Longest Week Of My Life

Last week I devoted myself to potty training Kaleb. Oh man, it was a hard, long week! I promised myself that we'd stay home and never go anywhere and that's what we did. I was excited at first, and even when he didn't care about picking out new underwear, I still thought he'd want to when we got home. Nope. It took Sheraden and I both holding him down to get them on and then he threw the biggest tantrum ever! It was pretty funny. Here's video to prove it:

The first day I tried to stay outside as much as possible. I think we stayed in the backyard for 2 hours the first morning and of course he never went when we were out there! He got in trouble for poking Eliza so I put him in time-out in his usual corner in the house and THEN he peed all over my floor! For his first nap I left his underwear on just to see what would happen and . . . . . duh....of course he was soaked when he woke up :) Whoops.

You're probably thinking I'm gonna fail at this whole thing by the way I started, but it got better as the week went on! I started with taking him every 30 minutes, but quickly discovered that was too long, so moved it to every 15 minutes. He never had another accident on the carpet, but the kitchen got it's share :) I gave up with underwear after the first day and let him go half naked. It seems he could understand he didn't have a diaper on better when I did that. When I'd try to take him potty before the timer beeped, he'd say "No Mommy!! The timer not go off yet!" (Then I'd sneakily go move the time up to one minute! :)

One of the few modest pictures I have of him potty training. He's pretending to be a baby like Eliza. He likes to do that a lot (I think for the attention)

Toward the end of the week when I took him every 3o minutes, he'd have nothing. So I thought, okay time to move it to 45 min. That seemed to work with no accidents so I moved it to an hour and today I never set a timer! I was nervous about it, but we were in the garage working and suddenly he looked up at me really worried and said I have to go potty!!! I thought it was probably too late by then, but i picked him up and he was still dry so we hurried to the bathroom and he made it! Success! That gave me confidence to take him to the library and he had no accidents. I showed him the bathroom there and asked if he had to go, but he held it till he got home!

Luckily I never had to worry about the pooping part. He's had that down for a long time now because I made him go after lunch every day. Oh, another thing I did to motivate him is take his firetruck away if he didn't stay dry. I put it on top of the fridge so he can always see it and remind him he can have it back if he goes potty. I also gave him skittles when he remembered to ask for a treat.


My favorite thing that he says every time he's done and I'm pulling up his underwear is,
"Mom, don't snap me!" It took me a minute at first to figure out what he meant, but I guess I was pulling a little too much on the elastic of his underwear and snapped his you-know-what. So that's the counsel I get after every time I take him! A word of advice from kaleb: "DON'T SNAP YOUR PEEPEE!"

I know we're not done training yet, but so far so good. I hope it sticks! One thing I thought interesting that I need to remember is that how happy my kids were staying home all week! Sometimes i try and do too much and end up wearing us all out. It's fun to go places, but we don't need to all the time.