I'm a big kid now, look what I can do!

I was talking to my good friend Kathryn toward the end of February, at a time when I was thinking about potty training both Jack and Eliza.  She said that she started potty training her little guy who was a bit older than Eliza, and told me about this great potty training method she was using.  So I sat on it for a few days before deciding to take the plunge.  Besides, what better way to celebrate LEAP DAY 2012 than LEAPING out of diapers??  So we did it.  We used the "3 Day Potty Training Method" for both of my little kids.  The first step is to have the kids throw away their remaining diapers.  My kids happened to be eating Fiber One bars at the same time.... I wasn't expecting any problems in the #2 department, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to give the kids a little extra help.  :-)

They each got new underwear, which they loved.

And we watched Eliza's new "Elmo's Potty Time" DVD.  Perfect!

The result: they did it!  Mostly.  It took more than 3 days... it was more like 5 days before I felt comfortable leaving the house with them.  But in that time, they did a good job of telling me when they needed to go.  Jack ended up having some anxiety/privacy issues when he needed to go #2, but once we started rewarding him with Thomas the Tank Engine toys, he got over his issues pretty quickly.  In fact, within a day or two of beginning to get new (to him) trains, he started trying to force himself to poop.  It looked pretty uncomfortable for us, but we figured that he would figure out the whole thing eventually, and he did.

The 3-Day method encourages parents to get rid of diapers cold turkey - daytime and night.  So that's what we did.  Jack had a hard time staying dry at night, though, and even though we tried lots of ways to help him stay dry, we decided after about a month of him having multiple accidents at night and Ben and me having our sleep interrupted multiple times a night that he would go back to wearing diapers at night.  Cat did that until she was almost 5, and she turned out fine.  The amazing thing, though, is that Eliza stayed dry during her nap and at night from the beginning.  Yeah!

It's been interesting going through this with both of them.  I've felt for a little while now that Eliza is a bit mature for her age and Jack is a bit behind for his age, so there are several things that they are learning to do at about the same time.  It kind of just made sense to potty train together, and even though it can be trying to have to stop making dinner multiple times or be late trying to leave the house because one or the other needs to use the potty (they're not quite independent yet), it also had some positive aspects to it.  We started rewarding them for going potty by giving them 2 or 3 M&Ms, so when one gets M&Ms, the other will frequently say "I want to go potty and get M&Ms!"  When we are out in public and it's time to use the bathroom, they just know that they will both go.  There's definitely some positive peer pressure working in our favor.

It is now the middle of April and I would say that Jack is using the potty when he needs to during the day close to 100% of the time.  Eliza doesn't initiate using the potty all the time, unless she needs to poop.  But if I'm good about taking her to the bathroom when she hasn't gone in a while, then we stay pretty  much accident-free.  So I consider it a success.  Whew!