Potty Training

If you don't want to hear all the gory details, I'll warn you to go ahead and stop reading now. But I am just so proud of Cole that I have to brag about him to all who are willing to listen!

Maybe since I've been so bummed about the end of Cole's naps, I've been blessed with a surprisingly easy potty training experience. A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I thought Cole was ready to be potty trained...we've been looking at the different methods, trying to decide what would work for him. Different people all seem to have different stories, and one thing I'm convinced of is that there is no "one way" to do anything with kids. I think as a parent you are blessed with a sense for what will and won't work for your child and you have to be careful not to get pressured into feeling like there's a right and wrong way to do things. There usually isn't. The first time I experienced this was when we decided to wean Cole from his binky. There are a million ways to do that too, and nothing seemed right to me, until I finally came across the idea of having him use it to "buy" a toy. Worked great. Anyway, so that's what happened here...I had finally settled on using Dr. Phil's potty training method. I didn't feel totally sure it would work for Cole, but I hadn't come across anything I liked better. All we were missing was the potty doll, so I posted on the message board of the MOMS Club I'm in asking if anyone had a doll they could lend me. Nobody did, but one of the moms decided to share her potty training experience with me. She sent me an e-mail describing what they did with her son...they just put him in underwear, let him have a few accidents, and she said pretty quickly he realized what needed to happen and did it. This struck me as something that would really work for Cole, so on Saturday morning, armed with Cars undies and gummi bears, we started training. Props to Brian, who did a lot of the grunt work because I had to take Weston to get his pictures taken that morning...anyway, Cole had two wetting accidents before he started taking that to the potty, and just one "messy" accident. The rest of the day he did great! We thought we'd have to potty train him just for home, then work on away from home later, so we've been putting him in Pull Ups before we leave the house, but yesterday at church and again today at the library he went potty there and didn't wet the Pull Up at all. And the biggest miracle of all...he has been waking up in the morning completely dry. He has NEVER done this in his life! He's heard us say how proud we are so many times that now when he goes potty he says, "I so proud of me, Momma!"

Anyway, I'm sure there will be relapses and stuff, but he's doing great, and all I can say is, "I SO PROUD!"