Our potty-training journey

Well, back in June I did this post and mentioned that we were in the middle of potty-training M&M. Well it's been about two months now and M&M is doing AWESOME!! I am so excited with her progress. As of the last three days she has been in underwear 24/7, even at night, and no accidents!

I first started thinking about potty-training last summer when I was pregnant with Bubba. I had three goals for M&M being: 1)getting her totally off of her binky/pacifier (at 18 months she only got it at night and for naps) 2) get her in a big-girl bed, and 3) potty-train. Even though I wanted to do all of them right then, I knew that wasn't feasible so I started with the binky. Surprisingly one day I told her she was a big girl and didn't need it anymore, she agreed and threw it away herself. Whew! That was easy. Then I waited for a while to get her into a bed because I was enoying being able to put her in her crib for naps so that I could take a nap during the day being very pregnant and tired. We had a twin bed that we put into her room and let her choose where she wanted to sleep. After one night on the bed she chose the crib. I think it made her feel safe. My mom suggested getting a toddler bed so we did. This worked. My mom really helped in this transition while she was here prior to my having the baby in December.

Sorry, got side-tracked, onto potty-training. People had told me to wait until after the baby came to potty-train M&M because even if she made progress she would probably regress. I think they would have been right because she DID NOT take the change with Bubba being born very well. It was a horrendous transition, actually, but that's another story. I was also breast-feeding and I didn't want to be potty-training at the same time because there would have been those times that I was feeding Bubba and M&M would need my help to go to the bathroom. So I waited until I had weaned Bubba and she turned 3. That was in June.

I started out just telling her to try throughout the day and eventually had to set a timer for every hour to remind myself because I would forget. I gave her M&M's for a reward and would put a sticker on a chart. When she got a certain amount of stickers on the chart she would get a prize from the prize bag, which I just filled with $1 toys, etc. that I got from Michaels, Target and Walmart. We went to see my family for a week last month and again my mom worked with her a ton and she made a lot of progress. We got to the point where she was pooping in the potty every time so she was just in pull-ups for a few weeks. I don't really know how we got from that point to now because I really didn't have to do much. She just took charge and said she wanted to wear big girl underwear. Of course we had accidents and messes, luckily no poopy messes though! I think that's all part of it because she needed to realize what would happen if she didn't go on the potty. In the last week or so she has been going all by herself without even telling me. For a while public bathrooms were a problem, but she got over that too.

All I can say now is, HURRAY!!! All of these things that I thought were going to be horrible turned out not to be that bad. I'm glad we waited until she was 3 to do the potty-training because after only two months, it's done! She didn't seem ready before anyways because she is VERY stubborn (she gets that from her dad, hehe) and with Bubba being born it would have been too much for her to handle all at once.

So, there's our journey. I figured if I said something about M&M being potty-trained I might have some questions about how I did it, so I decided to just do a whole post about it.

As for the memes that I posted about earlier, they won't be happening this week because I came down with the flu this past weekend and didn't do squat for three days. We started the letter P for Tot school last week, didn't get everything done so we will continue on this week. I have a lot of fun things planned!