Wrapping Up 2 Kids at Once (not twins!) with Potty Training

EPISODE 194: WRAPPING UP 2 KIDS AT ONCE (NOT TWINS!) WITH POTTY TRAINING

Hey there, today we're going to talk about wrapping up two children, but I'm not talking about twins. So let's get started.

Hey there, welcome to the Go Diaper Free podcast. I'm Andrea Olson, your host, author and mom of five babies all EC from birth, all out of diapers by walking.

I got this message from a woman who said her goal for EC is "I want them both wrapped up by the time he's one year old." Currently she has an 11 month old she's doing EC with and a 26 month old she's doing potty training with. So I wanted to talk about some strategies to get you there. If you've got two kids in diapers, maybe you've got a baby who's pretty new. Or maybe a baby who's one like this woman. And you've got an older one who's not quite totally potty trained yet. If this is you, this episode is completely for you.

So the first thing, and I'm going to do this in specific steps, these are the steps that I want you to take and I do have pretty much the same advice for everybody in the same order every time. So the first step is to read or listen to my book called The Tiny Potty Training Book. This is the one for the older child. You can get that at godiaperfree.com/ptbook. And I will put a link in the show notes as well. It does come with the audio book currently, if you would like that. And it's a lot easier to get a book read if you've got a toddler, if you can do an audio book, right?

So the first thing I want you to do is read or listen to that. And I want you to at least read or listen to the first half of the book, because the second half of the book is actually troubleshooting. You don't even need to read that. So read the whole thing, so you know exactly what you're getting into first, I want you to do that within the next week. Then I want you to schedule your potty training experience and there is an instruction to do that in the book as well. I want you to make that schedule set for very soon, like this weekend. Could you do that? Can you finish reading half my book by then? It's a pretty thin book, so it's about a hundred pages. We want to reserve three to four consecutive days if possible, if you can't do that and you've only got weekends off, that's fine. Let's set off the next three weekends of two days each to work on this process.

The next thing I want you to do is to hop on tinyundies.com. And if you don't already have it, I want you to get two of my Mini Potty, one for each child in a color of their choice. So you can let them look and pick which color they want, but we want to have two different potties for each of those children. I also want you to hop on tinyundies.com and I want you to get size 3T undies, unless your two or three year old is huge and chunky. Like I have a three year old who wears size 4T, 5T. You can always size up as well, but they can share these undies. And how many packs do we want of these? Let's go ahead and get four packs if you can swing it and they can share and all use the size 3T.

We want to offer both children a daily morning pottytunity until that potty training experience is time, until that part of your schedule opens up. So we also, in other words, so the morning pottytunity is for both children. During this time as well, we want to offer the 11 month old or your younger child a pottytunity every time you change their diaper. So a pottytunity is basically an opportunity to go potty. They don't have to go, but we're just going to start making it a habit for ourselves and for our child to get offered that at a diaper change. We also want to offer the younger one the potty, if it's clearly a poop. And most of us know when our children are pooping. So if you notice that you gently say wait, and you bring them over to the potty and have them go, or you bring the potty to them and have them sit.

Now, this is the ECing part. So say for example, you have scheduled your potty training experience for 10 days from now, on a Thursday you're going to start, you've got Thursday and Friday off from work so you're going to do Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Those are your potty training experience days. You may or may not finish at this time. If not, that's not the point. The point is that you're committed to everything, you're not scheduling any outings at all. You are basically telling everybody you're going on vacation, you're not available, and you're not going to plan on having any kind of entertainment or whatever. You're basically going to be with your baby. And my potty training book will tell you exactly what you're doing there.

In the time between now and the next 10 days, if that's you, we're going to be offering both children a daily, morning pottytunity. Just say, Hey, "You guys, both of you sit on yours." And because they're doing it together, they're going to be more excited about that. And then the 11 month old at every diaper change and the 11 month old if it's clearly a poop. And if you want to do the same for the older one, that's fine too. But the potty training experience is going to be a little bit more straightforward for them. So I would hold off if that feels right.

The next step in our process is to potty train the oldest first. We want to potty train the oldest first because although we may think that the younger one will be easier, it's going to be a matter of honor and respect for the older child as a sibling relationship, and also between you and your child. Are you honoring them? Because they've been in diapers longer. And even though it might be harder in some ways, it's going to set the stage for the younger one to follow much more easily. The little one can help with this process however you see fit. Now after you've done the potty training for your eldest, you're going to be working on potty independence for some time, at 26 months old you might spend another month just teaching the different parts of manipulating clothing and changing wets and dealing with any accidents and whatnot.

My books come with support currently, by my certified coaches, for a lifetime. And that's at the time of this recording that may or may not change in the future. But if that is something that trips you up and you're like, "Well, I don't really know how to do this part or that part." Or any part of the process trips you up, you want to get support with us. We also have a Friday Zoom group called The Potty Tribe, you can totally come on there anytime and ask questions and that you can find out more at godiaperfree.com/tribe. It's an add on, monthly thing that we have. So every week you can come in and get help with your potty training experience.

But basically we're going to train the eldest. We're going to finish the potty training experience, and my book describes all of that in detail. Now when the littlest one is walking, this is your ticker that says, all right we're going to do something here. So we're going to keep with the littlest one until they're walking, if they're not walking yet. We're going to keep doing the morning pottytunity, we're going to keep doing the diaper changes pottytunity. We're going to keep doing the poop pottytunities. These are three of the Four Easy Catches. We're just going to do that and no more.

When they master walking, the youngest one, we're going to stop using daytime diapers by just doing a one to two day naked, potty training experience. Just like he recently experienced with your older one, his older sibling. There is a hybrid plan found in my Go Diaper Free Book, if you'd like to also get that book and then download the optional hybrid plan from our members area.

But if you don't want to do that's okay, you can just follow what you did in the Tiny Potty Training book. And we're going to do a condensed version over one to two days, once they're walking. So what that's going to teach them is how to get to the potty when it's time to go. So that's just going to bridge a few of the gaps. I did this with my first child when he was 13 months old and it really taught him how to get to the potty, which was a big gap in his knowledge. And then we're going to proceed with EC, just like we have been, assisting that younger child until he can do it himself. We're going to have the older one help with the younger one. And anytime anybody needs to go to the bathroom, including you, we're going to go to the bathroom together and do a family pee. Put both of the Mini Potties in the bathroom, you have your toilet as well. And don't say anything. We're just going to go and do our business together.

So that's all I've got on how to wrap up two kids at once, who are not twins. I will link in the show notes to Wrapping up Twins and Wrapping up Triplets, because we have episodes on both of those. And also a link to the Wrapping up EC MiniCourse, which is very, very helpful. And then also I'm going to go ahead and lead you to my program as well. For young toddlers ages 12 to 18 months. I've got these three awesome programs that are divided up by newborn, mobile baby and young toddler. It goes beyond my book, it's very age specific and it's a very big expansive program, but it's only about an hour and a half in length. But it focuses just on the age range you're at.
So since you're at 11 months and you're just on the verge of that 12 to 18 month program, getting the Potty Training book, potty training the older one, and then working on EC with the 12 to 18 month old with that program would be ideal. If you don't want to do that, it's fine. You can just really trust that you're going to learn a whole bunch from potty training your older one, and that you two together are going to work on potty training your younger one. And it's going to look a little bit different, it's going to take a little longer in some ways and be a little bit faster and easier in some ways, but you got this mama and daddy, you've got this, completely 100%.

I'm Andrea Olsen with Go Diaper Free and I thank you so much for listening and watching today.

Thanks so much for listening. This is the Go Diaper Free podcast at godiaperfree.com. We'll see you next time.