The REAL Parent’s Potty Training Survival Guide

***Thank you to Clorox for sponsoring this post so I could share this fun, real potty training survival guide to keeping the mess in check as you tackle the dirty business!***

You know what gets a bad rap? Diapers. Parents jones so hard to shed them, but on the other side of those nappies lies an unseemly fate–potty training. It is quite possible I am the worst potty trainer in the world. I largely handled it by laying down a few tarps, burrowing my head in the sand and praying hard it would all be over soon. Thanks to my rockstar, far more involved and mature, husband we all–mostly–survived. Something else that helped a ton? Being able to laugh at ourselves and the mess as we went. Friends, while you won’t find an actual potty training how-to here, you will hear the truth that a real potty training survival guide involves a great deal of humor, not to mention a super-effective way to clean, as you work to boot those diapers and slug your way through the ordeal.

The Real Potty Training Survival Guide’s two goals:

1. Keep the potty humor flowing
2. Get really smart about cleaning up the mess.
3. Let the potty training laughs fly!

I get it–you’re exhausted and grappling with yet another mess doesn’t feel like much fun. In fact, let’s be honest, you are madly counting up your assets while pursuing a second mortgage on the house to see if there is any way you can afford to ship your kiddos off to boarding school until they can efficiently and independently use the toilet. In the meantime, as with all things in life, you have a choice–you can laugh or you can cry. Since I’ve done my fair share of crying over kid chaos, I can first-hand report that laughing is a whole lot more fun, so let’s go that route, friends.

Tell me the funny things that have happened with your kids during potty training! And let me share a few gems of my own…

• My son was finally embracing the notion that depositing in the toilet was a good thing! So why should I be surprised when he upended an entire bag of cotton balls in the potty? And guess who enjoyed the treat of fishing the cotton balls out by the handful so as not to upset her family’s dicey septic system? Lucky me!
• After observing her brother’s anatomy, my daughter took notice of her own structure and proudly assessed, “I have two butts! Look, Mommy!” As rationalizing with a toddler remains a perpetually fruitless endeavor, I had to look right thenwhile she was on the toilet– and confirm that yes indeed! My gal was rocking the butts
• “Can you take picture?” Because who isn’t proud of their poop?! Honestly, by the time we were solidly pooping in the toilet, I was so darn proud of the results that yes, my love, I will not only snap a pic of your poop, I’ll get it permanently hung on a canvas to hang above the fireplace.

You need to clean that gross up!

And since this potty training gig will find us nudging our heads far too close for comfort near the toilet to assess toddler bums and shoving our hands down into its bowl to scoop out cotton balls, or one of the other 100% gross tasks that goes along with helping our little ones in the bathroom, our best hope to avoid yucky germs is to keep the area as bacteria-free clean as possible.

And the best way to do this to do this is to toss the germs! Literally, instead of hanging on to the nasty little beasts, pitch them! Thanks to the genius , this is possible. With the Clorox® ToiletWand® System, each disposable refill head is preloaded with to give you the cleaning power you won’t have with a traditional germy toilet brush. Simply click a refill head onto the wand, scrub to unleash the preloaded Clorox® Toilet Bowl Cleaner, then toss the head away.

Does this really matter? YES! Toilet bowls can contain as many as 3.5 million bacteria per square inch[1] and some of those remain on traditional toilet brushes after you’re done cleaning. Gross, right? It’s time to boot the brush and turn to the Clorox® Toilet Wand, which kills 99.9% of germs and features abrasive scrubbers to power through tough stains. It’s time to break up with your toilet brush!

Need more compelling reasons to tidy up that toliet area in a serious way? Research shows that “potentially infectious aerosols may be produced in substantial quantities during flushing.”[2] Aerosol plumes created by flushing the toilet can shoot up to 15 feet in the air.[3] “Toilet plume” can transmit bacteria (e.g. salmonella, shigella) and viruses (e.g. hepatitis A, norovirus) when fecal particles enter the mouth. For this reason, it’s best to keep cups and toothbrushes in the cabinet…and most importantly, to wash your hands!

My children are now 5 and 7, so our potty training days are behind us…but the cringe-worthy bathroom messes are NOT. Our bathroom? Remains 100% disgusting. Little boy pee sprays? Messy poop wiping smears? Need I say more? Whatever stage of parenting you are at, you still need to work hard to keep those germs in check. Thanks to the Clorox® Toilet Wand, this is easily accomplished. 

There’s very little in this parenting gig we parents can feel as though we have aced, but with Clorox® Toilet Wand, we can solidly rest assured that we have done our best to battle those nasty germs…and with hefty dose of real humor to laugh our way through all the messes as we go, we might just survive these dicey days after all, friends!

***Thank you to Clorox for sponsoring this post so I could share this fun, real potty training survival guide to keeping the mess in check as you tackle the dirty business!***

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPgqi_LIQfc

[2] Source: Lifting the lid on toilet plume aerosol: a literature review with suggestions for future research, American Journal of   Infection Control, March 2013 https://goo.gl/d00ny2

[3] Source: Sean Kane, Here’s why you should always close the toilet lid when you flush, Tech Insider, March 24, 2016 https://goo.gl/cIKSTh

First image credit: depositphotos.com, Image ID:37402849, Copyright:lianna_s

Second image credit: depositphotos.com, Image ID:13470379, Copyright:oksun70

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Meredith

Meredith blogs at The Mom of the Year, where she dedicatedly earns her title one epic parenting fail at a time, offering quick, relatable laughs for fellow parents and all their empathizers. She has been part of several best-selling anthologies, featured on prominent sites such as Huffington Post, In the Powder Room and BlogHer, and loves her role as the Executive VP/Operations Manager of The BlogU Conference. When she's not breaking up fights over Legos and juice boxes, she remains fully committed to sharing a less serious look at the world of parenting.

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