Potty Training the Little Miss

There is one thing every parent dreads: Potty Training. It seems like a beautiful thing. You think that life will be wonderful without diapers. But then you realize the insane amount of time, energy and effort that comes before you get to that blissful state. Forevermore, I will be reminding (they'll think I'm pestering) my children to go to the bathroom.

Regardless of the commitment, there comes a time when you just need to bite the bullet and say "bye bye" to diapers. It happened for Kate this weekend. It was spurred by seeing her cousin using the bathroom. Kate kept taking off her diaper and talking about the bathroom. My mom swears by training kids at the magical age of 2 years and 3 months. I was going to wait but I knew I couldn't handle 3 months of fighting to keep her diaper on. Plus, Kate is all about being big like her older brother.

My experience with Kate has been the complete opposite of my experience potty training Vince though. He was so excited to earn candy and never fought me when I told him to go potty. Kate, on the other hand, is a stubborn and independent little lady. She is always demanding to "do it yourself". That's her way of saying she doesn't want me to help her. She screams if I put her on the potty instead of letting her use the stool and she hates to go when we tell her to.

Going into our potty training weekend, we knew that Kate totally had the know-how. She has been going potty before bath time for at least 6 months now. In the weeks prior to pulling the trigger we began making routines like "when we wake up in the morning we go potty". This weekend just happened to be when we said sayonara to the diaps and hola to the big girl undies.

Overall, things have been great. It's all time consuming and completely exhausting, but it's going well. She had 4 accidents on day one (two pee, two poop), 1 accident on day two (poop, ugh!), and 1 accident on day three (pee). Not too shabby if you ask me. We watch her like a hawk, remind her every 20-30 minutes to go, reward her for being dry, reward her for going potty, and cheer like crazy every time we have success.

This upcoming week Vince has swim lessons so we'll test out how we do with outings. Wish me luck, I'm going to need it!