Potty training, part 2

I explained our potty training approach with Littles in my last post. I would say that we took a fairly typical approach with her, waiting till she was about two years old, watching her for signs of readiness, etc.

With Noob, we took a different approach, known as "elimination communication," or EC.

To summarize very briefly, parents who practice EC introduce the potty at a very early age, typically between 0-4 months. They watch their babies for cues when they need to pee/poop, and put them on the potty at those times. I don't want to go into a ton of detail on the theory and mechanics of EC here. If you're interested in learning more, the Wikipedia article on it gives a good overview, and includes references to some books that go into even more detail.

Anyway, full-blown EC presents some obvious challenges to working parents. Some EC'ing parents forego diapers entirely, starting from birth. Good luck finding a daycare that will agree to that! Even using diapers regularly as "backup," it's a lot to ask for a daycare provider who is responsible for a number of kids to carefully watch one of them for subtle elimination cues, or spend time taking him/her to the potty.

But there's no reason why you can't EC part-time. And that's what we did with Noob.

Elimination communication
I started with EC towards the end of my maternity leave, so Noob was about 3-4 months old. (I tried earlier, but found he was a little too floppy to comfortably hold over the potty.) I put him on the potty whenever I changed his diaper -- I never did get good at actually identifying his elimination cues, so I mostly just put him on the potty based on time. At that age, I simply held him over the toilet: He faced away from me and towards the toilet tank, with his back resting on my arms/torso. Sometimes he went, sometimes he didn't. No big deal either way. But I will say that I was quite surprised by how many "catches" we had, even that early on, even not doing it consistently at all.

I returned to work when Noob was almost 5 months old, and my mother-in-law took over child care duties, followed a few months later by my husband, and finally by "A," our nanny/sitter, when Noob was just shy of 1 year. I never asked or expected anyone besides me to put Noob on the potty. I think my husband did it a few times, but aside from that, I just kept at it when I was with Noob and happened to think about it. Sometimes it went well, and sometimes there were long stretches where I simply forgot to put Noob on the potty much, or where he resisted it.

As Noob got older and more mobile, I started letting him have some diaper-free time around the house, gradually increasing the duration, and taking him to the potty when I thought he might need to go (again, based mostly on time). By 15 months old, he was pottying fairly consistently when I put him on it. At around 18 months old, he started independently going to the potty at times. (We left little potties around, so he could go by himself when he felt the need. The LÄTTSAM potty from Ikea is the best one we've found. Sturdy, easy to clean, and cheap!) He also started leaking out of his naptime diapers, so I told A that she might try putting him on the potty right before naptime, and she reported frequent success with that.

Shortly afterwards, he developed a bad diaper rash, which was eventually diagnosed as eczema and ended up lasting for months. His doctors recommended plenty of diaper-free time, prefacing that recommendation with, "I know this will get messy, but..." In fact, Noob got pretty good about letting us know when he needed to go, resulting in surprisingly few messes.

One common misconception about EC is that it constitutes "potty training" from an early age. Throughout this period, I never considered Noob to be truly "potty training." I wasn't trying to get him out of diapers. I was just making the potty a normal part of his daily routine.

In fact, I actually wanted Noob to stay in diapers through a 2-week trip to China that we took in January. (We did an international trip a few weeks after Littles potty trained, and while she did well, it wasn't an experience I was eager to repeat!) Which he did, thankfully.

Pee training
Right after we returned from China, and right around the time of his 2nd birthday, Noob started at Littles' preschool. I didn't feel he was ready to go to underwear quite yet, so I sewed him a bunch of cloth training pants, to use in lieu of the disposable pullups required by the school. (If you're interested in the details of how I made the cloth trainers, check out my sewing blog.)

Things went really well for the first few weeks. Thanks to the guidance of his teacher (the same one who had so much patience with all of Littles' accidents) and positive peer pressure from his classmates, Noob suddenly showed a lot more interest in using the potty independently. He even had days where he kept his training pants completely dry all day long at school!

