Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s youngest daughter is out of diapers! In an interview with Today’s Parent, the couple share that, over a month after revealing that 5-year-old Delta was still wearing diapers, the tot is officially potty trained.
“The Twitterverse was kind of mom-shaming me, which I’m not interested in,” Bell says of the internet’s reaction to her daughter’s potty training timeline. “I kept responding with the same thing: ‘Every child is different,’ which they are. And yes, I have a five-and-a-half-year-old who still sometimes wets the bed and that’s OK! But she’s getting there.”
Delta potty training is going well now, thanks in large part to the couple’s new trick.
“We wake her up at about 11 p.m. when she’s like a zombie and put her on the toilet,” Bell explains.
“Yeah, we put a wet spaghetti noodle on the toilet once a night,” Shepard quips.
Despite their daughter’s progress, Bell stresses that parents still struggling with potty training shouldn’t be concerned.
“I think it’s really normal and no one should feel ashamed if their kid has an irregular pattern for potty training. And if you want to try this 11 o’clock make-them-pee trick, great, there’s no shame in any of it,” Bell says. “Sometimes it takes kids until they’re even older than five! But I’ve never met a high-schooler who pees their pants all day. It’s going to stop at some point.”
The couple have been quarantining at home with Delta and their other daughter, 7-year-old Lincoln, amid the coronavirus pandemic, an experience Shepard likened to groundhog day.
“The days are flying by; we’re like, ‘There’s no way June is almost over.’ Because, you know, generally we work a lot, so we stake out specific times to go on a family vacation, so there are all these markers of the seasons passing that we’re missing,” he shares. “All in all, though, we’ve had so much time with the girls and that part has been really heavenly.”
“It’s been so good having this much contact with them while they’re young,” Bell agrees.
In fact, they’ve enjoyed the family time so much that they withdrew their girls from their summer camps.
“We had originally signed up for a camp, and we withdrew. Not because of the virus — the camp is taking precautions. But because we’re learning about our girls,” Bell shares. “They’re five and seven and their personalities are coming out, and we’re learning that they’re homebodies. They are really, really, really happy playing in a corner by themselves; they aren’t like, ‘We’re dying to go to camp.'”
“So we’re trying to support the people they’re becoming, and maybe they’re a little bit more introverted than we are, and that’s fine,” she adds.
When 360aproko spoke to Bell earlier this year, she revealed how her family was passing the time in quarantine.
“We’re doing just art projects around the house. We have neon glow paint and we’ve been painting the rocks outside so they glow and just doing silly stuff,” Bell said. “Just reconnecting with each other and I think that’s the most valuable lesson.”
“We’ve just been doing sticker books and talking,” she added. “We’ve watched the whole Harry Potter series. My daughters are very into Harry Potter.”
