We have both green diapers and purple diapers. We used to buy them for different purposes, but then amazon subscribe and save kept just sending us too many and so we had a bunch and we just used them both whenever. The green ones are size 5, and work with either kid, the purples are size 4, so we prefer to use them on kaylee. anyways, we decided to take advantage of their different colors and start telling kaylee she needed to be potty trained soon. We are approaching a smidge over 6 months since we potty trained ethan, and just about exactly 6 months until preschool starts. Ethan's got the no accidents thing down pretty well, but the wiping and undies and pants back on part of the whole deal needs some work. So if Ethan still needs a bit of work, and it's taken 6 months to get here and there's 6 months until preschool starts... it's time to get cracking on kaylee. we're not overly concerned because she's older and she's already got the pants back on skills going kinda okay and we were kinda relaxed with the pace of teaching ethan, but still... time to start.
So we told kaylee, these purple diapers are for day time, and the green ones are only for sleeping. I cancelled my amazon order of more purple diapers and told her, when we run out of purple diapers, you have to wear undies. Then time passed, we used a few purple diapers every day, we reminded her occasionally...
And then, SURPRISE! yesterday we pulled out the last purple diaper. oh @#$! we said. I guess we really need to do this. It would seem our own purple diaper counting skills were lacking, and we hadn't quite realized there weren't still more in the closet. but here it was, the time was upon us.
Annemarie is in town and we'd planned to go to the zoo, so we slapped that last purple diaper on her butt (kaylee's not annemarie's) and headed out. While at the zoo every time Blake took ethan potty I took kaylee potty. we had one success, one failure, and some pee in the diaper (but we hadn't told her not to pee in the diaper, we were busy talking up wearing undies later in the day).
As we drove toward home, Ethan fell asleep in the car, so we stopped by QFC and I took Kaylee in to buy some special juice, more milk, and some special donut holes. We came home, let Ethan keep sleeping in the car, and offered kaylee some juice. juice, juice, juice. keep drinking that juice kaylee. the concept is, if you pump them full of juice (or any liquid) and sit them on the potty every half hour, they end up succeeding often and learn the sensation of having to pee. we also grabbed the monster potties out of the garage/basement. (they are little stand alone potties that you have to empty and wash each time, so awhile ago we told ethan he needed to graduate to the real potty when we got tired of cleaning those, but they seem to be a good transitional step; kaylee prefers them, and they also let you the parent know if there's any success, even if it's a tiny tiny tiny tiny amount!)
Anyways, how did it go? Raging success. We did not think kaylee was ready. Last time we thought she was ready and ethan was not. This means we're 0 for 3 for predicting our children's potty training readiness. whatever, we'll take it. Kaylee had no accidents, even later that night when we went over to the peltons' for dinner. Yes, we took her to pee every half hour, but 80% of the time she managed to eek some little bit of pee out, and no accidents. she even pooped in the potty which has been a big struggle for her in the past. (thank you donut holes, which were reserved as a special poop-prize!)
Anyways, today's day two. there's lots of progress yet to be made, like her telling us when she has to go etc, but... I think we've begun.
hurrah!
no pictures are included for your benefit. that and I didn't take any.
coming soon: pictures of our trip to the zoo including some awesome ones at willawong (willawog?) station... the australian bird part.
