Two weeks ago I started potty training Sprout. He is typically very resistant to new things and had developed an odd fear of sitting on the potty. So I expected it to be a long, unpleasant week. The first couple of days were indeed quite challenging. He would fuss every time I said it was time to sit on the potty, and ended up "saving" anything until he was wearing either a naptime diaper or a "leaving the house" diaper. I did learn from this, though, that the kid could hold it a LONG time. Which I thought was good to know going forward.
After about three days, he actually did pee in the toilet, and this was a huge step forward. Oh, prior to this I'd put together a super deluxe candy jar (2-4 skittles at a time didn't seem quite motivating enough any more) and taped up 9 brand new still-in-the-package Hot Wheels cars on the bathroom door. Every time he peed he could pick a candy and every poop would earn him a car. His very first poop in the toilet was about the size of a peanut M&M, but I didn't want to discourage him, so it counted. That first week he had one #1 accident and one #2. I had him help clean out the #2 accident as I'd read that was supposed to help cement it in the kid's mind that this is really inconvenient.
Yesterday he earned the last of the nine cars and thus earned what he had said he wanted for his potty training reward a few months ago: a big stuffed Angry Bird. (He actually got a big one, a small one, and a small green pig because I found the latter two on a really great sale).
When he sits on the toilet, I allow him to play Angry Birds on the iPad, which has also been a good motivator and a good way to keep him sitting there without me always being in the room.
He is still in a diaper at naptime and bedtime, though over 90% of the time he is waking up dry, so I don't think we'll have to do that much longer, either. I am able to use some of the snazzy cloth diapers I recently purchased for this (he grew out of the other kind I had quite a few months ago and had been in disposables ever since), which is nice as it is difficult to reuse a clean disposable diaper more than a couple of times before it just gets all bunched up.
I am very much looking forward to a diaper free (nearly) six months, and glad to be done dealing with "big kid" diapers, especially.
