Potty Training Maya

Let me just start this post by saying I was not ready to potty train my barely two year old at ALL! As a matter of fact, it hadn't really entered my realm of thinking. I figured I'd think about it in the summer and had just pushed it out of my head for the time being. As is usually the case, my daughter had a different idea :)

I don't necessarily think there are any huge secrets to getting a kid potty trained, but the one thing I have learned from my previous experiences is that you have to do it when they are ready. Not when the parent is ready, when the kid is ready. If you bypass the opportunity when they are ready, you will be hitting yourself later when they are resistant to the training. If you push the training on them too soon, you will just cause yourself more headache and work than anyone really wants to deal with. Not to mention a child who's probably overly frustrated at trying to do something they're not ready for. That's my soapbox :) With that said, Maya decided she was ready to train too early in my book, but I went with it because I knew it was my window of opportunity.

For a short period of time, Maya was flexing her independence by constantly taking off her pants and diaper. And by constantly I'm talking at least a dozen times a day. I'm not kidding. The second she would be out of my sight she would go in a corner and strip. Didn't matter whether the diaper was dry or wet, she wanted it off. I was finding rogue diapers all over my house. She took it to the next level and for a few mornings I found her standing in her crib with her pajamas in one hand and her diaper in the other. The child despised diapers.

So on March 2nd, I took the hint. If she wanted to run around my house naked, so help me she was going to be potty trained! As I did with the other girls, I jumped right into underwear. You have a few more accidents up front, but they seem to get the message a little faster that way when they get all wet. She had a few accidents the first day or two, but by day three she was down to one accident a day (none of these accidents were ever number two). It has now been a little over two weeks and she is consistent with the one accident a day. She has had days with no accidents, but somehow she will manage to always sneak in one accident (even if it means peeing on the bathroom floor right before we are about to put her in the bath at night!). To top it all off, she naps in underwear and has stayed dry when she sleeps. She is even waking up with a dry diaper in the morning!

Of course she picked the most inopportune time to do this... Makenna and Maryn both had swimming lessons every day and we had a lot of other activities on our schedule as well. She was coming everywhere with me and it was quite terrifying to think that she was doing it in underwear. I'm probably jinxing myself, but she is yet to have an accident in public! I used to be anti-pull-ups, and still am to some extent, but Maya is so strong-willed in her decision to do this that I have used a pull-up on her when I've left her in the nursery at church or the daycare at the gym. But of course she will only wear the pull-up over her underwear... she insists that she has to keep her Dora's on!