Big Girl Undies Here!

Filed Under Diapers/Potty, Potty Training, This Rocks, Three Years Old | 2 Comments

I never thought I would be typing these words…. Bailey is potty trained!!! It started on June 26th, in the afternoon. My mother offered to keep Bailey overnight so Jonathon and I could go out, and then the next day we could prepare for a friend’s baby shower at our house. As I was getting ready that afternoon, my mom called and said, “Why don’t you bring Bailey’s little potty and some extra underwear with you?” My child has attempted to potty train several times, each of which has been a disaster, so I agreed but assumed it would be a waste of time.

My mom said that Bailey had ONE accident on Saturday evening, and then a second one on her way to the bathroom. That’s all it took for her to figure it out. On Sunday morning she had one accident on the way to the bathroom again. Then my mom took her to Chuck E Cheese in underwear, and she stayed dry. At this point I will also admit that MY MOTHER TOOK HER TO CHUCK E CHEESE IN PAJAMA SHORTS. And she KNEW they were pajama shorts. Groan. SHe thought they would be comfortable and easy to pull down.

Bailey was accident free for four days after that, until she “dripped” on the way to the potty one night. Since then, she has had one accident at gymnastics camp and one at her preschool. Both were situations where she was dropped off for several hours and I wasn’t there. She has even started pooping on the potty in the last few days, instead of waiting for her nighttime diaper. She does wear a diaper at nap and bedtime. She is almost always dry after nap but usually a little wet in the morning. First thing she does in the morning is sit on the potty though, which is her choice.

We discovered FINALLY that the key to her potty training is that we could not ask her to go potty. That was what was making her freak out. We had to just let her go on her own and not even ask her to try. Now, if we are leaving somewhere I still don’t have much luck asking her to try. I have to be pretty firm and say something like, “You need to go make pee before we leave. It’s not a choice right now.” But thank God, she is potty trained. At 38 months- we always joked she’d be reading before she was going potty but I guess not. And thank you, mother. Now she can actually go to preschool this fall… which is a whole ‘nother topic.