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.
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