Good luck with sleep training! (And potty training!) My son is 4.5 months and we just started sleep training on Sunday night. I was really stressed about it but it was clear he had gotten to a point where he needed to learn to fall asleep on his own. It was something I hoped I wouldn’t have to do but just a few days into it I’m already so grateful! It was also a good reminder not to judge parents for what they do…we really all are just doing our best and have our kids’ best interest in mind, regardless of how it may appear to others!

My son will be three in July and basically shows very little interest in going on the potty. He goes pee in it every night before his bath but beyond that… not much. We have potty books and we encourage/bribe and he still just doesn’t seem super interested. In fact he often says, ‘no I don’t want to!’ when we try to get him to go. The one thing I don’t want to do is push him into it if he isn’t ready or doesn’t want to. That’s one thing all the experts seem to say not to do. However… he’s almost three!!! 😛 I told him when he turns three all the diapers will be gone forever and there wont be any more left haha.
He just had another verbal explosion and is speaking more grammatically correct and really made a lot of leaps recently in those kind of areas (And has had a lot of control related fits) so I am hoping along with this mental growth spurt will come the readiness for the potty.
Good luck to you guys. I have an 11 month old daughter so its always fun to read posts about your kids because our family is pretty similar. 🙂

Ugh, potty training. I read an e-book called Potty Training by Carol Cline. It was incredibly helpful before starting (1.5 months ago) and I still refer to it now for tips. One thing I learned from it was not to ask my kiddo (he’s 2.5) if he has to go, because kids that age love to say no (!), but remind him to “tell mommy when you have to go potty”. Something I learned from my Love & Logic parenting class (best class ever, it’s based on the L & L book) is to give him a choice: Do you want to run to the potty or walk to the potty? He gets to choose how he gets there, but the message is that we are going to the potty. Good luck! I’d take sleep training over potty training any day, haha! Maybe because with extinction it took about three nights, and this potty training is dragging on… granted it’s much better than it was…

I used the book “Potty Training 1-2-3” by Gary Ezzo (one of the authors of Baby Wise) and Ann Marie Ezzo for my son. By day 3, no accidents. It’s a quick read, and the concept focuses on staying “clean and dry” and rewarding that, as opposed to just rewarding the act of going potty. After those few days we have never looked back!

I did a very extreme but very effective form of potty training. Shortly after my daughter turned 2 I just took away the diapers. I did have to plan to stay at home for several days, but it worked. I kept a little potty in the living room and just watched for cues. We got the hang of it after a few accidents and she was fully trained in the daytime after 3 days. Because I’m crazy I didn’t put a diaper on her for naps or bedtime either…and it took a couple of weeks before we got the routine down to where she wasn’t wetting the bed. But I think it was worth it because she wasn’t able to hold anything until naps or bedtime and just go in her diaper. She never showed any interest in using the potty until I started training her but she was clearly ready. I’m sure such an approach wouldn’t work for everyone but it worked for us. Good luck!

I’ve potty trained two kids, but they were both very different. Believe it or not my son was so much easier than my daughter. I saw some potty bootcamp on tv one day – and that’s what I did. I found a weekend where we could stay inside all day and took away the diapers cold turkey (no pull-ups)! Crazy, I know, but I just kept moving the potty chair to whatever room we were in and if he went to the bathroom in his pants, I would remind him to go in the potty.

In my mind, I think it helped him realize the feeling of needing to go and then where to go. With diapers being so good nowadays, I’m not sure if he just didn’t realize that when he needed to pee. Or that he was able to break the habit of just going to the bathroom wherever he wanted to go and not having to take a time out from life to go to the bathroom. I was also fortunate that both my kids hated poopy diapers and dealing with poopy underwear. After about the third poop accident, I would be less and less helpful in taking the undies off and dealing with it.

I went diaperless cold turkey with my daughter too. She is more stubborn and also prideful, but by day 3 she gave up the ghost so to speak and realized that if she didn’t want to get wet she would need to go in the potty.

