I am not a fan of the cold weather. My favorite season is spring, as the weather is more favorable and everything is blooming and waking back up. We will see what the groundhog says about when spring will arrive. I’m mainly looking forward to it as it provides more of an opportunity to accelerate our efforts to wrap up potty training. A lot of parents take advantage of nature’s ability to absorb “accidents” 🙊

Throughout this journey with the kids, I’ve put on my IT hat quite often, relying on data and analytics to monitor and manage trends with all of the kiddos. Early on after we brought all 3 home, we had a white board set up to track feedings (whether it was breast milk or formula), diaper changes, and within that who peed and when, who pooped and when, and who sharted (shart = shit fart, an indication for a newborn that something big was brewing…haha!).

We had so much help when we brought them home that that level of tracking became difficult after a few days. There were holes in the data as some folks didn’t write things down. With an average of 8 diaper changes per day per baby, it became easy to forget.

With potty training, I’ve been tracking things on my phone and shared the Note 📝 with my wife so she could track too as she is at home with them all day. Initially I tracked every piddle (pee) poop and the date. My wife has her hands full with three all day long, so she forgot to put them down. I figured we have reached a point where we are in he home stretch where we will soon just be managing accidents, so I modified the tracker to just focus on dates. Dates are important still because there are periods of regression – hey…life happens and sometimes you need a break!

It is worth noting that in terms of pee, Michaela was approaching 600 times, Emma 400 and Christopher 300. So we have a sense of who is most ready. Right now it is all about dates. They know what to do, and they are expected to give it their best effort each day. If we had just one child right now, we would probably be done if it was a girl. Three at once creates challenges. There are limited one on one coaching opportunities, there is ZERO privacy, and interest is fleeting early on. Motivation comes in waves – basically when they are all ready they will be ready and that’s that.

On the horizon is nothing but pull ups, training underwear and a diaper budget of $0.00. And finally some form of pre-school where my wife gets a couple of hours 1 or 2 days a week to herself.