloth-diapered babies, although I have read that some babies always pee during a feeding). I began nursing him with a prefold so I didn’t have to put on and take off a diaper. Also I invested in a biodegradable infant potty that I kept on his changing table.

Instead of changing him *after* he soiled his diaper, I would put him on the potty and he would eventually go! While we waited I would read him books or he would play with toys until he pooped. Here is a picture of him doing exactly this at six months old:

After he went potty I would let him sit bare-butt on a mattress protector on the carpet. He liked that, and so did I! In less than a week of experimenting with EC, I had become “that” (strange, sweet) lady from the seminar!

In retrospect, I have a good guess about why my son was skipping pees and overflowing those naptime diapers. I think that he was experimenting with holding it as long as he could, since cloth diapers allow the baby to feel wetness (which he didn’t like).  By giving him an opportunity to eliminate before I put him down he could begin his holding again during his nap and the diaper still had enough room to hold the pee from when he woke up.

One of the coolest things about doing EC so young is that you have a captive audience! The very young babies stay put when you put them down; they don’t know how to say “no”; they don’t have to unlearn (much) “diaper training”; they usually think it’s fun; and they are mostly in your arms already. So it is about as low mess and low pressure as it gets!

Cleaning his bottom after a poop was also easier since the poop wasn’t smeared all over. I would pour the poop in the toilet and simply wash the potty with hand soap. This way I was able to go three days before I had to wash diapers, instead of every day…

Doing EC doesn’t necessarily mean giving up diapers altogether. When my son and I went out, I would have him in a diaper — but I was able to leave the house with only one extra insert and a collapsible potty seat. Many days he would come home hours later in the same diaper he left the house in. I would take him to the toilet when I thought he had to go, and put the same clean diaper back on him. Wherever we went, I never had to hand the host a poopy diaper to dispose of.

I got another potty seat that I kept in my trunk, and I would potty my son before putting him in his car seat. If he peed, I could simply empty the potty by a tree and clean it out with a spray bottle I kept in my car. I kept a couple of flat diapers and a wet bag in case I needed to deal with a poop, but this didn’t happen much, because he preferred to poop at home.

I even took the collapsible seat on airplanes. One time he used the same (disposable) diaper all the way from SFO to ATL, even with layovers! During his diapered life I think we bought a total of five packs of disposable diapers to use while traveling.

EC is totally possible, and counterintuitively enough it is not at all complicated once you get the hang of it. It will work even if you only do it “imperfectly”. For example, according to the books I’ve read, the best times to catch a pee is are in the morning and as soon as baby wakes up from a nap; but sad to say I *always* missed those… and EC still worked with my son. (This is referred to as being a “part-time EC’er”.)

In my opinion, the hardest part about doing EC is believing it works! In my case I was fortunate to run into that woman at the seminar so I could see EC in action, and I was very happy to have a potty trained baby!

People looking for a good book on EC (instead of hoping to run into a nice woman at a seminar) could start with this one: Infant Potty Training: A Gentle and Primeval Method Adapted to Modern Living by Laurie Boucke. I found it the best because it discussed everything from how to begin EC in the first days (which I would do if I have another child) to regressions (which my son experienced as he learned to crawl and walk). But do be aware that if your child is 12-15 months old before beginning any kind of potty training, traditional methods are likely to be more effective than EC.

Have any of you tried EC or Infant Potty Training? Why or why not?

Shaniqua is a stay-at-home mom living in a small Northern California town with her husband and three-year-old son. She is the chapter leader of the Morgan Hill Chapter of the Holistic Moms Network, through which she hosts playdates and holistic cook-ins. In her “kitchen-turned-laboratory”, Shaniqua explores the benefits of raw butter, raw cow milk and goat milk products, gluten-free and grain-free cooking, pastured meats, organ meats, and home-fermented foods. You may find her on her blog Kinky Grass Roots.

Запись How I Potty Trained My 14-Month-Old Using Elimination Communication впервые появилась Baby & Blog | Celebrating Black Mommyhood.

I’m pretty certain in the coming weeks, I’m going to buy my baby some big boy underwear, but I don’t wanna.

I do want my child to potty train, but I can’t believe it’s happening already.

He’s on a regular schedule. He’s been staying dry for long stretches. He knows the words for using the bathroom and when we’re home he does most of his business on the potty. He has even used the potty in public and when we’ve been traveling.

Whether I’m ready or not, my big boy is potty training.

I say “baby” though he’s almost two. About 8 months ago I ordered his potty seat. I had started to notice him grunting and rather than just watch him go in his diaper, I held him over the potty, though this hasn’t always worked in my favor.

We used words such as “bathroom, poop, potty, etc” while holding him in place. Now especially at home he’ll announce “poop poop” before the grunting begins.

When he has successful potty time, we sing a potty song which he loves. Whenever he sits on the potty, we read him books which he loves more. I’ve figured out that he needs about 3 books to go to the bathroom. He really loves books that talk about using the potty while he’s on the potty. Sometimes he just asks to go to sit and read, but that’s part of the process too.

The part we really need to work on is getting his pants up and down himself and that includes the big boy underwear. I was doing ok with all this growing up until I was staring at packs of superhero undies and found myself on the verge of tears wondering where my baby had gone.

Whoever said raising kids is full of long days but short years wasn’t kidding. I won’t miss diapers when they’re done, but I can’t believe how fast this is going.

I guess it’s time to get serious about the potty. Any advice? Mostly I think I just need a hug.

Alicia is currently living her plan C or maybe D or F in a small college town where she divides her time between family, travel, work, and the internet. 

Запись My Toddler is Potty Training and I’m Not Ready впервые появилась Baby & Blog | Celebrating Black Mommyhood.