Monday, May 12, 2008

Potty Learning

We are entering this mystifying stage of learning to use the potty. My son is now 2. He is learning to identify when he needs to eliminate. We did not use elimination communication so this is all new territory for us.
I must say it has not been that difficult so far. He tells us when he has to pee and poop if he has no diaper on. The worst part I would say is knowing that he does not have to pee but going to the bathroom because he says so. It feels like I am spending my entire day in the potty.
We have had some misses but that is part of the learning right? We had an adventure yesterday when we went to the store to buy toddler underwear. I must say there is not much to choose from that is not commercialized with some cartoon character on it. So we bit the bullet and let our 2yr old have Cars underwear. They are actually very cute and he looks like such a big boy running around in undies and socks. He thoroughly loves his underwear. We have told him not to pee or poop in his underwear and he seems to grasp this concept.

So this is our routine:
Get up and if diaper is dry pee on the potty.
Change out of jammies into underpants. Mommy has coffee and toddler has milk.
Into the potty about 1/2-1hr after getting up and pee again.
Then we put a diaper on to go out and do our thing and if we pass a bathroom we stop in and try for a pee. If he has to have a BM he usually says and we make it to the potty.
We play outside in a diaper and I do not usually push the pottying at this point in the day. He is too busy to remember.
We go to the potty before and after naptime
Then outside again to the park or on some sort of outing for which we use a diaper.
Then Daddy comes home and we take off the diaper for dinner time and on goes the underwear and he usually pees a couple times and one last time before bed.

We were have dry dipes at night but this has stopped since he got sick and we had to keep water by the bed at night. We will try again when all signs of illness are gone. He still wears dipes to daycare on the days I am working. Once we have a high success rate at home even when playing then we will send him to daycare in his "unders" as he calls them. I am trying to take a relaxed approach. I will however do some reading because that is me. I like to research, research, research.

He has been sucessfully potty trained since about 2 weeks after this post. We actually did resort to bribery. He got one tic tac if he went. This helped us tremendously. Also we totally eliminated the diapers at night and naps as they were always dry. We had a few accidents mostly outside. This was fixed by teaching him to pee on a tree. I think the only way to go is to use underwear and get rid of the diapers completely. The switching back and forth is very confusing for the little guys and gals. I believe potty training also improved his sleeping because before he would wake up upset and we wouldn't know why. This stopped when we learned the potty and I think he was waking up having to pee but not knowing it. Now he wakes goes potty and goes back to sleep.