Meanwhile, at home (mornings/nights/weekends), we switched him over to underwear exclusively around mid-February. Up till this point, most of his diaper-free time around the house had been bare-bottomed time. So when we first put him in underwear, he didn't quite realize that underwear was not the same as a diaper :) But we stuck with it through some accidents, and he figured it out. By the end of February, a month after starting school, he was doing pretty well with pottying, both at home and at school.

In March, it went downhill. He started having more accidents at home, and wetting his training pants more at school.

We suspected that the training pants might be the problem. At school, he knew he could pee in them, so he did. And at home, he forgot he wasn't wearing them, resulting in accidents.

In early April, we decided to cut out the training pants at school, and just send him in underwear. He did fantastic! For the first few days, he stayed completely dry at school! And then he came home and promptly had an accident :) But it didn't take long till he was virtually accident-free, in both places.

In retrospect, we should have ditched the training pants long before we did. The great thing about training pants is that they prevent an accident from making a big mess. But the bad thing about training pants is that they prevent an accident from making a big mess :) With both of my kids, their motivation for using the potty came from wanting to avoid making a mess. Taking away the mess meant taking away the motivation, too.

So, that's my cautionary tale on the use of training pants. (This applies to disposable pullups as well as cloth training pants like we used.) A lot of parents think that they're necessary to work on potty training. They're not. They're basically just expensive diapers. I think going straight from diapers to underwear is much more effective, not to mention a whole lot cheaper.

Poop training
Just like his big sister, Noob struggled with pooping in the potty even once he had peeing down. With him, bribing worked well to get him past his fear of pooping. I got some Chuggington trains (he loves trains) on clearance at Walmart. We put one in each bathroom. When we were pretty sure he needed to poop, we'd put him on the potty, let him hold the train in its package, and explain that he could keep it if he pooped in the potty. It took a month or so, and a few stops and starts, but he eventually started going consistently.

Nap training
This was pretty easy. We continued to send a pair of training pants to school with him each day, to wear at naptime. Most days, he kept it dry. So one weekend (in mid-April, I think), we put him down for his nap in underwear both days, and he continued to stay dry. We stopped sending training pants to school and he continued to stay dry. That was that.

We haven't tackled night training yet, and probably won't for a while, since we have a new baby coming in a few weeks and will be up at night already with him/her!

Overall, I felt like this approach really worked well. I think that working on pottying from an early age, even as inconsistently as we did, helped lay the groundwork while Noob was at an age where he was still very compliant. That meant that once we decided to "officially" start potty training, it went faster and was a lot less frustrating than it had been with Littles. I'm definitely planning to take a similar approach with our new baby.

Potty training, part 1

Noob recently potty trained -- yay! I get asked sometimes about how we tackled potty training. It was something of a process, with both kids, and I often forget the details. So I figured I should write it down before I forget even more.

I'll start off with Littles. Her story is a good example of how a supportive daycare/preschool can make all the difference in potty training, hence why this is up on my working mom blog :)

Daytime pee training
We started shortly after her second birthday, in July 2009. The first step was simply introducing her to the potty, specifically to the concept that she could actually put pee/poop in there. We had an early dinner one night and afterwards, I put her on her little potty with a portable DVD player. And waited. Sure enough, she eventually peed a little.

She promptly freaked out! I can't blame her. She had been peeing in diapers for two years; it must've been weird to pee somewhere other than a diaper. I calmed her down and put her on the big potty and she peed some more. Cue lots and lots of praise!

Over the next two months or so, we worked with her more and more on using the potty around the house. Sometimes, we just took her diaper off so she could go. Other times, we let her run around bare bottomed. The latter did result in the occasional accident, but seemed to help her get the hang of it much faster.

During this time, she was still in diapers at preschool. Her preschool requires pullups, but we did cloth diapers at home. So we were sending cloth diapers that could be pre-snapped and pulled up. In September, her teachers complained that the diapers were too hard for her to pull up/down independently. I met with them to discuss, and when I shared the progress she was making towards potty training at home, they encouraged me to send her to school in underwear.

