A Pot To Pee In

Olly Mann goes head-to-head with the ultimate parenting challenge-potty training

- By Olly Mann

SMALL CHILDREN CAUSE amnesia. Ask anybody who S possesses a car seat to hold forth on their current phase of child-rearing, and they'll wax lyrical about warming up milk bottles, or baby-proofing the house, or teaching phonemes, or which holiday camp is best. Ask them three months laterwhen their kid has moved on to the next stage of life-and they'll draw a blank. They'll have no idea. They will literally not remember the very issues that, just a few weeks earlier, had been the bread-and-butter of their parenting.

So it is when it comes to potty training. I've already been through it once-well, twice, if you include my own personal transition to drier bedsheets and yet I simply cannot remember the details of how it's achieved. My eldest son, Harvey, now six, can take himself to the loo, aim his appendage with precision and wipe his bum like a champ, but I have no recollection of how it all happened. I just know that he used to be in nappies, and now, three years later, he isn't, and, presumably, at some point in-between, we worked it all out.