Potty Training Part 2

My big boy!

As you may recall. last summer we toyed around with potty training Eric.  We were able to successfully get him to go both peepee and poopoo in the potty.  With our September cruise coming up, though, we figured it wasn't going to be very convenient to potty train him completely at the time.  It didn't help that everybody was trying to tell me that he was too young, nor did it help that he was often asking me for diapers.

Last year's potty training attempt

Looking back now, though, I think that maybe I should have stuck with it and gotten him potty trained before he became any more stubborn than he already was.  Had summer been any longer, I probably would have done it.  I guess it's too late for regrets, though.
Several weeks ago, when the weather started to warm up again, I decided to have at it again.  I guess that with the thought of Eric having to start school in September, potty trained, I wanted to get a good head start.  Eric, at first, refused to even get near to either the toilet or the urinal.  He cried every time I even suggested it.  Had this been some other child, I would have just thought, "Oh, he's not ready yet," and I would have waited to try again.

Eric modeling his new boxers

Eric, though, is very stubborn.  I'll give you the example of his shoes.  Whenever we switch sizes or seasons, it is very difficult to get him to wear the new shoes at first.  Even with his favorite red Cars shoes that he wears every day now, at first he refused to put them on.  He screamed and cried hysterically while we forced them onto his feet.  We had to be persistent, to get him accustomed to something new.  Now, he throws a fit if I even suggest that he wear any other pairs of shoes.

I'm guessing that potty training will be the same way at every step of the process.  Even his teacher at school says that Eric is very set in his ways, and that it is hard to get him to do new things.  She suggested that it was just about time to try potty training again.  Considering that he needs to be fully potty trained before school starts in September, I wanted to get a start on things, to have time to perfect everything before then.
At first, it was impossible to get him to pee so that I could try to make it go into the potty.  I would take his diaper off, and would give him a lot to drink to try to get him to go.  He just refused, though.  I brought his little urinal around with us, but he screamed and cried every time he saw it.  (Oh, but last year he was so proud to use it!!)  I finally got him to go outside without the urinal.  It took awhile, though, and a bit of bribing with stickers.

Here he is wearing his new favorite t-shirt.  If you want to see how we made it, check out the new blog.

While most websites seem to say that if your child is crying about the urinal, then he isn't ready yet, and you should wait a couple of weeks and try again.  With stubborn Eric, though, I could see myself waiting two more weeks an endless number of times all throughout the summer.  So, I decided to just rip the bandage off; quit cold turkey!  If he were to have any say in things, things would stay the same way as always, and he would wear his diaper and his red Cars shoes for the rest of his life.

So, whenever he got home from school, off came his diaper.  (I sent him to school with his diaper on, so that I could progressively get him used to the idea before sticking the girls at school with the potty training protestor.)  That, of course, also went against the traditional advice about potty training.  Once you go for it, you should just make the diaper disappear!

Somehow, though, my strategy seemed to work for us.  The first few days Eric would protest as I took his diaper off, and put him into his new underwear.  He cried every time I suggested going "pee pee in the potty," too, so I stopped asking/suggesting and just brought him to a potty and pulled down his pants and told him to pee.  He usually whined a little bit before finally going a few drops.
Papi made it into a game with him one day, and that seemed to get him to go for a little bit longer.  He still, though, had the annoying habit of saying he was done after peeing just a little bit, only to pee in his pants 5 minutes later.  It was hard not to get upset with him, but I didn't want to traumatize him any more than I already was.
Then came the weekend, and we decided to go the entire weekend without a diaper.  Saturday actually went quite well, and he still had the same dry pants on until an accident late in the evening, right before bed time!!  Sunday, though, didn't go quite so smoothly, and Eric seemed to rebel against the whole notion of potty training, and I started to doubt whether or not to bring him to school on Monday without his diaper.

Still, I just decided to go for it, and see what happened.  I'd let the girls handle him on Monday, and tell me what they thought about what I should do.  If things didn't go well, we could always return to the diaper, and try again in two weeks after his teacher's week off.  While he did end up going through a couple of changes of clothes that day, the girls told me to go with it and to try again the next day.
After an evening of having to change him several times, though, I was starting to have my doubts again, but again I brought him to school without a diaper on Tuesday.  I told his teacher about my doubts, and she once again reassured me.  She told me that as they start going together, they get more excited about heading to the bathroom to go pee pee in a group.

So, you can imagine that I was in utter shock when I went to pick Eric up on Tuesday, and he was wearing the same pants as he had been that morning!!  I jumped up in the air from excitement when I noticed that and they told me how well the day had gone!!  It wasn't any less exciting when the same thing happened on Wednesday and Thursday.  Friday, though, brought a poo poo accident, and that is a whole other messy issue that we will eventually need to address.  (He has learned to go pee pee standing up, and refuses to sit on the potty!!)

Wearing a diaper for a little nap.

For now, though, I'm pretty proud of the little guy and the progress that he has made throughout the week.  He wears a diaper at nap-time, so I decided to put a diaper on him today for his nap at home.  That's when he surprised me with "no, diaper, no!!" for the very first time.  Sigh. I did eventually get it on him.