So we made the switch to full-time underwear. It was a rough road for the first few weeks. There were days when we picked her up from school and she had five pairs of wet underwear in her bag. Luckily for us, she saved most of her accidents for school :). And thankfully, her teachers were super-supportive. There were times when I wondered whether we should just go back to diapers -- but her teachers never wavered. I figured they had potty trained a lot more kids than I had! We took their lead, and one week in October, things just "clicked" for Littles. She went from having multiple accidents per day to just one or two per week.

As a working mom, I can't stress enough how much I valued the support of Littles' teachers when it came to potty training. Potty training requires consistency, day in and day out, so it's important for all of a child's caregivers -- parents as well as teachers, daycare providers, or anyone else -- to be on the same page. Some daycares refuse to work on potty training until a child is in the 2-year-old room, even if s/he is ready earlier. Others will only "allow" one or two accidents a day before putting the child back in pullups. I'm so thankful that Littles' teachers weren't like that. It helped tremendously with getting her trained sooner rather than later.

I always encourage parents looking at daycares or other child care arrangements to ask about how they handle potty training. It's one of those questions that seems so strange to ask when you're searching for child care for an infant -- "surely my little baby will use diapers forever" :) -- but time goes by fast! And it can be frustrating to get two years down the line, only to discover that your daycare won't follow your lead on potty training.

Poop training
OK, now, all of that was just for pee. Poop took a lot longer. It was clear that she knew when she needed to go, but she was just scared to go in the potty, for some reason.

She often went either when waking up from her nap or before falling asleep at night, so we put a little potty in her room for her to use. Weeks went by, no difference. One day in January 2010 (4ish months after pee training!), I was complaining to a friend that she'd go off to college still pooping in her underwear. That night, after we put her to bed, she called to us. She had pooped in the little potty for the very first time!

From that moment forward, poop accidents were nonexistent. For the first few weeks, most of her pooping was done on that little potty when she was alone in her room. I think she just needed her privacy :)

Nap training
As I mentioned, Littles often pooped when waking up from her nap, when she was still wearing a diaper. So one of the things we tried for poop training was putting her down for a nap in underwear. She had way too many accidents, so we went back to diapers at naptime. But a few weeks later, in February or maybe March 2010, she started peeing in her diaper before falling asleep, taking it off, putting on underwear -- and keeping the underwear dry. So we cut out the diaper step, just put her down in underwear, and she did well with it.

Night training
In the midst of all this, Noob had arrived. We were already up at various hours of the night with him, and didn't particularly want to start doing the same with Littles, so we put off night training for quite a while.

In late 2010, Littles started outgrowing her overnight diapers. One symptom of this was that she'd sometimes have strange leaks where the diaper was not saturated or even completely dry, but the pee would leak right out the legs. Funny thing is, this happened every so often when we were reading bedtime stories. She had been daytime trained for over a year at this point, so there was absolutely no reason for her to have an "accident" with an adult sitting right there... unless she was peeing in her diaper just because she knew she could.

Looking back, I realized that Littles had never really initiated potty usage on her own while still in diapers. She was still peeing regularly in her diapers when we took them away during the day, and she was still peeing regularly in her diapers when we took them away at naptime. But in both those instances, she turned out to be more than capable of holding her pee at that time. The diapers just gave her a reason not to.

I figured night training might be the same. So one night in February 2011, we put her to bed in underwear. This was a major leap of faith, because not only had she never woken up dry in her life, she was completely soaked every morning. To our surprise, she did really well with it, and immediately started staying dry most nights!

She did wet the bed maybe once a week, so we started doing a "dream pee," putting her on the potty just before we went to sleep. She usually peed without waking up, and that helped her get through the night dry. A few months later, we stopped doing the dream pee, and Littles continued to remain dry at night.

And that was that for Littles and diapers! As I said, it was a process :) Although really not that painful, with the exception of that September/October 2009 period. I was pregnant with Noob during that time, and it really got me thinking as to how we might approach things differently with him. We did take a very different approach... but I'll save that for my next post.