Potty Training: It really does stink, literally and figuratively. For those of you without children, consider your selves lucky. I don't like it at all. I know it is a natural thing that has to be done at some point, but I was really holding out for Brayden to be as easy as my parents tell me I was.
See, I have a brother that is 3 years older than me, and they had the hardest time trying to potty train him. If I remember correctly, the story has it that my brother finally was potty trained when he was 5 years old. My parents told me they had to send my brother to daycare to motivate him to use the potty and that apparently worked well for him. With me, I am told that I sat my little self down on the potty when I was 18 months old, told them "I go potty like a big person" and that was that. My parents told me that they were shocked, for they had been dreading the moment that they needed to start to potty train me because they were not successful the first time around.
So, on Labor Day weekend, Brian and I started the next daunting task of parenting. Day one was pretty awesome! I knew that once Brayden had gone potty in his little man toilet once, he would understand the task at hand and want to be a "big boy" and I was right... for the most part. See, we went to Walmart, bought a new little man potty, a bunch of stickers and posters (for motivation), a bunch of big boy underwear and we went home. Once we got there, we put Bray in his new underwear and explained that there were going to be no more baby diapers because we were a big boy now and blah blah blah. He seemed to understand and wanted to help with his sticker poster and everything. He sat on his potty and nothing happened. So he got some juice and we would try again.
We started playing with our letters of the alphabet, spelling different words and what not, when our first accident happened. He had started to pee on my carpet. It was actually kind of funny because he looked down and said "UhOh Mommy" and got up and ran to his potty and sat down. Granted it was after he had emptied his tank, but he had the right idea, so I was happy. He did good the rest of the day, sitting on the potty every 15-20 minutes, and then he peed in his potty. He was SO proud of himself, and of course we were so excited for him!
Naturally I call my parents to tell them and they told me that they are not the ones I need to go to if I need help with this because of their track record. But Brian and I were so excited and Brayden seemed to be too. They second day was a lot harder, he was pretty grumpy all day long and did not want to cooperate with anything. So we had a lot of accidents that day. We had also tried to have him sit down on the big man potty because Brian's mom didn't have her own little man potty and we forgot to bring ours with, and that was disastrous. He HATED it. I was afraid he wouldn't use his little man potty after that, but he did. The next day, we proved to my parents that he will potty in his little toilet if you sit him on it.
Getting him to do his secondary business on the potty was more difficult than I wanted it to be. I didn't want to bribe him with candy or food, but it came to a point, where there weren't a whole lot of options. He gets a piece of candy or a cookie when he successfully goes in a toilet. Running around with no clothes on seems to help a lot too. He has more accidents when he has his underpants on, which is saddening but understandable.
So that is where we are, several months later he exclusively pees in the potty. We're hit an miss with his other business, but more hits than misses! Luckily, every one is helping me out in this endeavor!
Hang in there!
-Cat
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