I'M A BIG KID NOW!

Austin is officially potty trained! My goal was to have him potty trained before he turned 2, so a few weeks before the big day, I tried the Potty-wise method. It didn't work for us. I think if I waited another year, it could... but I also think he could have been successfully trained if we had done this 3 day method 3 months ago! (My dad did something similar to Pottywise with all 4 of us and it worked in a day. I think it might be more geared towards girls). By the way, Austin was showing NO signs of readiness, but I really felt like he was a smart enough kid to learn, and I really liked the reasoning behind this method. Turns out, I was right!

Here's the run down of events:

DAY 1
Messy, messy, messy! We woke up in the morning and Austin "threw away" ALL of his diapers. (really they are being saved for his brother) Big boy underpants only! We cleaned up a LOT of tee-tee. By the end of the day he successfully used the potty twice, and I felt like we were making progress in terms of him recognizing the feeling of a full bladder.

DAY 2
I was worried that he would forget the little progress he had made, but he did really well! All of his messes were confined into the bathroom and were a result of not making it in time, or from not "tucking it down" all the way. We even caught half of a poopie in the potty. Mommy was beat!



DAY 3:
Same as day 2, only a little better, and worse. We practiced "tucking" all day. More poopies landed in the potty. By this time he was so tired of being stuck inside that he was asking to go for a ride in Mommy's new car. I asked him where he wanted to go, and he just kept saying "Mommy's new car" or "sit in Austin's cow seat". Poor kid. I felt bad for him so we hung out in the backyard for the afternoon and played in the sandbox. He loved taking his new excavator from Aunt Amanda in the sand!


Our only set back was on Day 3 the big toilet was making a hissing noise and I made the huge mistake of saying it sounded like a snake... Yeah scared him out of sitting on the pot. He tried so hard to hold it and cried when he really needed to go. I felt so bad. Finally Daddy comes home and has the brilliant idea to give him his rewards just for sitting down (this was the only time I had to break protocol from the book). It worked the first time and he's been fine since!

AND TODAY...
It's been a week since we started and we have an amazing little boy who is using the potty consistently! He has not had ANY accidents, and we have even braved taking him out in public. He is going both #1 and #2 with no problems. While we were training, we kept him in underpants during his sleep times, but decided to go back to pull ups until he is moved into his big boy bed. Hopefully it will only be a few weeks, and he is waking up dry already. I'm just worried I might not get upstairs to get him to a potty in time and I'd rather him be able to go himself if the need arises. This whole experience wasn't SOO bad after the first day. I will say that I've never been pee'd on as much EVER than I have in the first 3 days. Not even adding up ALL of his newborn accidents. But seeing just how excited he was to use the potty made me (almost) forget how gross it was just a few minutes earlier. He is SO proud to be a big boy now!