Potty Training

This post is long overdue... but I thought I better document Sydney's progress so far. At the beginning of June, Andy and I picked a weekend to have a potty party and potty "boot camp." We took Sydney out Friday night to pick out her new panties, decorations for her cake, and I secretly got some helium balloons (her favorite). The next day we had a party, ate cake, did "The Potty Dance," and tried on her new panties. We stayed home all weekend reminding her every 30 min to an hour to go potty. The first day we had mostly accidents but by Monday we were accident free! We were really impressed with her fast progress because on Tuesday and Wednesday we had no accidents either. Dare to be optimistic :). Anyway, I think Tuesday was our first day out of the house and even on our adventures she still did amazingly well at holding it until we could get her to a potty. For about three weeks we were mostly accident free. Then I think the novelty of it all wore off, and we've been really up and down since then. Until about two weeks ago, we were still wearing panties during the awake hours of the day and having mostly success, but Sydney then decided she hated any reminders to go potty and if you reminded her there was no hope in getting her to go at all. So after trying lots of different things this is where we stand... in light of her previous success, we know she can and knows how to hold it and use the potty consistently, but simply doesn't want to. We opted for a more relaxed approach now. Through experimentation we've found that she is less resistant and stressed about the whole process if we keep her in training pants all the time. It seemed like having accidents really made her feel down and after a couple of accidents in a row, she was really stressed about the idea of going potty at all. So now we are just putting her in training pants on a regular basis. We still remind her about four-ish times a day to go potty and most of the time she does! We have a potty chart where she gets to put stickers for her success and when its full we get to go play at McDonalds because she loves it. It usually takes her about a week to ten days to fill her 30 square chart. Most days she'll tell us at least once before she has to go potty but still goes in her training pants pretty regularly other times of the day. At this point, we feel like since she knows how, we just need to keep the idea positive by not pushing it or making her feel bad by completely giving up :). We figure she knows how and when she wants to she will. Hopefully over time she tell us more and more often before she goes in her training pants, and we wont have to consistently remind her every few hours. In the meantime... she's not even two and half and so we've got time. I think the moral of the story is: although she had all the signs of potty training readiness, she didn't have a very strong desire. She was excited by the novelties of the potty chair, potty books, and the panties but didn't really care being wet or poopy even for extended periods of time... she still doesn't. For our future children, we will probably wait until they have that very strong desire to use the potty so they don't get their pants dirty, not just for the fancy new underwear or stickers they get. Overall, I don't regret starting the training process as early as we did; I just realize that it will take a little longer than we had hoped, and we're gonna go Sydney pace for now. Two big successes however in the past few weeks: She will know use about any potty anywhere with our travel potty seat, which she wouldn't do before. She has become a pro at going potty in the wilderness on leaves, rocks, sand, or wherever which was a big deal here since at first sometimes Andy had to sprint her back down a trail to the potty seat in the car ;) In fact, going outside is one of her favorites!