Potty Training

This blog has nothing to do with being pregnant or growing a child inside my body. Instead, this post has to do with growing a child outside my body, specifically, my toddler. She is 26 months old, and has been using the potty for quite a while. When she was about a year old, she developed a poop face. I think it was because she had GI issues and often had constipation and hard poops. In any case, when I would see her poop face, I would hold her over the toilet because I didn't want to change a poopy diaper. By 18 months, she was pooping on the toilet pretty consistently, and for the past 4 months, she's been telling us when she needs to poop.

Since she turned two, she's been peeing on the potty for the nanny, the people at her preschool, and sometimes for us. She kept her diaper dry for two days at my in-laws' house over Christmas break, using the toilet pretty consistently, and even telling my mother-in-law that she needed to pee a couple times.

So, since we have another hellion on the way, we figured we might as well get her potty trained so that we don't have two in diapers, and so we're not trying to potty train when we have a newborn.

Today is day one. We've been telling her all week that today would be the day of panties, which made her refuse to use the toilet all week. Every time we suggested it, she would scream and throw herself on the floor. She was anticipating it, and wanted to get her money's worth from those diapers, I guess.

I picked her up from preschool today, took her home, changed her soaked diaper, and put her down for her nap. When she woke up, I asked her if she needed to go potty. She said she didn't. Her diaper was dry. I let her pick out her panties. I figured she'd have an accident in 10 minutes. She didn't. She helped us make dinner, ate dinner, and began to play. She didn't have her first accident until 7:15 tonight. She handled it well, saying "pee pee!" We ran with her to the bathroom, and she even had some left for the potty. She took her panties off by herself, peed, freshened herself up with a wipe, put her wet panties in the diaper pail and put on her new panties. She wanted me to put the wet panties away, but I told her it wasn't my pee pee. As she was putting her new panties on, she kept saying "Pee Pee in panties." It will be interesting to see how she does as she has subsequent accidents this weekend.