Disneyland: The Potty Installment

If you are touring Disneyland with a Very Small Person who has just recently toilet trained, there are some things you should expect:

Your child will have to go potty as soon as you're deep enough into a line that you can't easily get out of it, after you've been waiting for twenty minutes to go on the ride. Whatever you do, don't tell her to 'hold it'. The results won't be pleasant.

Every over-priced meal you eat will be interrupted as you trek across the park looking for the nearest bathroom, which is never anywhere near where you are eating.

Your small child will inevitably have more accidents on this trip than she's ever had in her short life all put together. Pack extra underwear. And then pack more.

The ladies' room will always have a long line when your child is the most desperate to go. And since everyone else in the line is also standing there with a little girl doing the potty dance, you can't use the "please, she's just potty trained and can't hold it long, can we please go in front of you?" trick that works at most other ladies' room lines. The best solution we found? Have Daddy take her in the men's restroom. There's never a line there.

Rule of thumb when driving fourteen hours each way: if one person needs a bathroom break, everyone gets out and has a bathroom break because if they don't, the one who didn't go when everyone else did will need to stop fifteen minutes later.

A guarantee: someone will request a bathroom just as you pass the last rest area for 200 miles. Or they'll need to potty when the only place to stop nearby is a dirty, run-down dingy convenience store that doesn't appear to have been cleaned any time in the past two years... and little girls have short legs: they can't hover.

Tip: if you have a toddler potty seat, take it with you. I'd rather dump and rinse the bowl of a potty seat than think about what wretched germs my daughter picked up using the nastiest bathroom in the state of California. The potty seat would also be useful when the need arises when you're halfway across the Mojave Desert and the only place to stop is the side of the freeway.

Another tip (that I failed to abide by, and regretted it): take along a stack of sticky notes. Every toilet at Disneyland flushes automatically, the kind of flushing that terrifies all children. Send your bigger kiddos into the stall armed with a sticky note to place over the electronic sensor, and they no longer need to be worried that they might be sucked into oblivion by the over-powerful Disney toilets.

Should I be ashamed that I just managed to write an entire blog post about pottying and Disneyland? Probably. But there you have it.