Ladies and gentlemen, we are just over a month shy of Olive’s second birthday and I am suddenly the proud mother of a potty-trained child.
I’ll get to details in a minute but let me just get this out of the way first:
YAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSS! *Eighteen fist pumps* HUZZAHHHH! HIGH FIVE! HIGH FIVE! YOU get a car, and YOU get a car, and EVERYBODY GETS A CAAAAARRRR!!!
Ahem. Just a little excited over here.
So. My laundry has been cut in half, Olive’s pants finally fit as they should, and she has taken to proudly flashing anyone and everyone she can to show them her big girl “mants”.
For those who want to know all the details, this is what we did:
First, sitting her on the potty at least once a day since she was 7 months old helped SO much. This familiarity with the process, and understanding that you can go in the potty instead of your diaper made the actual training so much more simple for her because she totally understood what we wanted her to do.
We got this potty, which is biodegradable (important to me since I try to avoid plastic whenever possible, but for some incomprehensible reason there is a significant lack of wooden potties out there). In addition to being hippie friendly it sits really low to the ground and so it’s been super easy for Olive to get on and off of it herself. My one tiny complaint is that we got the cream coloured one and it came with the bottom slightly discoloured, so it looks like there’s a stain inside and it bugs me every time I see it, thinking that guests might come over and think her potty isn’t clean. But that’s neither here nor there and probably just has to do with how this particular one was made.
ANYWAY, getting back to how I DONT HAVE TO CHANGE DIAPERS ANYMORE!
Doing early potty-training was fabulous and I highly recommend it. I am positive that it was the reason this went so smoothly.
Basically I just randomly picked a day to begin, and told her she would be wearing underpants now, not diapers, Every half hour or so I would sit her on the potty and she would go. She knew what she was supposed to be doing so it was really easy for her to just do it when we reminded her. I began this process when Adam’s parents were here which was great because we had a few more adults around to remember to take her to the bathroom a million times a day.
The first day, predictably, we had lots of accidents. She’d get distracted or excited and -whoops! So we just grabbed her and ran to the potty, got her cleaned up and carried on.
Day 2 saw significantly less accidents and she started asking to go to the potty. A few times we didn’t quite make it, but it was encouraging to see that she was understanding the “I have to pee’ feeling.
Third day? ONE accident. One! From then on that stayed pretty static, around one accident a day (mostly when she was distracted and didn’t ask to go, and I forgot to remind her). And then after about a week and a half of that, no accidents. We’ve been accident-free for about a week now.
She does still sleep in a cloth diaper overnight and for naps, because we don’t have a mattress protector on her bed. But I would say that 95% of the time she wakes up dry.
We didn’t use any sort of incentive system other than high fives, and celebrating each successful bathroom trip with a huge reaction – clapping, astonished faces, high-pitched squeals of excitements, hugs, telling her how proud we were etc. You know, the kind of thing that makes non-parents throw up in their mouths a little.
And just in case you couldn’t already tell, I am SO excited to be done with diaper laundry. It turned into a beautiful day today, so I am stripping all of my inserts, sunning them, and packing them awaaaaay! (All except for two, for sleeping.) FOREVERRRR! (or at least a little while, anyway)
If you have any questions that you would like to ask me, the first person in the world to ever potty-train her child, I will happily answer them in the comments. Otherwise, please join me as I crank the volume and celebrate: