Every parent hopes to cruise through potty training so they can be rewarded with the sweet liberty of a diaper-free lifestyle. But sometimes the toilet training journey is less of a cruise and more of a crawl… or worse yet, a series of fits and starts. Marc and his wife Jamie know this journey all too well as they’re currently navigating the harsh (and sometimes messy) terrain with their twin boys. Guest Evan Ozimek-Maier, along with his wife and two-year-old daughter, on the other hand, are just buckling in. Will they discover the perfect technique? Will they encounter regression road blocks? Or will they careen down a YouTube rabbit hole? Evan joins the Modern Dadhood conversation to share his perspective, and to get down and dirty on the journey of potty training.
Every parent hopes to cruise through potty training so they can be rewarded with the sweet liberty of a diaper-free lifestyle. But sometimes the toilet training journey is less of a cruise and more of a crawl… or worse yet, a series of fits and starts. Marc and his wife Jamie know this journey all too well as they’re currently navigating the harsh (and sometimes messy) terrain with their twin boys. Guest Evan Ozimek-Maier, along with his wife and two-year-old daughter, on the other hand, are just buckling in. Will they discover the perfect technique? Will they encounter regression road blocks? Or will they careen down a YouTube rabbit hole? Evan joins the Modern Dadhood conversation to share his perspective, and to get down and dirty on the journey of potty training.
Episode 27 of Modern Dadhood begins with an acknowledgement that the past two episodes have been heavy. “Heavy topics for heavy times,” as noted appropriately by Marc. The guys have decided to lighten things up with a topic that every parent goes through: Potty training. As it turns out, the Checkets are currently fully immersed in the potty training adventure with their twin boy toddlers, so Marc, in particular, has plenty in common with guest Evan Ozimek-Maier. Evan is the Associate Director of Creative Services at the prestigious Berklee College of Music, and is a father of a two-year-old daughter Louis.
Evan shares about his family’s journey training Louis (who he and his wife Alyssa affectionally call Lulu) to ditch the diapers and commit to using the toilet. The guys discuss various techniques that they’ve read about, heard about, and tried themselves, and they share what has been most successful in their own experiences. Other topics include:
• The value of including your child in the conversation
• Letting your kid take the initiative vs. encouraging it based on age
• Associating feelings of negativity with the toilet/peeing or pooping without a diaper
• Parents’ reactions to their child successfully using the toilet
• Incentivizing potty use
• Being influenced by peers who are potty trained
• Embarrassment/shame around pooping
• Regression
• The Respectful Parenting Method
• The "Oh Crap!" method
• Potty training books/videos/resources
[Episode Transcript]
LINKS:
Evan Ozimek-Maier
Oh Crap! Potty Training
RIE / Respectful Parenting Method
Caspar Babypants
Red Vault Audio
Spencer Albee
Adam:
Hello, Marc.
Marc:
Adam, is that you?
Adam:
It's me. How are you?
Marc:
Oh, I'm better now.
Adam:
The sun is shining, at least where I am.
Marc:
It's shining here as well. You're listening to yet another episode... I can't, not with that sound. You're listening to another episode of the podcast, Modern Dadhood, which is an ongoing conversation about the joys, challenges, and the general insanity of being a dad in this moment.
Adam:
Tell us who you are.
Marc:
Oh, right. My name is Marc Checket. I did the Cheggit thing again. Let me try that again. My name is Marc Checket, and I am a dad of twin boy toddlers.
Adam:
And my name is Adam Flaherty. I'm a father of two. They're both girls and they're six and three-years-old.
Adam:
Well, the last two episodes of Modern Dadhood have been pretty heavy.
Marc:
Heavy topics for heavy times.
Adam:
Yeah. We've been chatting about some fairly complex issues and they can weigh pretty heavily on all of us as parents. So I was thinking that for today, maybe we could lighten it up a bit. What do you think?
Marc:
That's a great idea. That's right. Today, we are going to talk about the afterlife. No. What do you say we just talk about pee and poop?
Adam
I like it.
Marc:
Okay.
Adam:
It's something that we all go through as parents. You're going through it right now.
Marc:
Yes, indeed.
