The Joy of Potty Training!

I know it has been a long time since my last post (almost 2 months!). Conveniently, I have told no one about this blog so no one has missed me thus far. In the interim, we started potty training. And it has gone much better than expected. So I decided I would share my "system". Am I qualified to have a system? I doubt it. But... I have now potty trained two 21 month olds (and helped with 1 2.5 year old several years ago - as well as simply working full time in a 2 year room at daycare many moons ago). So here is what I have discovered:

The rules:
1. Accidents are no big deal. Seriously, it is way yuckier to clean up a poopy diaper than it is to wipe pee off a wood floor. Thus there is no yelling, scolding, asking "why did you pee pee on the floor?". Just set them on the potty. Change clothes. Clean the floor and it never happened.

2. Train the children to sit on the potty when it is convenient for you. Once they get the hang of letting go into the potty, then they will go pretty much every time you put them on the potty. Kids who aren't bursting at the seems with number 1 and number 2, don't have as many accidents.
For example: in the beginning we sat on the potty when we woke up, after breakfast, before snack, after snack, before lunch, after lunch, before nap, after nap, before leaving the house, before playing outside, etc. Once we had the hang of it we went less as they requested to go.

3. Find a good reward. I tried stickers. My baby did not care for them. We ended up with fruit loops. 1 for pee in the potty, 2 for poop. Both girls LOVE their potty treats. Right now I am phasing them out. We only give them when they ask, since neither one has accidents anymore (most of the time - maybe once or twice a week). Eventually we'll move to 1 if they are dry all morning and 1 if they are dry all night. Or I'll just quit when this box of Fruit loops is gone. We'll see.

4. Plan for it to take 4-6 weeks to feel like this is a success.

5. Get rid of diapers during the day and swich to cloth training pants - no pulllups. pullups are seriously completely useless. If you are on the go alot, buy Gerber training pants (since they have an extra absorbent layer) and Gerber plastic training pants. Put the cloth pants in the plastic pants and they will contain most spills. At home just use the cloth ones.

Well, I have to care for the children now, but I'll add to my system as I think of it. Enjoy.