Monday, September 07, 2009

The landfills thank you Kiernan

I like to think of Kiernan as my little genius. He walked early, he talked early, he's been impressing everyone since the getgo - that's my boy! When we finally sleep trained, things turned over in less than a week. When we moved him to his big boy room it was like flipping a switch. So I was fairly confident that when we started to potty train it would be smooth sailing. We started last February and it turned out.... Kiernan wasn't interested in potty training.
Sure, if you sat him on the potty every ten minutes, he'd pee for you. But that's not being potty trained, that's peeing on command. If he happened to feel like peeing when you hadn't thought to stick him on the potty then there wasn't going to be any effort to hold back. And pooping... well, Kiernan liked to poop in bed and was perfectly happy to wait until he had a diaper on at nap or bed time. We gave it a good solid try and then decided he just wasn't ready and went back to diapers.
I wasn't willing to start the process again when we were in the middle of new babies so nothing really happened on the potty training front again until July and then daycare really went gung ho with him and we were happy to work on it at home too.
Again, peeing on command was no problem. And we could even ask him every hour instead of every ten minutes, but he never ASKED to go pee. We were just catching him often enough that he generally wasn't peeing out. And the pooping... saving it for diapers still. This went on for weeks and then daycare managed to get him to poop in the potty and that was a great first step in the right direction. And then suddenly, a week and a half ago, it seems like the switch flipped! All of sudden it's working! We've been accident free in over a week! He asks to go pee whenever he needs to. Pooping is no longer an issue - in fact he's pretty gung ho on the whole thing.
We definitely tried to bribe him over the course of the whole process and it helped him get excited once he was really ready, but before that nothing we could offer him did it. He needed to decide on his own although we definitely all shoved him hard in the right direction to that decision :)
It's so nice to be down to only 2 kids in diapers. I dream of a day when I don't have to change so many bums any more ;)

*knock on wood*

4 comments:

Capital Mom said...

That is awesome! Man, a day with no diapers souds great.

shona said...

Good job, little man! :)

Some kind of Mom said...

This is very encouraging to read! Joel's almost there, but I don't think the switch has flipped yet. I hear ya on dreaming of no longer changing bums!!

CrAzY Working Mom said...

Knocking on wood for ya! Best of luck to ya. WTG, big guy. :)