Adam:
What are we talking about?
Marc:
Potty training, my good friend. Potty training.
Adam:
That's right, and today's guest is a friend, a business associate of mine, and someone who I have a lot of respect for, a lad by the name of Evan Ozimek-Maier, and he's going to be joining us shortly to talk about his potty training experience. I mean, he's potty training his daughter-
Marc:
Oh, it's not him. Okay. All right. Makes sense.
Adam:
He's experiencing it as a dad.
Marc:
Got it. Okay. Thanks for clarifying.
Adam:
Before we bring Evan into the conversation, I'd love to hear about how things are going with your family and the boys. Are they full-time in undies at this point?
Marc:
They are... Well, let's see. I'll put a percentage to it. I would say they're 80% of the time in big boy undies.
Adam:
Not bad.
Marc:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm only 90% right now as a 38-year-old man.
Adam:
Are you just commando the rest of the time?
Marc:
Very close. You know, let's leave that up to let's leave it up to the listeners.
Adam:
I know where my imagination's going, and it's not pretty, man.
Marc:
We're still, I would say in the thick of it, although I would say we're on maybe the tail end of it, but I think it's hard to tell how much still that we have to get through. It sort of, at times feels like it could last for quite a while still, but we're not quite sure yet.
Adam:
How many weeks are you into potty training? Three, four weeks or something?
Marc:
Yeah. We're like three weeks, three and change, maybe weeks. And they are leaps and bounds beyond where they were obviously, in the beginning. One of my sons took to it a little bit faster than the other. And I should say the other one is actually being just kind of resistant in a way. He's not like, "I don't get it." He's just kind of resisting parts of it. But man, they can like take their pants off, like champions. It's great. They're just learning all sorts of new things. It's been a real trip for me and Jamie to be trying to teach them to do these things. I think parents go through this a lot, over and over and over again, where you're teaching something to your children that you do all the time, but you've never given it a thought, "How do I teach this to somebody?" Because you don't think about it when you do it, and all at once it's interesting and difficult and super frustrating. I mean, I know you went through it twice.
Adam:
Yeah. What you just said reminded me a little bit of, it was an exercise we did in middle school or high school and I can't even remember what class, but the idea was you need to teach someone who has never made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before, how to do that, just using language.
Marc:
I've done the same exercise.
Adam:
And how hard it is to shed the just knowledge and context that you have because you tell somebody and you're skipping all these steps, just presuming they know. But if they know nothing, how would you go about walking them through step by step?
Marc:
I'll never forget that lesson actually. My teacher, her name was Mrs. Wanfrey. She's since passed, so she's definitely not listening. I'll never forget her reading one of the instructions that one of the kids in class wrote. It was like, step one, put the peanut butter on the bread. And she picked up an entire pack of unopened bread and an entire jar of unopened peanut butter and just smash them together. The kids were like, "Whoa, okay, I think we're starting to see the lesson now."
Adam:
Immediately.
Marc:
I'll never forget that image.
Adam:
You know she was excited to do that exact stunt every year. And she went through all the papers until she found the one kid who started with that step. Well, I'm glad it's going well, and once they get the hang of it, it's something you only have to do once, hopefully. Have you tried the overnight yet?
Marc:
Not yet. And they're a little miffed when we go to put on diapers on them at night. We have to sort of say to them like, "Oh, it's just really hard to get all the way through the night." It's like, "No reflection on you. You're really great at it." It's a weird little interaction that we have at night.
Adam:
They might pick up on that really fast too.
Marc:
Yeah, I hope so. It blows my mind how excited, particularly one of my sons, he gets just skyrockets to extreme excitement every time. And what's cute is that he says, "I'm peeping" which is a really cute way of saying peeing. I don't know how he got it. "I'm peeping," and it's hilarious every time.
Adam:
Well, on that note, we have our guest for today in our Zoom waiting room. Should we keep him waiting, what do you think?
Marc:
Just keep him waiting.
Adam:
His name's Evan Ozimek-Maier. He is the associate director of creative services at Berklee College of Music. And if you can believe it, he's also a dad.
Marc:
What are the odds?
