Adventures in...

...Potty Training!

The Christmas Break two weeks before Ammon turned 3, we taught him to go pee in a kiddy potty. He was easy to train, and he got it down within a week. He was even dry at night. It was awesome! Well, except for the fact that he refused to use a real toilet for 2 months. He ONLY wanted to go on his kiddy potty, so we had to take it with us if we went anywhere. That part wasn't so cool, but it was definitely doable, and Ammon surpassed any expectations we had at that point.

The Christmas Break three months after Jonah and Micah turned 3, we potty-trained them. It was an adventure of hitting and missing the mark dozens of times over the two-week winter vacation. Sometimes they used the kiddy potty, sometimes they used the toilet, sometimes they just went all over the floor. It was not a fun adventure AT ALL. But by the end of the break, they had the pee part down. The #2 part took a little longer; about 2 months longer. They just refused to do #2 in the toilet. I washed out so many pairs of underwear filled with brown yuck, it was gross. But, we lived through it and they learned in time to use the toilet and to stay dry at night.

We tried during the Christmas Break this past year to toilet-train Kanyon, just 6 weeks before he turned 3. But, he wasn't really interested, and he absolutely would not go in the kiddy potty because he saw his big brothers using the real toilet, so I threw away the kiddy potty! And I was happy to see it gone, because that truly meant this was the final time I would have to endure this awful adventure!

After a few weeks, he started hiding himself to soil his diaper and he wanted to be changed when he was wet or stinky, and we knew it was time to try again. For his 3rd birthday in February, he received 2 new sets of underwear, and he was so excited! For the first two weeks of toilet-training him, we used the incentive of NickJr.com. He liked going potty, because that meant he got to play "dora" or "diego" on mommy's computer. He was going pee every half hour, then every hour. Then the NickJr.com coolness wore off. And he started having accidents all the time. He had to remove his pants and underwear and put them in the dirty clothes all by himself as a consequence for his accidents. He has 21 pairs of underwear, and he was going through all of them in about a week's time.

It seems to be that he'll have one good day--where an accident is rare or non-existent, and then the next day is horrible--with multiple accidents and messes to clean up. For 6 solid weeks, we've been on this trek of two steps forward, one step back. But he's finally getting to the point where he'll pull down his underwear and go without us asking him or helping him. And two nights ago, he was dry in the night. And for two days this week, he hasn't had an accident at all during the day. And he's used public bathrooms successfully. And he used the preschool potty on his own for the first time this week.

After successfully potty-training three older boys, teaching Kanyon to do the same should've been easy. But, Kanyon is a special child, and he's been much more challenging to teach and train. Even though it's taken him three times longer to catch on to it than the other boys, I couldn't be any happier about his progress!!!