Welcome to Mostly Proud Parents

We’re very excited to introduce our newest resource for parents. It makes it easier to teach your children about the potty, and more importantly, to get them using that potty every day.

Whether you call it potty training or toilet learning, the point is the poop goes in the potty when your child is ready.

You don’t need another book, and you don’t need to hunt through Google. We collected the best information from all the books, websites, and nurses. Then we made it easy to understand, so you can be ready yourself.

A couple of years ago I wrote this story for my boys. It’s a loose re-imagining of Groundhog Day, about a little boy who can’t stop waking up the day before Christmas.

Hope you like it.

Holly has been drawing some really great robot dinos for the past few years, and she turned them into these awesome coloring sheets. Each one has questions that help your kids build their own world around the drawing. I think they’re incredible. Download them and share them. The PDF has eight designs to color.

We have a few 5-year-olds in our community, and I told them a slower, quieter story that’s better for falling asleep. This one is short at 3 minutes, but it was still fun to write and record. Hope you enjoy it.

My family and I moved into an eco-community outside of Sayulita, Mexico, called TierraLuz. It’s an amazing community, and there’s a handful of awesome kids here too. As our kids became instant friends with them, I started playing around with short stories about a secret undercover spy school in the jungle, just for these kids.

Now that we’re in quarantine, I tried a really short story as a fun exercise, and my neighbor recorded it in his home studio. I thought I’d share it here. Hope you enjoy it!

From Holly: Roman couldn’t focus on the work his teacher sent for today, even though it was a pretty cool project. He is obsessed with whistles today. A couple of whistles have recently come into, and out of, his life. So today he was bound and determined to make a bamboo whistle, once he came to terms with the fact that Mom was not going to have Amazon ship one overnight.

So we watched a YouTube video, borrowed a hacksaw, and got to work. The neighbor kids all took turns with the saw and the Leatherman.

And then we washed our hands. ;)

From Jason: Yesterday my son found, then lost, a whistle. He was pretty broken up about it, and today he wanted to buy one. Instead, we tried to make one. It worked, and it only took most of the morning.

What’s interesting here is that we just went outside and had a free project for a long stretch of time. If you don’t have bamboo in your backyard, you could probably get by with a thick branch and a drill.

What I found most interesting was my own willingness not to squash the dream of making a whistle, not to worry about how long it took, and just to let some flow happen in my kids’ lives.

Hope you try something just like it. We watched this video on how to build one. In the end, it works great. Here’s Roman explaining it:

This is such an amazing book. It’s an allegorical tale about tackling giant, insurmountable problems. I don’t think it was written as a kids’ book, but it’s my kids’ favorite book, and the audiobook is where things get really rad.

The audiobook is just over an hour and perfect for car rides. Our kids have asked to listen to it literally dozens of times. No exaggeration.

Not only is the story great, the audiobook production is excellent. And we’ve had tons of great conversations from listening to it and talking about the hero’s journey and struggles. It’s awesome.

We loved this book so much that we made some fun activities to go with it. We recommend listening to the book, then going through the activity book. There are coloring sheets, a little puppet, and questions to talk through with your children.

Download it, print it out, have the time of your life.