The Happy Dance!

Every parent who has raised a child through the potty training stage can attest to knowing all about the potty song and dance hoopla that goes along with potty training. We've been doing this for almost a year now. Well, mostly on and off and mainly with ongoing encouragement. With Elaina we used bribes of chocolate, candy and stickers. The candy worked pretty well as she got a jelly bean or M&M for telling us and another for the actual tinkle. The sticker reward chart worked pretty well too and when she wet her pull up, a sticker was peeled from her chart while the tears ensued. Seriously you would have thought we were cutting skin from her toes. Thank God those usual bouts only lasted a couple minutes before she realized that mommy and daddy were moving on from her drama.

And so the learning process.

For the past few months Elaina had reached a plateau of sorts. She was wearing pull ups during the day and excited about the big girl status that went with the new Disney Princess patterns that displayed on her new butt covers. Yet she still had accidents. Like any kid, stopping what she was doing to go potty was not on her schedule.

As far as I was concerned, she needed to get over this hump. I know that she is smart enough to know when she has to potty and she was just riding out the pull up phase without consequence. (Because it wasn't her $13 for 48 pull ups!) I had enough. It was full fledged potty training boot camp all of last week for my darling daughter. Our sitter (who we L O V E ) was going to have only a few kids this past week ( because most of their parents are teachers on spring break) agreed to go full board on helping to get Elaina over her hump of potty training.

I arrived Monday morning with a bag filled with 5 extra pairs of pants, 7 pair of big-girl-panties and loads of encouragement that I had pumped into Elaina about what was expected of her. She had her share of accidents early on in the week, but by Thursday, she had a full dry day and has only had 2 accidents since. Hooray! So, we've moved on from the potty dance to the shouting-with-joy-'cause-I-only-have-one-kid-in-diapers-happy-dance!!! She's done it!!

I am still a little taken back by her latest milestone and that she's taken another step closer to becoming a big kid. I was planning on giving her plenty of time to work on dry nap times and bedtimes, but I think she's already handled that herself. She's been waking up dry at 6:00 in the morning telling us that she has to potty. Aaack! 6 in the morning, but sooo not complaining. Pretty soon, we'll phase out the overnight diaper entirely and Elaina will be the "big girl" we've been talking so much about. My big girl! It's really finally happened!