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.
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