Thursday, September 4, 2008

Potty Training for Dummies



I always heard from other "mommy bloggers" that kids will potty train when they are ready. I also heard constantly from my mother that The Taters was already three and that he should be potty trained by now.


We tried all the tricks... stickers, rewards, books to read, sitting for all hours with him, putting him on the potty every half hour, etc. Nothing worked.


I knew I didn't want to use Pull-ups. I'm sure they work for some people, but they were just too much like diapers for me. I looked high and low for training pants and figured that in this day of eco-friendly, green parenting they wouldn't be hard to find... wrong! I finally had to order them online (and pay a pretty penny for them.)


We were headed to our family cabin for a short vacation and thought that would be the perfect place to begin our dry pants quest. We put the training pants on first thing in the morning and had a "discussion" about using the big boy potty. We also put him on the toilet after filling him with water hoping he would get the drift. No luck.


After a few tries, we sent him out to play with his best friend, Papa. They were happily playing with tools when it happened. "Mommy, I'm all wet!" He had peed himself. We rushed inside to the bathroom, changed his clothes and sat on the potty for a bit and talked about how that was when he was supposed to go to the bathroom.
We then went out to clean up Papa's garage floor, the holiest of holy places for a three year old with a thing for tools.
Only one more little accident with wetting and a small nighttime accident and he's trained. It took about one day to get the concept and one week to perfect it. It's still stressful traveling, but more for me than him. We've taken 5 hour road trips without a single mess. (We are finding out which camp spots have bathrooms, though!)

1 comment:

Granny said...

Looks to me like the parents are going to have to add a two seater now that Riley is trying to keep up with his big brother too.
Granny