She did it, she did it, I can’t believe she did it, but indeed she did!
pamelamyers | January 30, 2013
Well, she did it! Sam is officially diaper free (except at night)! I am so proud of Sam and how well she has done. We decided it was time for her to finally ditch the diapers a few weeks ago. She was ready, both physically and emotionally, and with pre-school starting in the fall, she really had to be ready to go. She knows how to use the potty, and really loves her underpants (which she started asking to wear over her diapers). It was just laziness on both my part and hers that have held up the potty training. I wanted to make sure that I had a good amount of time home with her to really focus because it wouldn’t have been fair to her to try to get her to use the potty successfully when we had her running around all over the place doing errands, shopping, etc. Not working on Fridays and Mondays really helps because I have a nice long 4-day stretch to be with her.
As I posted before, January 19 was the official start. I told her the night before we began that tomorrow was “no more diapers time” and she was going to use the potty every single time. I put her in some cloth training pants and asked her if she needed to go about every half hour. I thought she was going to kill me! I heard so many “noooooooos!” that is was funny. I did learn one thing — Sam has a very strong bladder because she can really hold it! She only had 2 accidents each on the first 2 days and that was it. And both times, she was able to stop herself and run to the potty to finish up. She did everything on the potty in the first few days too, which was great, because I have heard and read that peeing is the easy part but not so much the other. My little girl is a potty champ!
To give her an incentive, I drew a chart for each day and for every successful time she made pee she got to draw a smiley face and for every successful poo she got to draw a star. Accidents were sad faces, but we had so few of those! It really did help her because she was so excited to draw her smiley faces that I didn’t even have to reward her any other way. Every day she got to see the big long line of them and she was so proud of herself. Before we were even out of the bathroom she would say, “I can draw my smiley face now?” with such glee. I had planned on giving her some sort of reward at the end of every day that the smiley faces outnumbered the sad faces, but it wasn’t even necessary. Here is a pic of her chart. You can pretty much tell which smileys I drew and which ones she wanted to do herself.
I did give in and buy her a huge Hello Kitty she has been eying in the Build a Bear store and made sure she knew it was her present for being such a very big girl.
For about a week, other than to my mom’s house while I went to work, no one took Sam out of the house. My mom was the first one to take her out and Sam did wonderfully. No accidents at all. She is really great at making sure she tells us when she has to go, even in restaurants and stores.
It is hard to believe that I am saying goodbye to diapers. She is wearing a Pull Up at night, but even those seem mostly dry, so I don’t know how long that will last. It seems weird to go all day long and not have to check diapers. I do have to start having a better eye for where all the bathrooms are when we are out! One more proof that my baby is gone. But on the upside, her cute, tiny little butt looks even tinier and cuter running around in her pants without a padded diaper over it!