Day Eight: I am thankful for...Chase being potty trained

They never said it would be easy, potty training that is, well goodness raising kids actually. But thankfully Chase seemed to potty train pretty easy, as far as I know, having never done this before. But overall it's been an o.k. experience. I actually totally forgot about potty training Chase amid the excitement and lack of sleep from a newborn. And then one day I don't recall what struck me but I was like.....Goodness Chase is two and we should start potty training. So that we did.

I don't recall the exact day, maybe sometime in August I think, we started and I had no idea what I was doing. I just started putting him on the potty.  It was actually the most frustrating thing I've had to do. He was definitely smart enough to understand but would still just go in his diaper. After a few days of continuously putting him on the potty, I took off his diaper and let him go commando. Well that didnt' end so well, he would yell out "Mommy I have to go potty." And I would say excitedly, "Ok hurry up to the bathroom!" And to my dismay he had already gone on the floor. Why? I have no idea, he knew what he was doing. One of life's mysteries I guess.

Again I don't know how many days or weeks it was before he just got it. I think it was at least a month for peeing and another two weeks or so for pooping and that is just guessing, I really don't remember. But we are now only in underwear and diapers at nap and bedtime and even at nap time he's been doing good at not peeing his diaper.

But those days of training were a pain, especially pooping. We tried rewarding with suckers and money to put in his piggy bank, the suckers won out since he didn't get money totally at the time. But M&M's and suckers did the trick.

And here we are successfully peeing and pooping on the potty. And when he first started in just underwear and said he had to go pee, I stopped no matter where we were or what we were doing...driving-peed alongside the road; outside playing-peed on the tree; in the store with no potty, as they said, outside in the parking lot next to the car. What was I expected to do? He's two and they didn't have a "potty", so we if you have to go, you have to go. It's definitely easier, I'm sure with a boy though.

However, I am not thankful for the many times I have to clean the toilets. I always heard little boys were messy peeing, but oh my goodness, really? I guess I get it now, I have a long 18+ years ahead of me of cleaning pee off and around the toilets. Fun.

Oh and the his newest "stall mechanism" before bed time...I have to go potty but now it's escalated to "poopy". So we drag him out of bed and to the bathroom where he sits on the potty to go poopy but just chats the entire time. We had to tell him to be quiet don't touch anything and poop. Only 2 1/2 and he knows how to manipulate and use the system, amazing.

But here we are all potty trained except for sleeping. It's actually quite nice and wasn't to horribly painful. Well, except now that he has big boy underwear he only wants to wear one pair, his blue Thomas ones. Thankfully the Thomas pack came with 6 pairs so if the blue is dirty, I can convince him to wear another Thomas one.

Buying his first package of big boy underwear. We hadn't taught him how to wear them yet.

Day Eight: I am thankful that potty training 

is done and out of the way, for the most part.