Adam:
I think I'm going to hit the admit button and bring him in. Hey, Evan!
Evan:
How's it going, guys?
Adam:
Did you appreciate the magazines that were in the waiting room?
Evan:
They were tasteful, a little bit out of date, but I appreciated the variety.
Adam:
Evan, you and I have known each other for quite a few years now. It started out from a business context and sort of slowly blossomed into a friendship. And now we're in love, and are both married to other people and we have children and that creates all sorts of complexities.
Evan:
You know, we're making it work though. It's complex, but this is Modern Dadhood.
Adam:
Perfect.
Evan:
Exactly.
Adam:
This is the first person who truly gets it.
Marc:
He gets it.
Adam:
Seriously though, you've been on my list of people that we need to get onto the podcast for a long time. And so I'm really happy that it's finally happening and that we also get a chance to talk about pee pee and poo poo.
Evan:
Yeah. I can't wait. I've been thinking about it for so long, every couple hours every day, leading up until this moment. It's going to be really great.
Adam:
Can you share with us and our listeners a little bit about your beautiful family?
Evan:
So my wife and I have been together for going on nine years now. We dated for a while before we were married, but our daughter came along two years ago. Her name is Louis. We call her Lulu. She has strawberry blonde hair and people love calling her Lulu Lemon. And yeah, we're just like the three Musketeers. We go everywhere, we do everything together. And honestly, Luis is so independent and grown-up that I feel like it's not two people raising a child, but rather all three of us raising each other. It's really, really cool how involved Lulu is in our lives. It's never felt like pushing the lump around. It's always been, there we are, the three of us. It's been quite a journey.
Marc:
Okay. So we're here to talk about potty training, which I too, just by the way, I'm not even sure if you're aware, but I'm in the midst of still. I guess on the tail end. I'm not really sure though, because maybe it's just going to go on forever, which is how it feels sometimes. So you and I have a lot of things to discuss and I almost feel like this is going to be Adam sort of firing questions off at both of us. But let me ask this, because potty training, sometimes I think it's sort of easy to think of as a black and white thing, like either they're potty trained or they're not. But us dads, who are sort of going through it know that there's a lot more layers. It's much more complex, as I just stated. Some days I feel like, "Yeah." Other days I'm like, "But why, and is this forever?" Can you talk a little bit about where you are with Lulu right now?
Evan:
I have to say I'm a bit jealous that you're at the tail end of the journey because we are definitely lacing up the boots, should I say. We kind of started getting the vibe that Lulu was ready to start her journey a few months ago. Prior to that, it was 100% diaperland, not even really aware that she had gone. And actually, Luis is super stoic. Some kids will go in their diaper and then just immediately lose their mind. Whereas, Lulu's just good to sit and filth, apparently.
Marc:
I'm fine with this.
Evan:
And thank God our noses work. We started to sense it, once she started talking about it. Prior to that, it was, "Okay, great, we're just going to be changing diapers for the next 18 years." So we thought, "Hey, maybe we could have her feel like she's a part of the journey and we can start openly talking about it." At first, it was really great. We bought the little potty, next to the big potty. I would sit on the potty to show her like, "Look, here's how we sit and it's comfortable, and it's nice," and mommy would do the same. It was all working really well to the point that she got a good association with the potty. She wasn't scared of it. She didn't feel uncomfortable. But I think she liked it so much that she didn't realize there was work to be done. And we didn't want to stress her out, but I also didn't want to be sitting next to the potty for four and a half hours. So we started kind of trying to talk her through, "Here's what we do on the potty," and trying to describe it to her. And I realized like, "I don't know that I have the words to describe what her insides feel like right now." it felt very unnatural of we talked so externally with our children. Now, how do we talk internally with them?
Marc:
What would you say is the overlying technique that you found the most success with?
Evan:
I think the biggest thing that's worked for me so far is avoiding that association with the fact that it's something bad. Because that definitely happened. There were moments where she would go on the potty and then immediately it was, "Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh," and you don't want to panic. You don't want to be like, "Yeah, you did it," because then it's just they expect that level of excitement every time. So I was kind of splitting that difference, and it was a challenge, man. So at least we avoided the freakout. Now's the question of like, how do we communicate, "This is specifically what you should be doing with your body?" It's been tricky. I don't know. What worked for you guys?