I know it sounds really messy, but it only took a few days and I was no longer “potty training” – that was worth it to me.

How often is Claire waking at night?

My little girl was so easy with potty training (she just decided one day that she wanted to use the potty and that was it), but now that I have a son that’s almost 2 we’ve been talking a lot about how to start encouraging him to use the toilet. My friend with two boys swears by cheerios — you throw a few cheerios in the toilet, sit him backwards on the toilet so he’s kind of naturally pointed down, and make a game of peeing on the cheerios. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like something that might make going on the potty more fun, especially since my son hates sitting still.

Gook with the potty! What worked for us was to first get a “cool” potty. My son’s car potty had a button on it that made a “vroom” sound when he pushed it. As recommended, we also kept the potty with us AT ALL TIMES. I would often just let him sit on it while he watched cartoons. Usually he would sit there for the whole length of the show. It was a nice surprise to him and a nice way to clap and cheer when he got up and saw pee/poo! I know electronics aren’t everyone’s favorite thing for their kids, but we also let him play on our phones while he sat on the potty. Basically telling him he had to sit there until he peed (which he never minded because he was playing on our phone). We carried that car potty with us in the car. On walks. At the pool. At grandma’s house. On the weekends when we were home with him all day we also sat him on the potty every hour or so. And that leads me to the last and most important thing (in my experience): routine. We started the bedtime potty routine wayyyy before we actually potty trained, so that helped. Just sit him on it – like all the time. He’ll get it.

The biggest lesson I learned is that he WILL be potty trained. And he WILL pee in his clothes. But we dropped the diapers, kept a lot of extra clothes with us at all times, and just stayed consistent.

GO HENRY! He’ll get it. And in the meantime – stay sane 🙂

Wow. You’re one brave mama trying two types of child training and even working on your own tri-training. Go Caitlin!

I just found your blog recently and I am loving it! Our kids are very close in age (daughter is 2.5 and son is 5 months) and I am just hoping to jump on the potty training wagon here shortly with my daughter. She shows very little interest; she also has recently begun telling us she is a “baby” and I am hoping our transition into a big girl bed this weekend isn’t super painful. My son isn’t a terrible sleeper (knock on wood) but I look forward to reading your sleep training post soon since we will be jumping on that train as well 😉

I’m sure many other people have already told you this but I guess it bears repeating… Henry won’t be in diapers forever. He will catch on with the potty training eventually and more often then not, it just clicks one day. Be sure to give yourself a break and if you have a bad day it doesn’t mean you’re failing, both you and Henry are navigating all these milestones for the first time together. Such is the curse of the first born! 😉 Good luck, Godspeed and remember… you’re doing a great job!

I know you’ve already gotten a lot of comments and suggestions about potty training, but I’ll add a few things that worked for us. It took us a few weeks of trying different pottys before we discovered what he was most comfortable with. We tried a little stand-alone potty, a potty seat on top of the regular seat, and eventually discovered that he really prefers standing up and leaning over the toilet while holding onto the flipped-up seat. Once we figured that out, it kind of “clicked.” We didn’t use any reward beyond praise in the beginning, but when he just wouldn’t poop in the potty we realized we needed to up the reward to give him enough motivation. M&Ms mostly did the trick. Now we’re trying to figure out how to stop the M&M thing because he is definitely fully potty-trained at this point. Oh, we also discovered that he would pee and poop in his pants, but if he was naked he wouldn’t go on the floor. So a few days of naked time reinforced the idea that you go on the potty. And we started in the beginning taking him to the toilet every 30 minutes. Then we moved up to every hour. Then every 2 hours. Now he can tell us when he needs to go (that is one of the best milestones ever!). Finally, my advice is to just relax about it. I got waaaay too stressed out when we took him to the bathroom and he didn’t go and then we had to get in the car and what if he pees in his car seat and on and on. Just relax and realize that accidents will happen and eventually he WILL be potty trained.

