The Potty Project: Day 1

Today was probably the most frusterating day of my life. We decided, kind of spur of the moment, to potty-train Lincoln. When I say spur of the moment, I mean he ran out of diapers, and we were like hmmm, let's give this a try, so we bought underwear and a box of pull-ups for night time, instead of new diapers.

Here's the game plan. He stays in his underwear all day except during naps and bedtime. We decided that having him wear pants would make too much laundry, so it's a shirt, underwear, and socks for him. We set a timer to go off every 20 minutes. So every 20 minutes he sits on the potty for 5 minutes. If he goes we have a big party! We cheer, we give high fives, he gets a treat, he gets to put a sticker on his potty chart. If he goes on the carpet/in his pants, we do our very best not to get upset. And we try to explain to him the difference between wet and dry underwear. Sounds like a simple enough strategy. We mostly copied it from Aaron's sister Lisa.

Well, Lincoln likes his potty. He's been curious about it for awhile now, and is really interested whenever Daddy or Mommy uses the big potty. He talks about the potty all the time. The other day he even put his toy allegator into the cup holder on his car seat and told me that it was going potty. He really likes his underwear. He picked out Cars, no surprise there. He likes it to the point that today when I tried to put on his "nap time underwear" aka pull-up, he threw an absolute fit, because he wanted to wear his "McQueen" underwear to bed. He even does all right sitting on the potty (mostly, not always) when the timer goes off. For the five minutes while he's on the potty, we tried a bunch of things to entertain him. I read to him, I let him watch movies, I gave him a bowl of potty snacks (fish crackers) that he could only eat while sitting on the potty, we played firetrucks, and sword fight (I never let him sword fight, so he was really excited about this one), I even showed him a cool trick I can do, using a spatula I would flip a fish cracker high in the air and catch it in my mouth. He liked that a lot, but I got tired of eating gold fish after about 3 rounds. So we've made sitting on the potty as fun as I can think of.

The only problem is that he won't go in the potty. It doesn't matter how long he sits on it, or how short I make the intravels between sitting times, he waits until about two minutes or so after he gets off and then goes and pees somewhere on the carpet. I did not have a single, in the potty, success with him today. Aaron took over potty training when he got home from work, because I was so frusterated. He got Lincoln to go three times in the potty. So that was a plus. But that's 3 successes and about 20 clean the pee off the floor experiences total for yesterday.

Needless to say, I was happy when it was time to put him to bed, because then we could just put the pull-up, excuse me, "night time underwear" on him and not have to deal with it again until tomorrow. I'm pretty frustrated right now, if you can't feel that coming through. Half of me says I'm not cut out for this and to just put him back in diapers. The other half of me says to keep trying and be more patient because he's just learning too, and needs some time to catch on to the whole process. And really, I would love to put him back in diapers except for one minor setback. Notice in the sentence above I said, I'm not ready, not Lincoln's not ready. I guess I still just feel like Lincoln can do it, and that he's showed a lot of interest in doing it. But I don't know if I can handle another day like today...

But I'm going to do my best to keep a daily log of our Potty Project experience, because it's looking like I'll have to do this at least two more times in the future, and maybe looking back and reading about the process will be helpful when we start potty training Ivan, like when he's 12. :)