Adam:
Well, I think that jumping back to what you said at the beginning in terms of letting her take the lead on the conversation and not saying between you and Alyssa, that well she's two and a half years old or whenever kids are supposed to start potty training. So, "This is what we're going to do starting now, " but instead allowing the child to get the idea in their head. Anyway, we did a similar thing to you, with both of our girls, six-years-old, three-years-old. We really let them sort of lead the charge and deciding when it was the right time for them, and then just supporting them however we could. It wasn't about incentivizing it with, "You'll get a reward if you do this." It wasn't about making them feel bad, shaming them. If there was an accident, it was just reinforcing that this is what we do and this is why we do it, and giving them the positive reinforcement when they do it well, and they do it correctly. And just like you're saying, Evan, not blowing it up into this huge celebration every time.
Evan:
I know when I was raised, I mean, I don't know if your parents did the same thing, but my parents always talked about how they used M&Ms. And I'm like, "Oh, so that's why I love M&Ms so much. No wonder."
Marc:
That's why I have to eat M&M's every time I take a dump.
Evan:
Every time. I mean, don't you guys keep a bag of M&Ms in your bathroom?
Marc:
Right next the toilet. I do have to say part of a turning point for us was our boys were out of daycare for a long time, and we put them back in recently, and it coincided pretty much with also our initial potty training endeavor, the beginning of that journey. And it was a huge help. And I think it's for two reasons. One, they're getting a little bit of that, they're seeing the other kids, right? They're seeing kids who can, kids who can't, kids who've got it down pat, kids who are probably scared of it, kids who are probably confident of it. But they're more or less kind of working towards like a general goal of let's get comfortable using the potty and this is what it feels like. We considered that huge for us. That was a big help for them to sort of be thrust into that environment.
Marc:
And I think the other thing too, is that we were getting a little bit of resistance at home from them. I just think like that's not part of it when they're at daycare. And I think it's just because of like, "Well, everybody's kind of doing it." So that was just a big help too, for us. I mean, we can't take credit for that, but it was a big help.
Evan:
That's a really cool thing. I think you're right, they are going to see where is everybody at and realize, "Oh, we're all working toward that same goal. I'm not alone in my journey." I think that was big for us with Lulu. It was like, we don't want to make Lulu feel singled out. And I realized that anytime we were asking her about her poo poo, when she had gone in her diaper, she was getting really embarrassed. She loves sharing everything else with us. That was the one thing that she really kind of carried as her own quiet, personal shame. Maybe that group mentality is what we need. I don't know, maybe Alyssa and I need to walk around in diapers ourselves and show her like, "Hey it's okay."
Adam:
It's so funny that you mentioned that personal, private shame. I think about how I have these memories of my girls from really like before we were even potty training. I just remember them sneaking off to like poop in privacy, whether it was like in a closet or they'd go upstairs, under the table and hide. That's something that inherently, they just felt, "I don't want other people to see me doing this. I want to have privacy." It's pretty interesting.
Evan:
You have to wonder if that's coded into us developmentally. There we were, the cave people in the woods and everybody said, "You're going to go off as far as you can, you're going to dig a deep hole and none of us are going to know about it."
Marc:
Yeah. There's so much power in that initial reaction. You find out that they've... I mean, I'll just use us as an example. One of my sons is still having difficulty, he doesn't want to poop on the potty. He's done it, but it's not his preference. So we still have to put diapers on them at nap time and bedtime, because it's just too long for them to go. And so one of my sons, I think he's just in his mind, he's like, "I'm just going to wait it out. I'm just going to wait it out until I get that nice warm snug diaper, and then I'm just going to let it all go." It's happened actually a couple of times where we put them down to bed, we leave the room, a few minutes later, we hear him like, "I pooped." We can't let him sit there all night long, so we got to go back in and change him. But there's been a couple of times where he has, middle of the day, we're playing, everything's good. They got their big boy underpants on, and all of a sudden he looks and he's like, "Aah," and he poops, and he's like, "I pooped." His reaction has been very much like, "I pooped." Coming from him, I don't see any, "Oh, man, I feel sad, or I feel ashamed." But even still, even with that, he's very even, levelheaded, like, "I didn't poop, and then I pooped," kind of approach to it. It's still hard for me or my wife to not spring to action. Because I think our instinct in what we're trying to do is say like, "Oh, oops, we're actually supposed to put that over here in the potty, remember?" But it never comes out like that. It always comes out like, "Oh, oops." I don't know if it's instinctual in us. We want to try and catch it before it happens, but you're never fast enough. It's hard in those moments not to come at them with too much of any one emotion. There's just an air of excitement around it. Associate the feeling that you have just before that with, "I got to run to the bathroom and do it there."
