It was time.
Time to pottytrain GB. The kid will be three next week. We had waited long enough.
One of the most frequent questions you hear when it comes to potty training (besides, “why the hell isn’t there a magical way to just make this happen?”) is, “how do you know when they’re ready?”
In our case, I’ve been making GB change his own Pull-Up after he’s peed himself for about a month. So, yeah, if the kid is changing their own diaper, it’s probably time for potty training.
With Holdy, I did the Potty Training Bootcamp Weekend method, as made popular by The Moes Family and Growing a Jeweled Rose.
Because the kids are with their Dad every weekend, this was going to take some planning, but as it turns out, the kids were going to be with me this weekend so we decided to go for it.
Here’s how it works, in a nutshell:
- Give the kid a lot to drink.
- Set a timer for every 15-20 minutes.
- Take ’em to the potty.
- Reward them when they go (Avengers stickers here).
I like to have the kids wear just underpants so that they can experience the feeling of wet pants… and hopefully want to avoid it.
Absolutely clutch this time around was that both Philip and my parents helped by keeping Holden out of the house all day (and overnight) so I could focus on GB.
GB and I currently have a love-hate relationship (as I’ll share in my upcoming birthday letter to him), so I wasn’t sure how this weekend would go. In all honesty, it’s been great. We’ve been getting along–with the exception of one fight yesterday at naptime–he hasn’t been resisting the potty and he only had three accidents on Saturday morning… and none thereafter (yet).
He was even dry during his nap, during which he refused to wear a Pull-Up. He also refused to sleep on top of a bedwetting mat thingy… until I agreed to draw Spider-Man on it. For the record, he did wear a Pull-Up to bed but he was also dry overnight.
One of my biggest questions about potty training is how they magically switch from being taken to the potty every 20 minutes to knowing when they have to go themselves, but somehow it just happens.
Today he was preparing to take a walk with Philip and Brutus and I said he had to go potty first. He said, “I already did mom! Just now! By myself!” And he had. No idea how that happens.
Of course, he hasn’t pooped at all yet. Like at all, at all. We’ll see how that goes.