I’m in the midst of potty training, myself! My daughter is 2 years 8 months and so far it’s going well. We started off with giving her little treats when she would go on the potty, but then it turned into us asking, and she would go and squeeze out a tiny drop of pee in order to get her treat. So we started only giving the treat when she would tell us she needed to go, and that encouraged her for awhile. Then we really played up the panties — she loves to wear them, and I just always emphasize that we don’t pee in our panties. I still ask her all the time and am on the lookout for the potty dance. The hardest thing is poop — the girl will NOT poop in the potty! I bought some really fancy lollipops (her favorite) that she only gets if she poops in the potty. So far no luck, but I’m hoping that eventually those will work. Really the biggest thing that helped us was her being in a class at school where most of the other kids are already potty trained. Maybe hanging out with a few older kids that he can see use the potty will help him want to?

Good luck with Claire! My 8 month old still doesn’t sleep through the night, but I’m too much of a wuss to try to push it. I sleep trained her to fall asleep independently early, like 3 months, when she was showing signs she needed it, so I’m fine with where we are at right now. Not sure how you feel about this, but anything to make it easier — mine loves sleeping with a blanket. I know you aren’t ‘supposed’ to, but she rubs her face all up in that blanket and passes out. So maybe some kind of object like that might work for Claire too, if you have any problems STing! Hope it goes well!

I am actually waiting for you to potty train Henry so I can start on my baby lol, mine is one year older than Henry, also a June baby and I usually research how you approached specific periods, as my parenting style is very similar to yours!
Good luck sleep training Claire, your quality of sleep and overall state of mind will change so much!

We followed Oh Crap, Potty Training (link to the author’s site: http://www.jamieglowacki.com/) and it worked great for our son. We trained him at 28 months (started Thanksgiving weekend) and he was fully day trained within a week or so and night trained by January (we didn’t do it at the same time – I didn’t have it in me :)). Good luck!

Potty training my girls was relatively easy. My son, not so much. Let’s say he was lacking a bit in motivation. My best piece of advice: Wear closed toed shoes. All the time. Little boys 🙂 I can’t tell you how many times he peed in my sandals.

I am about to embark on this with my 2 year old, and I overwhelmingly hear that the 3 day method is the way to go– check out the oh crap potty training site. And apparently pull ups really slow down progress

I don’t have any kids, but I used to teach preschool, and the best advice that I can give is don’t ask, but tell him when it’s time to go potty in the beginning. Not in a forceful way or anything, but if you think he’s ready, then make it like any other time when he “must” do something, like when it’s time to put coats on, take a bath, eat dinner. It’s just part of the day. I had one little boy in my class who hardly ever had accidents, but his parents would send him in diapers every day. According to them, he wouldn’t go to the potty at home. As soon as he came into my classroom each morning, I would tell him to go potty and put on his undies. And 99% of the time he stayed dry for me, he just needed to be reminded to go, because he would get caught up in playtime. Before we went outside, for example, I would tell him, “Okay Ben, it’s time to go potty quick, and then we can go outside!” Sometimes he would complain, but I never got the sense that I was forcing him to go against his will, if that makes sense. It was just one more thing that he needed to be reminded to do, like washing his hands, using his walking feet inside, or playing nicely with his friends. If you need a reminder to remind him, set a timer for every hour or so. Good luck!

My son just turned four and he has a little brother who is a little over a year so a similar age gap between your kids and mine. My mom always said to wait until 3.5 with boys and I didn’t want to listen to her so we started training Eli at 3 and it was VERY hit or miss. He at first was very reluctant with the potty especially #2 and was not dry at night. I didn’t push him too hard and just kept his little potty in the bathroom and if he showed interest I let him use it. As he got closer to that 3.5 mark he seemed to show more interest (M and Ms and a chart worked at this point) and he seemed to train over night.. he went from using pull-ups to wearing undies 24/7. Damn, don’t you hate it when your mom is right?!