Operation: Potty Training

The last few days brought an unexpected break from work and daycare after Winter Storm Diego dumped 12+ inches of snow in our area. We don't typically get such an early snow in North Carolina; we usually see our biggest snows in late January and February, even in March, so it was quite a surprise to hear there was significant snow in the forecast. When it seemed that the weathermen were going to get it right, I got the crazy idea to use our days holed up in the house to potty train Emmy. Initially my plan was to conquer this badge of parenthood during the first few days of our Christmas break, but I was looking ahead with dread knowing it would mean staying home and missing some Christmas festivities. Since it was quite spontaneous, I wasn't prepared yet, so I had to make a quick stop at the store after work on Friday to purchase all the necessary supplies: M&Ms, stickers, and Pull-ups for nap and bedtime. As predicted, Diego moved in late Saturday night, and when we woke on Sunday morning, there was a blanket of white covering everything in sight. 

I got a lot of advice from my sister, my friend Sarah, and several other mom friends. Both my sister and Sarah followed a 3-day 'boot camp' where you ditch the diapers and go straight to underwear. They warned me that it means a lot of accidents (and frustration!) the first few days, but then it doesn't drag out the process with diapers and pull-ups. After my weekly run with my sister on Saturday morning and a pep talk, I came home ready to tackle potty training. I put Emmy right into big girl underwear and waited to see what happened. She was very curious about the new potty seat and proud of her new underwear. 

Part of the boot camp is encouraging a lot of liquids during that first day so that the child will need to urinate frequently. Then, as you train them to associate the urge to go the bathroom with using the potty, you ease up on the liquids during the second and third day, but continue to take the child to sit on the potty every 1 - 1.5 hours. The first day was very hard, not gonna lie! Boomer snuck out to write for the day, so it was just Emmy and me. I felt like I could barely keep up with taking her to the potty and cleaning up the messes afterwards. I even had to do a mid-day load of laundry so that Emmy had clean underwear for the afternoon - she went through 12 pairs of underwear just in the morning alone! It seemed somewhat hopeless, and I was beginning to think I had made a mistake! I realize now that mostly when I talked about going to the bathroom prior to this whole boot camp, I was referencing poopie, so I really had to first teach Emmy that 'pee pee' is also 'using the potty.' I'll spare all the extra details and sum up with saying that we've had some accidents, but we've also had some successes. We are mostly using stickers and exaggerated celebrations from Mommy and Daddy as motivation.  

We plan to venture out to dinner this evening, which will be our first time out since potty training. I am nervous, but I'm hopeful that it will be a dry outing! I will have one more day at home with Emmy tomorrow (they have called school for students, but it is an Optional Teacher Workday), so my hope is we can have another solid day of successes before she goes back to daycare. Since we have otherwise been inside during these snow days, we have filled the time in between potty breaks with snow gazing, napping, making Christmas treats, finishing off our Christmas cards, and playing the Wii. I even talked Boomer into a DVD workout during Emmy's naptime. The couple that sweats together, stays together! :)