Potty Training

Potty Training will be one of those things I will know how to do after its done. Hopefully. Hindsight is 20/20 right!?

We bought Luke a seat that fits the toilet before he was 18months. He seemed interested in using the toilet, flushing it, etc. He initiated it all himself. So we let him go when he wanted to, not pushing it, read him "potty" books, and talked about using the toilet. He got to the point where he was using the toilet for number 2 every time for more than a few days (I can't remember how long). Then one day we were working on pottying in the toilet and he was dry until early afternoon. He was telling me he had to go.

At the end of July we took a trip to my mom's, brought the toilet seat with us, but he refused to go. When we got up in the morning I'd seat him on the toilet and he screamed bloody murder. So I laid off while on the trip. We got home and it was the same thing. So all that progress we'd made earlier went down the toilet! And we hadn't done anything except read potty training books until this past week.

I'd been wanting to start him again but needed the time to do it. So we decided after Thanksgiving we'd be home for the Christmas holidays to focus more on it. Last Monday we started him in pull-ups and took him to the bathroom every couple hours, before and after nap and before bedtime. He made progress over two days, telling me that he had to go both potty and poop. We got really excited about it and praised him and he got marshmellows as a reward. But the third day was back to refusing to go, screaming that he wanted to play when it was time to go potty, and not telling me when he had to go.

He has lots of signs that he's ready: he hides when he goes in his diaper, he asks to be changed after going, he wakes up in the middle of the night wanting to be changed when he wets his diaper, and isn't enough of a sign that we have seen him do it?

So we're back to laying off for awhile. A friend told me that they focus all their energy on learning one thing. It might be learning to go in the toilet for a couple days, and then they are beginning to learn something else that takes their focus off of the first thing. We have noticed a huge jump in Luke's vocabularity and building sentences this week. So maybe potty training happened to coincide with language learning this week and language prevailed.

Oh well. He's not even two yet so I'm not worried about it. I just hate to keep trying and make an issue of it. But what do you do when you know he could do it? For now, we'll wait.