Evan:
Yeah. I would imagine even if it wasn't an accident, even that moment of, "I have to poop," once that communication starts, the spring to action, the firefighter's alarm is going off, the fire is blazing, it's time to go, how do you do that with immediacy but not urgency?
Marc:
Right. It's tricky.
Adam:
I've got a slightly different perspective on that because my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter is potty trained. She sleeps through the night. But she also does this thing sometimes, if we're playing outside in the yard. We've got neighbors to the side and in back, with kids who are similar ages. We will kind of congregate in the yards, being aware of social distancing and everybody's kind of on the same page with our comfort level and including the kids, and they do quite well. But if they're all playing together, off doing something, my younger daughter will... It's happened more than once that she has had to poop. And she's kind of snuck off behind a row of bushes and pooped there. What we're trying to figure out is, is it because she is having fun and she doesn't want to break away from that and go in, and she wants to get right back to playing? Or is it something to do with needing a little bit of attention, once we find out about it?
Evan:
Is she jumping back into the play right after it's all done? Is that her move? Or is it like, hey, something happened and now the script has flipped?
Adam:
She doesn't want us to know about it. She will jump right back into the play. And then inevitably, we'll find out sometimes, very soon after, sometimes hours later or the next day. Of course, not the end of the world. It's something that I'd like to correct. More importantly, even I would say is just the hygiene stuff. I want her to go in and clean herself and wash her hands and stuff like that. It just makes me curious about the psychology behind it. What causes her to do that and kind of be sneaky about it, and then deny it when we talk about it, and then eventually sort of open up when we keep gently pressing the issue?
Evan:
Yeah. I think that is the thing. And especially nowadays, when hygiene is so top of mind for everyone. The notion of washing your hands is already so important. Washing your hands now, after this context of you just did this, and thus the hand-washing happens afterward, is just so, so critical. As a neat-freak, I will say, "Hey, good job everybody. Way to catch up. Now we're all doing it."
Adam:
Is there a song that goes along with it?
Evan:
Oh, there's always songs. Elmo sings one of them and it's super charming. It's the perfect length of hand-washing time.
Adam:
Totally. I'll say, we prioritize that too, and we associate a lot of positives with washing hands. And we're always talking about, when one of them uses the bathroom or when our six and a half year old uses the bathroom and we know that she's closed the door. We hear the flush, we hear her wash, and the water is on for five seconds and then she comes out. We say, "No, you really need to go back in. You need to be really scrubbing," like we always talk about and all the same things that you're describing. It sort of leads to a conversation about regression. I don't know that our younger daughter is regressing with her potty training. I think she knows exactly what she's doing. She just has an ulterior motive of it's more important for me to get back into play. We just need to I think, reframe the conversation a little bit with her.
Marc:
I'm just curious, did you guys read any books or watch any specific videos in preparation for potty training? And I guess the second part of the question is in retrospect, do you find that that was a useful step?
Evan:
Interesting questions. We did not read any specific books about potty training. All of the perspective expert materials that we've read have just kind of been about all of the developmental stages of babyhood, toddlerhood, but none of them specific to potty training. Again, there's no one size fits all. Every kid is going to do things a little bit differently. And that's where I've never really prescribed to the one, "This is what every child should be doing, and here are the ages that should happen." I always kind of wince a little bit when I hear that because I know every kid's wired just that little bit differently.
