To Pee or Not to Pee

This post is all about potty-training (consider yourself warned).

By 2 years of age, Curly was the kind of kid who would happily walk around in a soiled diaper and not think twice about telling us. This led us to believe that potty training would not really happen until past 3…maybe even 3.5. But, we bought a Baby B.jorn potty by the age of 18 months and had him sit on it sometimes, and were overjoyed when he did manage to pee on it every now and then. We also managed to catch a poop in his potty and thought to ourselves, well…it’ll be a blue moon when that happens again, but cool! Low expectations. Very low, but hopeful.

At almost 2.5 years of age, we decided to try the potty every night before bed. To our surprise and joy, Curly actually peed in his potty half of those nights. And then most of those nights. And now pretty much ALL of those nights.  We used to read to him as he sat, and within 5 minutes, he might have peed a little. Even a drop of pee won him a prized sticker and tons of praise from us. Now, we’ll just tell him to go potty, he’ll sit and within a minute or two, have peed OR pooped. We think he’s figured out on his own that peeing and pooping in the potty means no diaper change, and hey, that’s a good thing! After he’s pooped, we have him lean over onto the couch or ottoman in his room and ‘spread em’ so we can wipe his butt. He is very compliant about this surprisingly…probably because he knows he’s going to get a sticker as his prize, which he loves.

We bought one of those potty books with star stickers and a calendar for him to stick them onto. Within a month, the whole calendar is now full of stickers. We went out and bought new, more exciting stickers, like Elmo and it appears Curly is really excited about going potty to earn them. We are just in amazement that this is happening this early.

We’re done with our diaper hybrids and have switched from disposables to pull-ups. We have ‘training pants’ underwear lined up for him soon. He manages to keep his pull-ups dry during the day for 2-3 hours at a time. His teachers told us he’s been using the potty at daycare usually 2 or even 3 times a day. He usually wakes up with a poop in the mornings, but this morning he woke up with just a wet diaper, asked to go potty, and proceeded to pee AND poop in it. Joyful dancing ensued in our household (and Nutella might have even shed a happy tear).

Now, we KNOW there will be setbacks and accidents. And that nighttime training won’t happen for a while. But it seems the momentum of potty training is really picking up and we are hopeful he will be daytime trained by 3, which is better than we ever imagined. So I wanted to document this here, and give other parents hope that hey…it *might* not be so bad after all!

[I thought about posting a picture of Curly on his potty here, but I don’t want him to hate me one day for it, so… sorry]