Potty Training Progress!

The closest thing to a pic of my husband that I can get away with

I am so happy to say that Layla is almost potty trained!

For the last few days she has been having very few accidents, and most of those have been while we were out. Yesterday I started to realize that she was having a breakthrough. While we were at preschool  she said "potty pants" a couple times and I told her to wait a few minutes until I could change her. You see, usually when she would say something, that meant that she had already had an accident.
I laid her down to change her, and realized that she was still dry. She went inside and used the bathroom, but then wet her pants on the way back home. Last night about an hour after I put her to bed she woke up saying "momma, potty pants," so I took her and she went to the bathroom. She did go in her diaper again during the night, but hasn't had a single accident all day.

I think we're gonna be completely done within another month and she just turned 2 on the 14th!

So here's the basic plan I used to train her:

1. We started putting her on the potty whenever she had a dry diaper after an hour or two when she was about 14 mos. old. Sometimes she would go on the potty and be surprised at the result.

2. After we moved to Portland and were a little settled in, we stared really working on the training. I would put her in either cloth training pants or a cloth diaper when she was at home, and try to take her at least about each hour when she was awake. She got to the point where she could empty her bladder when it had something in it. We also introduced the reward of giving her a date whenever she went. This worked really well for awhile, but then the novelty wore off. She still kept going on the potty most of the time though.

If I lost track of the time or she had a lot to drink though, she would just go in her pants. This is why cloth is more useful for training. They feel the moisture more in the cloth more than with a disposable diaper or trainer, so they realize that the wet feeling isn't a good thing.

3. The final stage is your baby being able to realize the feeling of a full bladder, or the feeling that they need to poop. The poop is actually easier because you usually see them straining and hiding in the corner somewhere :-0

We are just seeing the beginning of this stage now, like yesterday when Layla actually asked to go at school before she wet her pants.

The last step of this stage is night-training. This is the hardest because they will have a hard time waking up fully during the night to ask for the bathroom. I am totally fine with Layla sleeping in it for now .

Why is early training better? Babies seem to be less stubborn about learning than older toddlers. Plus, you will save tons of time and money not buying diapers and washing loads of them.