It has been a while since I updated all of you on our potty training adventures.  We have made some amazing strides and may even be close to a point where I can say Maya is potty trained

For quite sometime we were working on it very, very slowly.  I was pretty much just letting Maya call the shots and letting her just let me know when she wanted to use the potty.  I felt like we weren’t making much head way.  Then I discovered something, pull-ups, to her, were just like diapers.  They looked and felt like diapers so she was using them as diapers.  As long as she was wearing pull-ups she wasn’t getting the whole concept of using the potty.  She was sort of using it whenever she felt like it, but most of the time still doing her business in the pull-up.  Not exactly what I would call successful potty training.  I needed a change of plan.

Once I realized that using pull-ups just wasn’t going to cut it for her I moved on to my plan B.  Plan B entailed getting a bunch of big girl underwear, the kind with extra padding so the accidents that are inevitable didn’t cause quite as much of a puddly mess, and letting her really start trying to figure this whole potty business out.

At first it was slow going.  It took her a little while to really understand the signals her body was sending her to tell her she had to pee so there were quite a few accidents.  Plus, she refused to poop in the potty and would ask for a diaper when she had to go or she would hold it until nap time and go in her pull-up.  I figured I had to get a little more creative.  Going on the big potty seemed a little intimidating to her so we went out and I let her pick out a little sit on the floor style potty.  She choose a frog potty  She was game for going on the frog potty especially since I also added that she got to have a gummie bear every time she peed in the potty.  It was smooth sailing as far as peeing in the potty went.  However, she was still not comfortable with the whole pooping in the potty thing.  I decided to just let it go for now and wait for her to tell me when she was ready.

A couple of weeks later she said one day “Mommy I wanna poop in the potty”  So off we went and she did it.  I was so proud of her.  I cheered her on and gave her a big high five when she was done.  I even took her out and let her pick out a special toy at the store.  Since then she has pretty much been going exclusively in the potty, with only a few accidents.

Right now we are at a point where I am almost ready to say she is potty trained.  She wears only big girl underwear at home, with the exception of naps and bedtime.  She does pretty well.  We’ll have days where she doesn’t have any accidents at all and other days that are a bit more challenging.  But for the most part I think she gets the idea.  We’ve even ventured out a couple of times in the big girl underwear, and knock on wood, there were no accidents.

At this point we’ll just continue doing little trial outings in the big girl underwear and see how it goes.  I don’t think she is ready for night time training yet.  She’s still in a crib for starters, and I just don’t think she is physiologically ready.  For now we’ll call the daytime training a success so far and wait on her to show us signs she is ready to be done with pull-ups at nap and bedtime too.