Evan:
But I will say the parenting method that my wife and I follow for as much as we can with Lulu is the respectful parenting method. I think that really kind of sets the tone of how can this be a conversation, not something we're forcing upon her? How can we better understand her emotional needs so that we're not putting her outside of an area where she's comfortable, or into a context that she doesn't fully understand?
Evan:
But I heard about a lot of other methods of potty training. There's one that I love the name of it. It's wonderful. It's the Oh Crap! Method, where essentially you take the diapers off and the kids are off and running, and they are going to have an accident. And then they understand that they had an accident and, "Oh crap." I don't know, that always felt super-duper stressful to me. Again, I'm not going to shame anybody who did it. Seriously, whatever stops you from changing diapers, if it works, it works. I see you raising your hand. That's smart.
Marc:
I'm raising my hand because that's the one book, and I forget the name of the author. The Oh Crap! potty training. That's the one book that I read most of, and that is a method that we tried. We went through several phases and several tactics.
Adam:
The book that you were referencing, I pulled it up, is called, “Oh Crap! Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need To Know To Do It Once And Do It Right.” The author is Jamie Glowacki.
Marc:
Yep. And we tried that. We built them up a little bit the night before, "Tomorrow, we're going to throw away your diapers for the day and we're going to try the potty, and we're going to be naked all day long," and that was going to be the thing that was supposed to help us pick up the signals a little bit faster maybe. And obviously, one signal is really easy, which is if they just start peeing, you see it immediately. Right? But with that, I still had such a hard time really seeing the signals. I think my wife picked it up faster than I did. That's where we started, so I can't say that that would be stressful for everybody. We also had two at once. And so it's virtually impossible to keep both your eyes on both kids at all times.
Evan:
Did you each pick a kid and then say, "Okay, this is my zone. I'm going to stick with it?"
Marc:
Yeah. That's why when we started it, we started it on the weekend so that we both could be there, and we could both like you said, pick a kid, "All right, you've got that one. I've got this one," like eyes on. But that only lasts for so long in a day. I don't know if that's just what happens when you have more than one kid or what happens when you have twins. But every time we say that, "Okay, you've got that one and I've got this one," that lasts for about a half an hour, and then it's just, "Okay, free for all."
Adam:
Wait. They don't have to pee at exactly the same time? They're twins.
Marc:
No. Can you believe that? What a pain.
Marc:
One thing that I noticed, and I would almost give this advice if someone were to ask, there is so much on the internet. There's so much on YouTube. There are so many differing opinions, that once you go down that path of like, "I'm going to try to get information from here," it just became maddening. At every turn, I kept trying to tell myself, "Now, dude, your kids are your kids, and they're going to react the way they react. There's, there's no set rule. But I got so used to seeing YouTube clips titled “Potty Training in Two Days,” “How I Potty Trained My Kids in Four Days,” the best method, the this, the that, the other thing, that it was really hard not to get to day four, five, six and seven and be like, "Damn it, all these other people did it in two days. All these other people did it in four days. What are we doing wrong?” I know very well that you have to take it as it comes, and your kids are going to take however long your kids are going to take.
Adam:
Well also, we know so much of that stuff is click bait too. The more people that click on that, because they're desperate and they want to potty train in two days, the more money that somebody's going to make off advertising.
Evan:
Yeah, and also, you could probably know, if it's a 22-minute video on potty training, and there's probably a good 45-seconds of choice information in that video. I mean, regression, it happens at every age. I mean, sleep regression, eating regression, potty training regression, they're always lurking like a specter behind us. We've definitely hit that. The interesting thing for Lulu was she was really on an awesome potty training path for a long while. And then she is now in the care of a nanny with another two-year-old and a little-bitty infant. And I'm not going to lie, ever since being with that infant, her potty training has kind of regressed a little bit. She's less active in our diaper changes. She listens less. There's a lot of baby mimicry happening in our house.
Marc:
That makes perfect sense.
Evan:
Yeah. I think it's stemming from like, "Hey, little baby gets the attention. Doesn't have to think about what they're doing quite as much and aren't they sweet?"
