"I have pee in me"

You were warned in the title ;)  If you don't like reading potty stories, you should stop here.

My Little Man will be 3 way too soon, and I have been trying to encourage him to start going on the potty, but sometimes what Mommy wants and what Little Man wants are not the same thing.

Probably 5 or 6 months ago, I started putting him on the potty to start getting him used to the idea of using it.  Unfortunately, he really didn't like it.  He would scream that he didn't want to use the potty.  So instead of scaring the poor kid for life, I decided to back off a bit and wait a little while.

Well,  now is that little while later.  Last week, I took Little Man with me to Wal-mart and let  him pick out 10 new pairs of underwear (to go with the 5 he got for Christmas).  We also picked out a step stool (the "cool stool") for him to use to get up to the potty.


I have been telling Little Man that "soon" he will have to start using the potty instead of diapers.  He would tell  me back "Yeah, soon, but not today."  So after our shopping trip I told him that he will get to learn to use the potty tomorrow.  He wasn't too thrilled with that idea and told me "But you said we will do it soon."-----which he has sadly come to associate with "not right now".

Anyway, the next morning after I had gotten myself dressed, I put my Little Man in underwear basically for the first time.  I also changed my normal habit of restricting liquid intake (to encourage eating) and kept filling up the sippy cup.  I think we went through 8 of the 15 pairs of underwear before 6:00 p.m. when I put him back in a diaper so we could go for a walk and put him to bed. But I was expecting that.  What I wasn't expecting was how quickly Little Man would tell me he was wet afterwards.  He also seemed to be grasping the concept of feeling the need to use the bathroom.

Several times he told me "I think I have pee in me."

Don't get me wrong, we had quite a few accidents on day 1.  One of the funniest was about 5  minutes after a prior accident.  I put him up on the toilet after to let him pee if he still needed to.  He said there wasn't any more pee, so I put new underwear and pants on him and sent him to the kitchen to wait for me to wash my hands and come get his "sat on the potty" treat (one handful of goldfish).  He climbed up on the counter to wait, and proceeded to pee all over it before I could even get out of the bathroom.

Day 2 actually went quite well.  Before I even got him out of his (DRY!) bedtime diaper he told me "I have pee in me!" I continued to fill his sippy cup up VERY frequently and ask him if he needed to go potty.  In the 6 hours he was wearing underwear, he only had 2 accidents, and many successes!  He (and I) would get so excited when he would go on the potty.  And most of the times he would have a success, he would remind me "Now I get a chocolate coin and lots of goldfish!"  I think my favorite time was when he told me "I put lots a pee in the potty, so now I get lots and lots a goldfish!"

I'm not stressing learning to use the potty quickly, and I suppose it will be several weeks before I really consider him "potty trained" but I am certainly happy with his progress.