All right -- this may be a bit shocking, but I'm laying out what we've done and what we are about to do. Are you ready for it all?????
For Ballerina, we had it easy. On Mother's Day, 2009 we were giving all 3 kids "Naked Time". Not long -- just 15 minutes or so before getting into pajamas. We used to do this with Big Brother all the time and he always had so much fun. The twins were 3 years 4 months. Dad saw that Rachel needed to eliminate, so he picked her up and carried her to the toilet and sat her down and stayed with her for a minute, not really expecting anything to happen. BUT IT DID!!!!! She both pee'd and pooped in the toilet!!!!! We praised her for what felt like hours and I wrote a note to her teacher asking whether she felt we should pursue potty training at that point. Her response was that for that time, no. And it was getting close to the end of the school year that they wanted to have more time. Well, 2 days later, she sent me an email saying that she did appear ready and the following Monday, I sent her to school with underwear and lots of clothes and they started. They used a modified version of Foxx and Azrin's technique. By the end of the week, she was completely urine trained. A week or so later, she was wearing underwear to bed. She has never wet the bed at night.
Music Man on the other hand, well, he's still in diapers. Since the school year started, we have been making efforts to train him, but he seems to have no interest in it. But he has demonstrated control. He periodically will stay dry all day long at school and it's happening more and more frequently. We have a 3 day weekend coming up. We are going to try to make significant progress.
Yes, President's Day Weekend, 2012 will be about Potty Training in this house. From the time Music Man gets dressed in the morning until pajama time in the evening, he will be in underwear. We will set a timer to go off every 30 minutes, at which time either Dad or myself will take him to the bathroom. He will sit on the toilet (or stand in position if he prefers) and will stay there for a specified period of time. Then the underwear and pants will go back on and the timer will be restarted. If he successfully eliminates, we will bring him to the computer and restore pbskids.org, a website that he LOVES and has forced us to block because he stims on the videos. For 10 minutes, we will unblock the site and allow him to do WHATEVER HE WANTS!!!!!! If not, we'll try again in 30 minutes.
We know we're going to be inundated with laundry. We know that we likely won't see any success on Saturday. Hopefully we'll get some on Sunday. The stakes are also going up on Sunday -- he will have to help clean himself up -- he will have to go into the bathroom, take off his pants/underwear and put them in the sink for me. When they're wet, that will definitely NOT be a fun activity for him, especially if the pants are jeans. But once we can get 3 successful eliminations in the toilet, I think we will have made the leap. But we won't reprimand. We will just keep trying. We'll talk him through it with a calm voice. But once we go to underwear, we can't turn back.
I'm REALLY hoping that he'll be daytime trained by the end of the weekend. I truly believe at this point that we are dealing with stubbornness rather than a lack of readiness. We just have to make him see that this way is much better for everyone. I know, that's much easier said than done. But hopefully, we'll see some positive results.
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