Monday, April 6, 2009

Adventures in Potty Training!


Lilly has FINALLY decided that she wants to potty train! We introduced her to the idea soon after Jayne was born, but she just didn't care yet.
Last week she started asking to wear her big girl panties instead of diapers. I was a bit reluctant at first, not wanting to be cleaning up the accidents, but I let her try it for a while. She had some accidents and ran out of clean panties, so we went back to diapers. She actually does better in the diapers. I told her that when she can keep her diapers dry, we can wear the panties again. We brought out the gumball machine that Grandma Culbertson gave us and it's working great now! Lilly always reminds me, "Mom, when I go on the potty...gumball." So she's been keeping her diaper pretty much dry for the past two days. She's hasn't quite ventured into doing #2 on the toilet yet, but we'll get there. She likes her privacy too. She makes me close the door before she'll go pee. At first I thought she was doing that so she could cheat and just get more gum, but I can hear the tinkling from outside. Hooray!
I've always had a laidback approach to potty training and it seems to be working so far. We didn't push it on Jonah(it did take some Grandma magic to get him trained though) and we haven't pushed it on Lilly. I just figured that forcing it on them made them and me miserable, so why not wait until they are ready. Well, I think Lilly is finally ready!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah! Best of luck with the potty training. Even when they want to do it on their own it isn't an easy process. What a big girl!

The Barnum Family said...

You're so right Liz. It's not an easy process. We'll probably end up doing what my mom did with Jonah. She had the kids for a weekend and she just told him no more diapers and used a reward system. My kids have always done better with things when they're cold turkey. I'm just glad Lilly's headed in the right direction.

Shiree said...

I'm with you on not forcing the potty training issue. I think that's where the horror stories come from, the parents who decided when it's time to potty train. Of course, I am no pro, Alex is my only guinea pig. But, it's always exciting to be moving in the direction of potty training!