Potty Training - Week 9

It has been awhile since I updated how we have been doing on potty training. We were in despair when we passed a month of actively trying to get Child #3 to perform her peeing and pooping in the toilet instead of her pants. She really was fairly good about the liquid refuse. It almost always went into the potty. The pooping was another story.

We tried just about every trick we’d ever heard of.

- We had her pick out cute little (Tinkerbell) underwear and told her that Tinkerbell would be very sad if she was pooped in. Happened anyway.
- We bribed her. For every three days she didn’t have an “accident,” she would get to pick out a movie to watch. Didn’t work.
- We rewarded her for success. Small candies were ready to pass out for successfully pooping in the potty. They sat ungiven for weeks.
- We even tried rewarding EVERYONE for success. I read somewhere to give everyone in the house a small treat when they performed the desired behavior. Then, the theory went, the small child would want to also be rewarded and would demonstrate the desired behavior. No dice. It was pretty pitiful to hand out M&M rewards to everyone else in the house but not Child #3.

There were other things we tried. None of them worked. Each day, I would clean between one and four pairs of pooped-in underwear. It was very discouraging.

Then, suddenly, with some backsliding but not too many days of it, she finally started going poop in the toilet. It was right around Week 7. It wasn’t anything WE did. It was all her. I have been happily not cleaning poopy pants for almost two weeks.

She’s been dry during the day and night for over that amount of time. We don’t put her in an overnight diaper because she has shown incredible bladder control and amazing lengths of time of ‘holding it.’

She doesn’t normally pee during the night, but twice she has gotten up because her bladder is full. I usually hear her open her door and go help her. She heads right back to sleep.

I’m calling this one potty trained. Hooray!!