Potty Training

I am finally going to do it. After the agony of potty training my 4 year old boy (with only weeks until the beginning of pre-school), I am ready to work on Livy, my 3 year old. She was ready when Liam was but I couldn't bear to go through one more day of a toddler peeing in my trash can. So she waited.

Now she's 3 and most of her 2 year old friends are successfully trained. I feel lazy and almost like I've missed a sure fire chance to get it done fast - when she was interested because Liam was doing it. Oh well, what's in the past ...

Liam was very stubborn and in the end the only thing that worked to completely potty train him was the star chart.

For every pee in the potty - 1 star

For every poo in the potty - 2 stars

Every blatant accident removed a star

10 stars = a Transformer

We bought 4 Transformers and we were done by the 3rd. I couldn't believe it was that easy.

With Livy, I'm heading straight for the chart. This time I got a little creative with it - oddly creative in fact. She doesn't care what it looks like - nobody does in fact - except me because I wanted a fast project while the kids colored. If I had thought about it, I would have laminated it and used it for other things, like encouraging Liam to sleep in his bed all night instead of the couch. That has been an epic battle.

I whipped this up using bits of old maps for the days, thick white paper for the white banding, 2 thick craft colored papers taped together for the base sheet, a sharpie, and several stamps I carved but never used for anything. Everything was purposely done by hand, eyeballed, and without a straight edge - I just didn't feel like making this a masterpiece. After all, its to record pee and poo, but hopefully exciting enough to get her running to the pot.