potty training reprise

Back on January 16th, we blogged about our first attempt to potty train Riley. After 30 days of trying, it seemed clear that he just wasn't ready for it. One of the assurances that I had was that no child gets on the bus in diapers, so he had plenty of time to reach this milestone.

Well, I was wrong. On May 24th, Riley did get on the bus wearing a diaper as he started his preschool SpEd program that day. However, he was not destined to stay in diapers once he saw the other kids taking their potty breaks. Within days, he was taking off his wet diapers and handing them to me and asking Jonathan to let him sit on the potty while he was with him at the office.

So we figured we should exploit this opportunity to go cold-turkey and see if he was ready to give diapers up for good. Starting last week, I began letting him wear his trainers in the afternoons -- with success, mostly. I think that because he was going back & forth between diapers and trainers he would possibly get confused and that was the cause of the accidents that he had.

One thing that became clear is that he did not like to be wet and as soon as he started leaking, he'd have this worried look on his face and let us know he was wet. Another thing we saw was that he would sense that he had to go and sit on the potty all on his own -- he didn't wait for me to ask him if he needed to go. These were two more indicators that he was ready, as we did not see this back in Dec/Jan when we first tried training him.

So last Friday at 11am I told him that we would be taking his diaper off and he would wear underwear from now on. We restarted the award system in which he got to reach into the trail mix jar and pick 1 treat for pee and 2 treats for poo. In the first 24 hours he had several accidents, mainly due to getting used to not automatically going in his pants like he did with his diapers. After the first couple of accidents, he did great. The relapse occurred again on Saturday morning -- as he wears a diaper overnight still -- when he needed to remember to stop himself from going in his pants. Again, after an accident or two, he did great the rest of the day.

He has been accident-free since Saturday morning -- and it's now Tuesday morning. Can I get a WOO HOO??!!

I should also mention that Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons, he was gone from home at least 3-4 hours at a time and stayed dry the whole time! He's always been finicky about using public toilets, so this was a big step forward. He prefers his child-size potty to the big one, so I've purchased an insert so he can fit on it better. He still doesn't like to use it as he feels like he's going to fall in, I think. He does like using his Cars potty seat however, so we now keep that in the car and just stick it in a bag for him to use. Whatever keeps his pants dry is what we're willing to do.

We are so proud of our son taking this step forward and doing so well. It's just one of the changes we're seeing now that he's started preschool. His language skills are improving too. But more on that in a future blog.

Shelby