Success!

This weekend, as beautiful as it was, we locked ourselves in the house. A few months ago Arianna's daycare teacher was potty training her son and Arianna showed interest, so she started potty training her too. She was successful there! At home it was a different story - she wouldn't sit on the potty and was wetting herself often. So we took a break. This past weekend we decided to try again.

I picked up this book at amazon.com and both Shawn and I read it cover to cover - its only about 50 pages and most of it is real common sense stuff. It advocates a very positive reinforcement to potty training over the course of 3 days.

I'm happy to say that by the end of the second day Arianna had gone both pee and poop in the potty and by the end of the 4th day was more successful using the potty than not. This morning marked day 5 and she started the day with no accidents (a first!).

We threw away her diapers as was advocated by this book - she doesn't even wear them to bed. She still has accidents in the middle of the night, but with time it will get better, and we've already noticed a big difference. She will nap during the day and stay dry! We're having such good success with this book that I wanted to make a post to tell others about it. We were really clueless about where to start and this book laid a good foundation. I can't say we follow it word for word but instead have adapted it to our needs and its worked well.

Our reward system includes candy corn, jelly beans and stickers - she is very proud of herself when she goes pee and poop and is giving us many good signs. Her daycare teacher is continuing the great work we are doing and Arianna does great in her care during the day. I couldn't be happier with how well she is doing.

My mom tells me I was 4 before I was potty trained and it looks like by the time baby #2 arrives we'll have only one in diapers - that's amazing to me!