Monday, April 5, 2010

Potty time

Over the past few weeks I've been working with Eden to potty train her. Some days we seem to do really well. Others are full of accidents and battle of wills. Some days it's my laziness b/c it's just easier to have her wear a diaper. I know I know, bad Mom! But I figure she'll be potty trained before she goes to college, so I'm not going to sweat the small stuff.

One of Eden's best encourager is my niece Brielle. While visiting them Eden and Brielle would go potty together. Eden thought she was such a big girl just like Breille. Nothing like good peer pressure to help :)

One of the other big helps was the crafts we did while visiting. Shay and Brielle have scissors. Eden wanted a pair too. So I made it a goal for her potty chart. When she earned enough stickers she earned the scissors. Plus she gets two M&M each time she goes. she has an immediate reward and a long term goal. It only took her a few days to fill up her chart. She was so proud of herself! And I'm proud of her too.

We still have some work to do and we're not ready to go out in public yet in big girl panties, but like I said, we'll have this figured out by time she gets to college, so no pressure!

The funny thing is Josiah is watching and learning. He already seems interested. I have teased Larry that I'll train our girls and he can train the boys. My guess is he'll be easier to train b/c of Eden. Any ideas



Full potty chart!
Reward in hand

I love the concentration on her face as she learns to cut.





















3 comments:

In Everything said...

Whatever works to motivate them sounds great to me:) And scissors is such a unique motivator... LOL!! But at least she's learning a life-long skill:)

Wish i had some ideas to share... but I think if they act interested, why not try... encourage and then try again later;)

Oh, and I"ve always found POSITIVE encouragements work better than Negative ones.... especially since you can't MAKE a kid potty.

Drea said...

each child is different.. so im not sure any one persons method will work :) but with both caleb and taite all it took was taking away their diapers. i had caleb trained in abt 2 weeks and taite trained in abt 4 days.. but with both they still had accidents occasionally and of course the night diaper "pull up or diaper" is a battle for us still. taite knows he has a diaper on at night and will sometimes still USE IT like one.. aka drop a bomb hah.. but those times are far and few... so im ok with it.

TO me tho kids are so smart and if you really want to train them totally you got to do away with diapers and pull ups during the day (except naps)... otherwise they will just use them for what they are for.

I got some cloth pull ups that worked really nice with taite.. they'd swollen eden whole tho.. since shes so tiny.. with them tho taite could feel when he was wet and did not like it... helped with training but also held in any accidents.

oh and gummy bears were our motivator :) any time they went i gave them a gummy. worked like a charm and i got a treat 2 LOL

Drea said...

oh and i think boys are easy to train btw ;-) but i have no girls to compare with hehe. caleb was 26 months and trained and taite was 22 mo. we "do not pee standing" til they are abt 4 tho..