potty traning for dummies

In case you were wondering, the dummy is me, not my 2.5 year old.  If there were a book on what NOT to do during potty training, I could clearly write it.  

Samuel has been interested in the potty for quite some time.  Everyone said it was too early, but he wanted to use the potty so I let him.  I never pushed him to go but he's been requesting to go every night before bed for a good year.  Eventually we did need to "encourage" this trend because if he would forget to go it suddenly became a stall tactic, requesting to go after already in bed.  Recently I've been wondering how I can get him to go on the potty during the day too because I really felt like the only thing holding him back was me (to be honest I was a bit overwhelmed at the thought of potty training).  So I bought a book I've heard good things about:  Potty Train Your Child in Just One Day: Proven Secrets of the Potty Pro

I scanned the book and got some good tips from it.  I also got good tips from The Potty Whisperer (thanks for the link Mom!).  Just as I was about to revisit the book and get myself a complete potty training plan for our "Potty Day", it seemed potty training was about to begin whether I was ready for it or not.  So much for planning.  

Lately Sam has been wanting to be naked boy so I decided to embrace this phase and use it as my opportunity to bring out the potty.  I told him he could stay naked in the house as long as he did his important job of using the potty (a good thing to say to Mr. Independent!).  I didn't really have high expectations and I didn't plan to push.  But guess what, being naked worked... but the timing couldn't have been worse.  I mean, this was July 3!  We had guests coming over on the 4th, plans for a couple boat rides and a trip to the local fair over the weekend!  

He did have 2 accidents on July 3 - one was during a time-out (which he's since learned that saying "I gotta go potty" gets him out of time-out *sigh*).  July 4 went well though I did throw diapers on him in the afternoon because I didn't want him to stress about any accidents with our friends over.  And Sam has been completely dry for the last 2 days (though he still needs diapers at night).  I'm so proud of my little guy because he really had to work hard for this PT success!  Our weekend included a trip to a porta-potty and an attempt at peeing off the boat (which was quite the sight, lol!) and STILL he remained dry!  All future boat & car trips will have a potty AND a diaper on board by the way.  Poor guy is a bit hesitant on this whole poop-on-the-potty part but with a blanket in hand (gross!) and a verbal "bye-bye" to the poopy all is good in Sam-land.  

The author of the book "Potty Train Your Child in Just One Day" recommends a party at the end of the day.  There was no time to plan a party for this unplanned training so instead I asked him who he wanted to call to tell about going on the potty.  Well, he asked to call the neighbors.  So we called them even though all their children and Grandchildren were over for dinner (again, great timing on my part).  They understood what a big deal this was and gave Sam tons of praise over speaker phone.  Neighbor Dale was pretty quick to hand the phone back to his wife after Sam yelled, "I WENT POOPY TOO, DALE!" but he was very sweet to him nonetheless.  We've called a couple Grandma's too and Sam is a proud boy.

While it certainly wasn't "potty training in a day", 3 days aint bad.  Thank goodness my little guy could overcome the bad timing and my terrible planning.  I'm sure we will have challenges ahead but it was a lot less overwhelming than I had anticipated.