Since a few of you have asked me how I potty trained Lizzie, I thought I would just write a blog post about it. I had heard of a 3 day potty training method so I started doing some research on the internet. I took what I found and made some tiny adjustments. Here's the trick, you've got to go all out. You find 3 days where you have no commitments and stay home for those 3 days. Make sure it's at a time where there aren't any big changes happening. I chose to do it over the weekend because Tyler was home more to help me. Also, there is no going back to diapers, ever! This is cold turkey. Yes, you will be cleaning up a lot of accidents, but it's only for 3 days. Ready? Here is what I did...
The day before we started, I took Lizzie with me to the store to help pick out her underwear. Can you guess what kind she picked? Yep, Frozen. We also bought Pull-Ups for naps and nighttime sleep. I told her that she is now a big girl and will start wearing panties tomorrow.
Day 1: I changed her out of her diaper when she woke up for the day and we said bye bye to the diaper. I left her naked on the bottom, and t-shirt on top. I'm usually strict about limiting Lizzie's screen time, but since we were stuck at home for 3 days, I let her watch a lot of shows. Luckily she had a bunch of new toys from her birthday so she played with those a lot too. I gave her diluted juice to drink so that she would drink a lot and obviously, pee a lot. I left a training potty in the living room so that it would be easy to get to. I sat her on the potty every 30 minutes and told her to pee or poop. Most of the time, she wouldn't go when I did that. I watched her very closely all day and when she looked liked she was about to go (or started going already) I would whisk her to the potty. Whenever she got pee or poop in the potty, I would praise her, then take her with me to dump the contents into the toilet and flush. Then we'd wash our hands and I'd give her a jelly bean or 2. On the first day, her success rate was about 50%. There were a lot of clean ups. When she had an accident I would just say "pee and poop go in the potty." No punishing, no getting mad. You want to make this as good of an experience as you can. Before naps and bedtime, I would have her try to potty and then put a Pull-Up on her.
Day 2: Same as day 1 except we left the house in the afternoon for about an hour. I was afraid to go anywhere far so we just decided to walk to a nearby park. Before we left, we sat Lizzie on the potty and told her to go. It took several attempts but when she finally went, we put her in panties and pants and then left. Since she had gone potty before, she didn't need to go while we were out. On this day she was getting better because she would say "potty" when she needed to go and would try to make her way to the potty. We still had some accidents.
Day 3: By this day Lizzie was taking herself to the potty. We did everything the same on this day except we went on a longer outing. Our outing was to my parent's house for dinner and she did end up having an accident there because she couldn't get to the potty fast enough. At home, she made it to the potty every time.
As of right now, I'm keeping Lizzie bare bottomed at home because it's just easier for her to go potty, she isn't very good at pulling her pants down on her own. Going out still makes me nervous because there isn't always a potty so close. We'll see how it goes as we start to venture out more. Hope this is helpful to any of you wanting to try potty training. I had always heard good things about this method but was still amazed when it worked! It's a long 3 days but totally worth it.
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