Potty Training

Yes, it's true. We're potty trained!!! Most of you that actually read my blog already know this (and have heard ALL about it) but for those of you that may not know, we worked hard and we're done! =) Warning, this is going to be a long--mainly words--post so you only have to read if you are REALLY interested. (It's mainly just a journal post.)

This was day one (January 6):



We (okay, I need to stop with the plural at this point), Zaylee spent all day in just her unders as we worked on the process of pottying in the toilet.

I based my training off of a book recommended by a friend: "Toilet Training in Less Than a Day." I knew of 8 success stories using this method so I figured it was going to be piece of cake! Well, let me tell you. Anyone that knows Zaylee knows that she is not textbook material. She has a definite mind of her own! When the book said to give her a treat as a reward for completing a step she had no interest. It says make sure the child drinks a lot, well, she had decided that day she was going to try a liquid fast--no interest in ANY kind of drink! And so on so forth. She just did the opposite of everything the book said she would do.

So we tried a little bit of adaptation. I kept a lot of the ideas but just altered it a bit for what I thought would work for her. The first few days were pretty challenging and I had a few doubtful people tell me just to put her back in diapers (you know who you are--shame on you! j/k) =) But I was determined that once I started, she was not under any circumstances going to ever put a diaper back on. And we didn't! It took about a week but by that point she was almost completely trained. She still did have the occasional accident but they were rare. Now she will loudly announce what she has to do and take off running. She's completely independant with it other than she can't reach to wash her own hands and she still needs the convincing of the need for wiping. She has had no accidents outside of the house (YEA!) and has even held it in the mall long enough for us to find a public toilet she could use. After falling in the toilet at church during nursery the first week we thought she would have an aversion to that but this Sunday she did great going numerous times during the meetings. (I think she finds it fun to be a big girl!)

Nighttime updates then I am done. Nights at first were pretty challenging for her and still are not competely mastered but she's doing great. I decided that I didn't want to use pull-ups either so for the first week I did a lot of washing in the mornings but now when she wakes up in the middle of the night (no she still doesn't sleep though the night!!!!!) she is dry and will go potty in the toilet when we tell her to then she will stay dry for the rest of the night after that. Now this is not an every night occasion, mind you, but it's more often now than not.

So, to conclude, it didn't take less than a day but I am still happy with a week and 1/2 - 2 weeks time frame!

**This post is completely out of order with the posts still to come, but I just had to post it now--I didn't want to wait until I was done updating the rest to get it out there!!**