Update on Mission: Potty Training

I have been asked by MANY people for updates on how the potty training is going! I have been sick for the past several days, or I would have updated sooner, but let me brag on my girls a little now :-)

Things are going WONDERFULLY!! I am so happy and surprised and sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop! Jordan, who had been trained last year and just totally regressed, picked it up right from the beginning and except for a handful of accidents that occurred while running to the bathroom, she has been accident free since beginning over a week and a half ago! Including bedtime!! Cali was totally new to this but is doing amazingly, too. She hasn't had an accident, including at bedtime, in a week!!

There are several things we did differently this time that helped a lot, and I really think training them together worked nicely for us -- they motivated each other and cheered each other on, which was just so cute! Here is a quick break down of what we did:

We started, Saturday morning with two potty chairs sitting in our living room. With the entire family home together and with the Olympics on, it was just easier to move the chairs into the room we would all be in anyway. Having the chairs in close proximity was key. I had checked out 6 "potty" books and 5 "potty" videos. We watched each of the videos on Saturday and read the various books. While most of the videos were decent, there were two that were HUGE hits! Potty Power and Go Potty Go! are AWESOME!! They have catchy songs (that my husband and I still find ourselves singing unfortunately) and really play up the whole "Big Kid" thing. Often they would ask to watch these videos over and over again and they loved sitting on the potty while watching them. Jordan immediately picked up on the "feeling in my tummy" that they talk about that is a clue to let you know you need to potty, and it was over at that point -- she has got it down!

For naps and bedtime, we put one pad under their fitted sheet "just in case." Cali is sleeping in her training pants with a vinyl cover placed over it. For Jordan, as I had mentioned before, the vinyl pants were a bit tight, so we did try a recommendation from one of the comments on that post which was to put a pull up OVER her regular underwear. We only had to do that for a couple nights, however, and have since been putting her down with just her regular underwear and it has been great!

Daddy got Jordan a new package of pretty big girl underwear which she loves and that has helped a lot, too. We haven't done stickers or anything like I did with Jordan last year, but we have been doing treats when they go potty -- I had a stash of left over Halloween and birthday party candy and they are able to pick a treat (usually a tootsie roll or peppermint, with the occasional tootsie pop thrown in) whenever they make it to the potty. Calling grandparents when they went for the first few days was also a fun incentive, as well as whenever MamaRosie or Crawdaddy (my parents) would come over and bring them treats for being such big kids!

Supplying them with a lot of liquids, frequent potty trips, asking if they had "dry pants or wet pants," and making it light and fun all worked wonderfully! Last year when I worked with Jordan, I used a system that claimed you could be trained in a day and encouraged you to have them do practice runs to the potty ten times in a row every time there was an accident. This resulted in tears of frustration from both of us and looking back, I can see made the process miserable. We didn't do anything like that this time. When an accident happened, we brought them to the tub and cleaned them off, put them in clean underwear, told them how nice it felt to be in clean and dry pants and had them help clean it up occasionally. Much easier for me and much better results!

We did have a fun hiccup in our plan, however, when my wonderful Heavenly Father thought He would show off His sense of humor by giving Cali a touch of a stomach bug during this process, but she handled it so well (and for the most part, so did I), and in hindsight I think the frequent potty runs and slight accidents that resulted from the 48 hour bug helped her to learn the process even more!

Yesterday was a great test. We decided to temporarily go down to one vehicle in our efforts to work the debt snowball and get out of debt. We sold Gregg's truck and yesterday was when we actually finalized the transaction. I needed to drive across Houston, over an hour drive with traffic, to pick him up. When we were almost there, Cali started telling me that she had to go potty! I knew Gregg was waiting for me, but I didn't want to test Cali's bladder, so I pulled off as soon as we could and the three of us went into the gas station bathroom. She was very proud of herself :-) She told me she had to go again when we got to the couples house who was buying the truck and again, success! Jordan decided to wait until we had been back in the car driving home for five minutes before telling us that she had to go, but that was one extra stop I was happy to make. Even after eating dinner in the car, including drinks, they arrived home over an hour later completely dry. . . WOO HOO!

They are now both in regular "big kid" underwear (no training pants and certainly NO Pull-ups!) and are going to the potty all by themselves. I am sure that accidents will happen but I am very very very pleased with the results already!

Thank you all so much for your prayers, advice and shared stories. It inspired, encouraged and motivated me, and also gave me quite a few laughs :-)