We spent this past weekend reinforcing in three days what we've been gradually working on for almost a year: Elias now pees in the potty. We're still working on #2 - despite the fact that he's done it on the pot a handful of times, he seems to have little interest suddenly, saving that duty up for naptime or bedtime diapers. But as of Friday morning he's only worn a diaper to sleep (which, of course, meant no daytime diapers all weekend since he no longer naps at home and we rarely even enforce the in-bedroom quiet time these days). Even though our process has been gradual and in the end we didn't stick to this too closely (wearing underwear instead of running around naked, for example, and making it out of the house 1 to 2 times each day), I did look up information on the numerous variations of the three-day program, which goes a little something like this:
Day one: stay home all day, run around bottom-less, put portable potties in as many rooms as possible, feed your toddler lots of salty snacks and juice boxes you'd normally limit, repeat.
(Here he is enjoying some post-dinner outside time with Daddy at the end of day one. First potty training, now chores??)
Day two: follow the program for day one, adding in a short outing very close to home, i.e. a walk around the block, etc., preferably with bottoms so as not to freak out your neighbors.
Day three: follow the program for days one and two, adding in a longer outing, let's say an hour in duration, even one necessitating a short drive from home.
And voila, you have yourself a toilet-trained toddler. Or, you can do what we did, which is begin the process very gradually as soon as your toddler (and I say toddler because I'm skeptical babies [and by babies I mean 0 to 18 months] can express this interest, but that's just my completely unscientific opinion) shows an interest. For Elias, interest in all things potty related started pretty early, I think primarily because there were three bigger kids at his daycare using the potty from the time he started there at 19 months. Two of the three continued on to preschool this time last year and that's when his interest disappeared almost completely, seemingly overnight, and conveniently right after we spent forty bucks on a training potty that sat in our bathroom collecting dust for the next several months. His best buddy from daycare, Hazel, four days his junior, sealed the potty-training deal over winter break last year so I was hopeful he'd regain an interest in the process after the New Year when everyone was back at daycare, with the minor change of Hazel now trotting up to the bathroom instead of having her diaper changed.
Not so much.
But several months ago, Elias once again showed an interest, not so much in him actually doing the deed, but accompanying Neal and I to the bathroom, picking out underwear, and adding an on-the-pot Dora the Explorer potty training seat to our potty training paraphernalia. So since about his birthday, maybe a bit before, we've been encouraging him to wear underwear on the weekends and on daycare days when there are fewer kids and babies, to try going on the potty, of course, all the while using preschool as our impetus for the timing and sudden urgency. When my brother and his family visited earlier this month, we dropped the program altogether and sure enough, after they left, he had very little interest in getting back to it, explaining to us that he'd wear underwear at preschool. Um, not exactly how it works, there, kid. Every day at daycare I'd ask Eryn if he wore underwear. Occasionally he'd don a pair after nap, because by then surely he'd done most of the day's business in his diapers, especially during his Eryn's-only 2-hour siestas. Then, at the beginning of last week, even knowing Thursday was his final day in diapers, he flat out refused, telling Eryn, "No thank you. I have until the weekend." But on Wednesday and Thursday he seemed to be mostly on board and the weekend went pretty smoothly. Again, he's getting out #2 before his nighttime diaper is changed in the morning and/or after he's in a new one getting ready for bed, but other than starting to go once in his underwear, we had no accidents and, as I mentioned above, even ventured out quite a bit.
We did offer "treats" along the way - fruit snacks, for example, and on Friday we shared a popsicle from the ice cream guy who cruises our neighborhood a couple times a day. We reminded him about his big reward at the end of the weekend, which could be either a trip to Fenton's or a new toy, book, etc. In the end he opted for a set of three new "vroomy toys" from Ikea (and one of our outings yesterday included a pit stop at Dairy Queen, so he really got both, in the end). Here he is somewhat reluctantly explaining his sweet, sweet reward for peeing in the potty all weekend:
We still have some tweaking to do. Elias doesn't want to sit on the potty but hasn't totally mastered the standing part. Instead, what he does is a sort of half-stand, half-squat, essentially straddling the potty while facing it. If he puts a step stool in front of either of our regular toilets, he can go there, saving us from the dumping/flushing/rinsing step. But of course he doesn't want to do that. In an effort to explain to him how he could, you know, sort of aim the stream as it came out without being directly over the toilet, I think I might have compared his penis to a fire hose. I have a feeling that one's going to come back to haunt me one day. What can I say, we'd just watched the Mighty Machines episode about fire trucks.
He also insists on completely undressing from the waist down but has a hard time getting his clothes back on. All details we'll work on this week and next before he heads to his first day of preschool after the Labor Day weekend.
So we're not 100% there, but it's a solid start. It only took us a year to get here.
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