When you first find out you are having twins your mind starts racing. All you can think of is “two… two…two…double…double…double EVERTYTHING”! So as it is with everything else that doubles when twins come along, so does potty training. Which is not exactly something that most parents of multiples look forward to.
I mean, yes, it’s exciting to think of no more diapers to change (or buy), and that your babies are becoming big kids and less dependant on you. But I think I can safely say that no parent who has potty trained twins actually was excited about the process (and if you are/were please stand up and tell us!).
This is for the simple reason that most people don’t like cleaning up bodily waste.
Like when your cute little puppy poops on the carpet for example, you clean it up and keep on training, because the end goal is worth the disgusting feeling of poop squished under your plastic bag-covered hand.
The same is true of children. So it’s with happiest of happy dances that I can say we are finally done with potty training (with the exception of night training), and that looking back, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
You can read our full potty training story here.
So now that we’ve mastered this milestone, I thought I would share a few potty training mistakes that I would do differently if I had to do it over again.
3 Mistakes I Could Have Avoided
Starting too early
As I mentioned in my potty training story post, we bought two matching potty chairs and some very miniature panties for our girls around 18 months, just to have around so they could get used to them.
They right aways played with their chairs and sat on them often where we had placed in the bathroom. They had been starting to try take off their own diapers when they were wet, and also being interesting in the toilet and copying what we did, so that’s why I figured they were showing “the signs” of being ready to start potty training.
We slowly introduced them to the feeling of sitting on the potty bare bum by changing their diapers in the bathroom every morning, and sitting them on the potty chair. They liked reading on them, and basically they became glorified reading thrones where they would sit for a loooong time and then as soon as I put their diapers back on they would go pee in the diapers.
I knew this was a great way to get them familiar with their potty and so my expectations were pretty low at that stage. However, like every first-time parent, I was a bit more eager to have them trained really early, just for bragging rights of course. “Oh my, your toddler is 3 and still not potty trained? My twins are not even 2 years old and they are fully trained during the day!”
Never mind all the articles I read that said twins often are even more behind with developmental milestones than singletons, I’d read about moms who potty trained by 18months, so if a singleton could do it, I figured so could my twins!
Lets just say that a lot of stress and frustration on my part could have been avoided if I’d lowered my expectations even more and realized that there’s nothing wrong with waiting a bit. Especially since it was almost a full year later that they were both daytime trained. So yeah…I cleaned up my fair share of messes in that year!
Trying to do a 3 day potty bootcamp on my own
When researching potty training like a mad woman, I did a lot of reading about the 3 day potty training methods and thought it sounded like the obvious route to take with twins. Two toddlers trained in 3 days? Sign me up please!
So when my girls were 19 months old I brought the potty chairs out into the living area and we started off bare bum and drinking lots of water, as instructed. My little mini me’s thought it was great fun and soon were buck naked jumping around on their potties and chewing chunks out of the spongy blue removable potty ring.
After a morning of cleaning up too many messes to count, I called it quits and for the sake of my sanity told myself I’d try again when they were older. Who was I kidding?
All the articles I read about this method mentioned setting aside 3 days over a long weekend or holiday when both parents could be present to do the bootcamp..and this was just for one toddler. So needless to say trying to do it on my own with twins was biting off more than I could chew.
I decided to go back to my slow and steady method of just having scheduled potty times at certain points during the day, and then keeping the diapers on the rest of the time. In the end, this worked much better since my girls were at different places in their interest anyway.
If you’re going to try for the bootcamp method, make sure you have some backup!
Combining diapers with pull-ups
The original thought was to get rid of all the diapers and buy some pull-ups for naps and night time. But because my girls were still waking up almost every night from their wet diapers, I kept them around since they were easier to change in the night than the pull-ups. This made my Twin A refuse to wear the pull-ups at all during the day, since her beloved diapers were still around. Finally though, they stopped waking from their wet diapers and we were able to use the nighttime pull-ups for sleeping and get rid of the diapers!
This made it easier to make the transition to no diapers or pull-ups during the day at all, and that’s when Alisha (Twin A) was starting to go on the potty all by herself without being told.
So there we have it. If you’re soon to be potty training more than one toddler, I hope this could be of some help, and best of luck! Potty training twins is not for the faint of heart! 😉
Check out these other great articles on potty training twins from a few of my favourite mommy bloggers!
https://twocametrue.com/are-your-twins-ready-to-potty-train/
https://sleepingshouldbeeasy.com/2017/02/28/how-to-potty-train-twins/
