Success!

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to announce that Austin Miner Gibson is officially potty trained!  Can I tell you the relief I have that it seems to be pretty much complete?!?  I feel like it has actually gone pretty fast for him, in certain aspects.

For those of you with no interest in potty training, you might be just fine stopping here. I won't feel bad.  But just for the heck of it, I'm going to give you kind of a play by play of how it all went and what worked for us.

We started to introduce the idea of using a toilet way back in January.  He was pretty easy going and was all up for it... the only problem was he had no clue what he was doing!  He would sit on the potty for hours and hours each day, with no luck at all.  I wasn't about to put him in underwear when he had absolutely no clue what I was asking him to do, and I didn't have the time to clean up a bazillion messes a day, so we would put his diaper back on after lunch.  Then he would go potty in his diaper.  It was frustrating, but reassuring, because that showed some serious bladder control!  So month after month we kind of kept up this routine, some weeks less than others.  Finally around March he started to figure it out. Wahoo, we were so excited.  Life was a little too busy, though, to officially start potty training, so after Spring Break was over, we really buckled down and started the serious business.  I think this has been one of the best potty trainings so far.  I think part of it was probably just how Austin is, but also I think after potty training 3 other boys, I had some ideas to try and follow.  I ended up doing it in stages - mostly because as we were going, I would get an idea of what steps I should try next, and they ended up working great.  I think I will call that inspiration from above!

Once we had a little initial success where he accidentally went potty in the toilet, I think he kind of had the right idea.  For this stage I used my sister-in-law Nancy's idea.  We would get a candle, sing a little song of celebration (to the tune of Happy Birthday), blow it out, and make a big deal of him keeping his pants dry because he went potty in the toilet.  He loved this... all the way up until he got a little too close blowing it out and his nose got warmer than he was happy about.  I don't think it totally burned him, but he was pretty upset.  After that he didn't really want the candle a whole lot, but when he asked for it, he would have me blow the candle out.

At some point in time I kind of had some frustration of feeling like we were not having as much success as I wanted - especially when he was having accidents when he was not near me, and I think he might have started to fight it a little.  I  remembered checking out some videos from our library for Dylan, and thought maybe I could find some on YouTube.  There were ones with Elmo, and Bear in the Big Blue House.  He liked watching them, but they weren't the complete videos, so I was still looking for more.  I randomly found a video of someone documenting how they potty trained their little girl.  They had a doll, and first went through the actions with the doll of checking if they were dry, having success on the potty, getting rewards, and accidents.  Then it was the little girl's turn, and it kind of went through all that again. He watched a lot of it with me. I kind of then did the same thing with Austin.  Periodically I would have him see if he was dry, if he was he got a jelly bean.  I found that if right then I told him he could have another if he went potty in the toilet. We would have him get on the potty at regular intervals. I found about 2 hours was good for him, and he would go potty just about every time That worked great.  But, then again, eventually I felt like we weren't getting much progress beyond that. .  The next step for him was to tell me he needed to go potty.

So I decided to get some gummy sharks and put them in a jar, and told him if he told me he needed to go potty, he could have one. I started to not tell him to go potty anymore.  I figured if he realized I wasn't going to tell him anymore, he would eventually hate having wet pants when he had an accident and start to tell me. It didn't work super well, but I think this whole step was helpful.  I also decided to have Ethan help me.  I took pictures of him playing, making a surprised face that meant he realized he needed to go potty, running up the stairs, and standing by the toilet with a triumphant look on his face, then him holding one of the gummy sharks.  We did three series of pictures: one playing with toys, one playing his guitar, and one coloring.  I printed up the pictures and then we went through them many times over a couple days, talking about it.  He kind of got it, but was still not totally telling me he needed to go.  We tried this for a whole week, and had quite a few accidents.  I also found that he really has some serious bladder control.  Some days he would go potty when I had him at naps and bedtime, and then only have one accident besides that.  So, basically he was holding it for a lot of the day.

We have a trip coming up, and we are running out of time, so I decided to up the ante.  I had some Bob the Builder vehicles I bought a while back and was saving for possibly potty training or birthdays.  So I took those out and lined them up on the fireplace mantel, and along the windowsill in the bathroom.  He was so excited and wanted to play with them so bad.  I told him he could have one when he went potty in the toilet, but that it was his job.  When he needed to go potty, he needed to tell me, or he could just go up on his own.  Well, a little while later he said he needed to go potty, so I told him to run up to the toilet and go potty.  He kind of was still  upset I hadn't given him one yet, but we eventually made it up to the bathroom.  I expected him to get on the toilet and go potty.  Well... that little stinker climbed into the bathtub, and gave me a glare the whole time he stood there and peed his pants in the bathtub.  I still can't decide if that was total defiance, or if by chance he misunderstood me and thought that was where I wanted him to go.  I kind of think it was the first, but maybe I'm wrong.  Later in the day he again said he needed to go potty, so we got upstairs.  He started to climb into the tub again, but I convinced him to sit on the potty.  Success! And he was so excited to pick his first toy!  After that it has been history.  He has wanted to go potty a whole lot more than he did last week.  I think he has gone potty nearly every hour or two the last couple of days.  But he is doing it all pretty much himself now, and I think the only accident he has had since that day (Monday) is one when he was throwing a tantrum about something else. I am feeling pretty good here.  We have just about used up all our prizes, and I'll probably downgrade to the rest of the gummy sharks, then the rest of the jelly beans.  I'm feeling quite sure that he is what you would call fully potty trained.  I don't tell him to go potty even before bed and naps.. he takes care of that - often two or three times before he will actually go to sleep.  When he needs to go, he will sometimes tell me, or just run up and go potty.

FYI- I'm not counting nights in there because those are just tricky.  Sometimes he is dry, but often he is wet. I am trying to just do underwear at night hoping that it will quicken the process.  I would think he could hold it during the night, given our experiences in the day.  Here and there we have done pull-ups, and I'm thinking if this goes on much longer we will just switch to pull-ups for sanity's sake, for sure during the trip.  But it sounds so nice to actually ditch the pull-ups early on. I think that for my older boys, they just never had to worry so much about night during that initial potty training and just got used to not worrying and it was harder later on to get them to stay dry during the night.  I'm not sure that I'm right on that - I know they say that sometimes it just takes a while for them to stay dry at night. But I still wonder if that might be part of the problem.

Anyway... Hooray! I'm sure there will still be accidents occasionally, but I think we are on our way!