Friday, November 9, 2012

Potty Training... oh my

This is a much much overdue post but I debated several times whether or not this was going to be something to blog about or not :).  Eliott decided that going potty was pretty interesting when he was 20 months or so.  He would watch big sis jump up there and a few times here or there would give it a try himself, usually right before bath time.  The potty training 'method' I used with Madison claimed that potty training was ideal at the age of 22 months, even with boys, since they are old enough to know what's going on yet not into their two's yet.  So.... I thought I'd give it a whirl.  The week before Labor Day weekend, the kids and I gathered some at-home activities and committed the next three days to sticking around the house while we stripped Eliott of his diaper and let him wander the house in a t-shirt.  Day one... dream child.  He went a few times down his leg, but seemed to figure it out quickly and headed to the potty for almost the whole day, even a #2 to brag about.  I thought to myslef, 'Wow, that was incredible'.  Well, day two was not quite a good and day three, a disaster.  He managed to poop on the floor several times and rarely made it to the bathroom to go.  Now I was stumped on what to do.  I was not a fan of cleaning up pee, but poop really makes me want to quit.  I said from the the beginning that I was not going to do this 'half-way' stuff... either he was going to have it figured out or we were going to head back to diapers and try again another day.  The problem I had was he was already waking up from naps dry, so I knew his body was starting to figure it out.  Plus, I have a hard time quitting what we had worked so hard on for three days.  I told Matt that I we would attempt to head back to life slowly and see what happened.  I wanted to give it through labor day and then make a decision.

So Friday night we headed to K-Mart to pick out some big boy undees.  I figured we needed to do it with Eliott so he would get excited about the whole deal.  This was a rough point... as we headed through the aisles looking for a 3T underwear, Matt looks over and T is peeing in the aisle at K-Mart without a care in the world.  He actually didn't quite miss a beat.  I thought to myslef, "What in the heck am I doing!?".  Well, I am a woman of my word.  We bought the underwear and I committed to sticking it out for the weekend.  Well, one package of undees was definitely not enough as I spent quite a bit of time changing underwear... the potty accidents didn't bother me too much but when he missed a #2, I was having a hard time with my decision.

Too make a much longer story shorten up, someone must have told T that he had until Monday because by Monday accidents were few and far between.  More importantly (to me) he had figured out when his #2's were coming and has yet to this day had poop in his pants (joy).

Since then, he has had one day of relapse although sometimes has a tiny bit of potty in his underwear before he makes it to the potty.  He is very do-it-himself at this whole process and usually takes his whole bottoms off, climbs up backwards on our 'tall' toilet and does his business... often without saying a word to me.  I am very proud of this little man and so thankful to have a brief moment in time of no diapers (except at night).  'sigh'... :)


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