Our Potty "Train"ing Progress

Once upon a time, when I was idealistic and motivated, I tried a 3-Day Potty Training method with my then 2-year-old (now 4-year-old) son, Einstein.  It was kind of a fiasco, and I would say we were definite failures (or drop-outs, maybe) at the method.  However, it was an excellent way to get my son interested and excited about the potty, and help start him off toward success.

Well, fast-forward almost 2 years, and Einstein is fully potty-trained (we still do a little more bedsheet washing than I would like, but he is also possibly the world’s deepest sleeper).  Now we are on to little Miss Euler, who survived about 2 days of the 3-Day method before I just couldn’t take it anymore.

This time around, hardest thing about the 3-Day method, in my opinion (at least the Lora Jensen version), is that you’re not supposed to sit your kiddo on the potty at regular intervals, or keep asking them if they have to go.  Instead, you remind them to “tell me when you have to go potty,” so they start to take ownership of the process and recognize their own body signals.

The “tell mommy” strategy was fantastic for Einstein.  It took all the pressure off him and gave him a special job to do.  But for Miss Euler, something about it just didn’t click.  Instead of gradually increasing our success rate, like with Einstein, we just had one puddle after another, after another, with absolutely no change or improvement.

So we ditched that method.  We have to leave the house at some point.  I started making her sit and go every 2 hours (roughly), and before we left the house or went outside to play.

It worked great.

For #1 type incidents, that is.  But here we are, at 2 1/2, and we are still having trouble putting #2′s in the potty.

So I am breaking cardinal rule #2 (no pun intended) of the 3-Day potty-training method.  We are using outright bribing.

A good friend with a little girl 2 weeks younger than Miss Euler had fantastic success with a Potty Train (like, and actual railroad train) chart she found, where you buy some little poster with train tracks on it, then scoot a little train picture along the track, forward for successes, and backward for accidents.  Every 5 tracks or so, there is a star, which means kiddo gets a reward.  Awesome!

We made one!