2 Big Milestones

James has a two week Mother's Day Out session so I am taking advantage of the peace and quiet to try to catch up on the blog! 

We have been busy this past week since getting back to Louisiana and James has hit two big milestones.

1.  We are front-facing! We tried to make it to age 2, but it was just so hot and I caved. It feels very strange to see him in the car like that and I may be the first parent to say this but I kinda miss him being rear facing because he talks so much more now and is almost harder to deal with! I think when he was the other way he forgot I was in the car and would sit nice and quiet. Oh well. 

2.  We are out of diapers!!!  I never thought I would have potty trained at 22 months but I had several reasons for deciding to take the plunge.

- I felt that James was at a sweet stage and might would be more stubborn and set in his ways in a few months so maybe this was a small window of opportunity

- It was really hot so we were stuck inside anyway and we had no plans

- Diapers are expensive and we needed to save some $$$.  The money from diapers almost pays for a day of Mother's Day Out each month!

- Ultimately I reminded myself what I learned when teaching kindergarten and first grade: children are capable of much more than people give them credit for.  Aim high, expect good results, and they will normally not disappoint. I kept reminding myself this throughout this process because it is really easy to get discouraged! I also think each child is unique and individual and sometimes parents just have to trust their instinct about when they need to try something. 

I decided to blog about the process because I will need to remind and encourage myself when we have future kids and for any other potty training parents out there in the blog world. :)

Day One:

Being the type of person that I am I did massive research on potty training and decided to go with the 3 Day Potty Training Method  partly because I needed a plan and also because I didn't want to drag it out for weeks or months.  The first day we threw away all of our diapers and went straight into big boy undies. At first I couldn't even convince him to sit on the potty without freaking out....that's when I knew we were in for a long three days.  In the first 30 minutes we went through A LOT of underwear, had LOTS of accidents including a poop explosion on the floor, and I admit I thought I had lost my mind.  However by the end of the day we were making a little progress with James a least recognizing when he had an accident. 

He was excited to get to wear his new car underwear

Day Two:

The morning started off well but then we saw a big regression in the afternoon.  Lots of accidents and not a lot of communication from James. Once again I doubted if I was doing the right thing by doing this now but I figured I would see it through to the end.  The worst thing was being stuck in the house all day.  By the night I was losing my mind from cabin fever. We baked goodies, did art, watched television, read massive amounts of books and did anything else we could think of to pass the time while stuck inside. 

I pumped him full of juice so we would have lots of learning opportunities 

Yes, this face says it all. Potty training is hard work! 

I broke the rules and went outside during training which resulted in an accident. Lesson learned: follow the rule book

Shorty after this he went to the bathroom in the basket. Not cool

Day Three:  I started off the day by praying that today would be the day it would click. I also had someone else on my side- Ryan!  He took the morning shift while I ran a couple of errands. I have never been so excited to have a reason to go to the grocery store before.  This day brought a magic change- all of the sudden he knew to tell us when he had to go.  We only had 1 accident the whole day!  By that night we were all getting ill from being stuck inside so when I got a text from Jennifer that they were going to Frozen Frog we threw the rules out the door and got there ASAP. 

James wanted to "hold" Reece 

We made it through our first outing with no problems! Hooray! Now James is by no means perfect at this point.  He does really well with Ryan and I but its hard for him sometimes at other places or when he is having so much fun he doesn't want to take a break. I'm realistic to know that this will probably be an issue for some time. But overall I'm pretty pleased with how he is doing. I just can't believe how grown up he is- where did my little baby go??? 

Great job James!