My mission before baby girl arrives was to have Hudson potty trained and out of diapers, at least a few months prior to his world changing :)
I did a lot of research online, looking at blog sites, parenting sites, etc. on the best ways to potty train your toddler. Many recommended setting aside 3 to 4 days where you don't leave the house and having baby boy in underwear and a shirt only. Absolutely no diapers! (Pull ups at nap & bed are ok). I think that Hudson has been ready for a little while but our weekends have been so crazy busy that we have not had time to focus just on the potty training. So finally I dedicated the first weekend in April to Potty Training Extravaganza at the Weingartz household!
Thursday night we went out to dinner for pizza, one of Hudson's favorite meals :) From there we headed to Target to buy big boy underwear! He selected Cars 2 and we already had Thomas underwear at home. Also picked up some pull ups. After bath that evening, had a 10 minute battle to get him into his pull up :( But once we had it on he was fine.
Friday I let him wake up and eat his breakfast before I even approached the topic of underwear and going potty. I explained to him that today we were going to go potty on the big boy potty & if we went and washed our hands after, we got a treat :) So he sat on the potty and we waited...... after about 10 minutes of trying, I gave him a little treat anyways and put some underwear on. My plan was to set the timer and have him go every 20 minutes. Luckily we decided to hang out in the bathroom for a bit playing in the sink because within an hour we had 3 accidents :( After that the day got a lot better! He was able to go potty a handful of times and he only had two more little accidents where he started to go but then we made it to his potty :)
Saturday we extended the time to every 30 minutes. Mid-morning he did have 2 accidents and one little one but other than that he did really well :)
Sunday we set the timer for 45 minutes and heonly had 1 accident the whole day!
Monday I had to go back to work but luckily my mom was up for the challenge :) She picked him up that morning and brought along his little potty. He only had one small accident running to the bathroom and he even went poopy on the potty that evening!!!
Tuesday was his first day back to daycare. I arrived early so I could bring him into the bathroom and show him the potty's as they have real toilets but luckily they are the little ones. Took a little convincing but I finally got him to sit on the potty for a bit. Unfortunately after I left, they could not convince him to try until almost 10:30 but after that he did really well. Hopefully today is an even better day :)
My recommendations for potty training:
1. Set aside 3-4 days where you do not need to leave your house
2. Keep them in underwear with no pants (pull ups for nap & night), once you start do not put them back in a diaper.
3. Have a reward system whether it be candy, money for their piggy bank, or stickers.
4. Start with the timer system, the first day taking them every 20 minutes and gradually increase from there
5. Have lots to drink and some salty snacks to keep them drinking, especially that first day.
6. If they aren't ready, don't push it. Back off and try again at a later time.
Hopefully Hudson continues to do well with this as it would be nice to be diaper free for at least a few months at our house :)
