Potty Training Part 2

Last time I shared how potty training has gone in our house over the past few years, you can check that out here.  This time I will go into more detail about how and what I used to make it successful.

I used this method for potty training in one day that I found on Pinterest.  It goes something like this.  You find a time that you can dedicate totally to that child, no distractions.  Finding someone to watch your other children for the whole day.  The week I chose, I had one child at camp and the other was spending the week with my parents.  We started right after breakfast and went until he went to bed at night.  We did that for 4 days straight.

We went straight to underwear, except for sleeping time, because he is so young and still in a crib (which we aren't ready to give up yet!).  Its very hard to take that leap into straight underwear, but I am so glad that we did!  Honestly most of the time I allowed him to run naked around the house, it helped make him more aware of what was going on, and less laundry for me!  I bought the Gerber Training Pants, I feel like they held in the pee fairly well.  They are soft and absorbent.  Nothing fancy about them but they work!  One of my goals when we first started was to use as few Pull Ups as possible, as with cloth diapering I am trying to save some money.

Have lots of treats on hand for rewards, and some treats for mom as well!  My child is pretty funny though because I was going to use smarties to reward him for successfully using the potty, well he doesn't like smarties!  I tried M & M's, nope!  Finally what I ended up giving him was Oreos!  Yeah he loves them!  Thankfully since he is so young he really didn't get the concept of rewards, so I rarely gave them to him.  What we did use a lot was the Potty Time App on the iPad, he LOVES that!

All in all I feel that at this point (a month into it) he is about 85% trained!  He tells us most of the time when he has to go and rarely has accidents.

I was really skeptical that the training in a day would really work, but I think that was a huge jumping off point.  After that first day then we spent a few weeks reinforcing it and I feel like he really understands what he is supposed to be doing.

I have also heard that around 22 months is the perfect age to begin potty training, and I have to say I totally agree!


Some tips that I have taken away from my third time potty training a boy:
- Start early, around 22 months
- Sitting backwards on the toilet is great
- Go straight to underwear
- Once you start don't stop!  No matter how discouraged you get!


Any other tips you can give to help someone else?  All I have experience with is boys, so what are some tips for training little girls?