Marc:
That's something I've thought about a bunch because our kids are the exact same age, they exhibited the signs at the same time, they are going through it. One grasped it a little bit sooner than the other. But I've wondered, Adam, did you experience that with your kids being what, three years apart? So when the younger one's going through it, did you notice things happening with the older child?
Adam:
I don't specifically remember our six and a half year old regressing. I think she probably regressed in some other ways, just in terms of independent play and stuff like that, needing more attention. But I think it's all natural. But I don't think that she really took any noticeable, meaningful steps back in terms of potty stuff when the baby came along. Although we're not experts, I totally feel comfortable offering this to any dads listening that it's totally okay if you do get aways down that path and see regression, or if you do get aways down the path and the timing isn't right and you need to stop for a month or two months, and then get back into it. Like you've been saying, Evan, I think you just need to sort of feel it out and do what's right for you, and be as open and honest with your conversations with your toddler as you can be.
Evan:
Yeah. Or we take comfort in it. If nothing else, it's really great talking to other dads about this, or just anyone who has gone through this journey, to know that A, hey, you're figuring it out as you go. But also B, that there's no one moment or else that's it. I have yet to meet anyone who's 40-years-old and says, "Well, that my parents missed the window and here I am, time for a diaper change everybody. Where's my diaper?"
Adam:
Sorry, this is super embarrassing, but I'm going to just excuse myself to change my diaper.
Marc:
I'm sorry, could you reach the A&D behind you? Thank you.
Evan:
I think the spirit of all of this is we're just trying to be really conversational with her rather than prescriptive. I know there are a lot of methods, in terms of like parenting guides and experts and whatnot really, rather than patterning on like this explicit way of doing this or that, our biggest charge with Lulu is just making sure that it's a conversation. It's so nutty, crunchy, cheesy to say that we're all on a journey. I am a participant in this journey. I'm not just dragging her through the sand. All of us have taken this journey. There is no right or wrong answer. And as long as I'm not mentally scarring her, then we're doing something right. So I'm happy about that.
Adam:
Evan, I don't know how you did it, man, but you found a way to wax philosophical on the subject of potty training, and we appreciate it. It's been fun.
Evan:
Yeah, this has been fun.
Marc:
Evan, good luck on the final stages of potty training. We hope to catch up with you soon and stay healthy.
Evan:
Absolutely. I wish the same to both of you.
Adam:
Man, when that music comes in, it's a cue. It's a cue that we're at the end of an episode.
Marc:
Sometimes I'm excited to hear the music. Sometimes it just makes me sad to know that we're going to have to stop talking to one another on Zoom.
Adam:
Especially when we're talking about poops and pees, the yellows and browns.
Marc:
Yeah, I could talk about it for days.
Adam:
Dads, you can find Modern Dadhood at our website http://moderndadhood.com, or on any major podcast platform, and some minor ones too. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and now on Amazon Podcasts. Check it out. Another way that you can help us a lot is to tell your friends about Modern Dadhood, and encouraged them to subscribe. The word of mouth thing really does help more than you could ever know.
Marc:
And also feel free to drop us a line at hey@moderndadhood.com. Tell us what you like about the show. Tell us what you dislike about the show, but be kind. And also, do you have topics that you want us to talk about? We're always looking for new material and new things to discuss and so we welcome that from you.
Adam:
Major thank you to Caspar Babypants and to Spencer Albee for our Modern Dadhood music, to our friend Pete Morse at Red Vault Audio for bringing forth all of the right frequencies and making us sound similar, even though we're in different places, and to our intern, Miles Crusberg-Roseen.
Marc:
Miles, who likes animation. Intern Fact.
Adam:
Intern fact.
Marc:
That was a really weak fact. He's new. We're still learning each other so there'll be better intern facts as we move forward.
Adam:
And as we like to-
Marc:
Oh, you know what?
Adam:
What?
Marc:
Oh, no. You go.
Adam:
No, no, you.
Marc:
Oh, no. You go.
Adam:
And as we like to say to round out every episode, one, two, three… Thank you for...
Marc:
Thank you for... Man, that was weak.
Adam:
Thank-- Thank you.
Marc:
Thank you.
Adam:
Thanks for listening.
Marc:
Thank you for listening.