Potty Training 2.0

As you may remember from a previous post, we tried to potty train Brady once before, with little success.  I'm not sure if it wasn't a hit because I was 8 months pregnant, him not being "ready", or that I was too grossed out by him eating urine soaked marshmellows.  Yep, that's right.  You can read all about it here.

Anyway, we decided to retry potty-training the weekend before I went back to work from maternity leave.  It went much better this time.  We loaded Brady up with lots of juice (he never gets juice so he sucked it down like candy) and set the timer for every 15 minutes.  Sure enough, every 15 minutes Brady would go to the bathroom in his little Elmo potty.  After he went, he would get a sticker for his sticker chart and a piece of candy (out of a Thomas the Train PEZ dispenser) after he washed his hands.  It was going swimmingly.  We still put him in a pull-up for his nap, but did great otherwise.

The next day he was getting a little bored (despite 4 accidents the previous day, he still used the potty 30 times!!).  We had to spice things up by making the 15 minute timer a "motorcycle" sound that he thought was pretty cool, and by the afternoon we were having him tell us when he needed to go.  Granted, it is much scarier when you are waiting for a 2 year old to give you this information, but he had to learn somehow.

All in all, it wasn't near the headache that I thought I was going to be (especially after our first attempt!!)

After a few days though, we noticed Brady was still having #2 accidents in his pants.  We had no idea how to fix this problem, since we couldn't bribe him with PEZ or stickers anymore.  That's when we decided to re-introduce the marshmellows.  By this time, Brady could see in the cupboard that there was two different sizes of marshmellows, and he knew if he did something REALLY COOL it would mean a larger marshmellow.  Now, after being potty trained for nearly 2 solid months, he still expects a treat when going #2.  Just the other day he announced he needed to go potty and started running to the bathroom, then stopped in his tracks (while holding his bottom), looked at me and said, "I get a BIG marshmellow, Momma.  I get a BIG marshmellow.  I go BIG poop."

Oh man......