Impromptu Potty Training

Aaron is in the midst of potty training. He's two years and three weeks old. This is like six months before I would have even thought about potty training him, but it turns out kids sometimes have their own agenda.

Tickled pink to be in "big kid" underwear

He's been telling us he's poopy for at least a month. Most of the time he's not, he just wants his diaper changed. We've been coaching him to tell us he's just wet and he sometimes does that too. In the last couple weeks he's started actually taking his diaper off, which is shocking when you find him naked. It's only happened once when he was poopy, but it made me nervous.

Lately I've been telling Aaron that if he needs to poop or pee he should just go in the toilet. Every time he very firmly said, "no!"

So Bill and I decided two days ago to pull down the potty seat that fits on top of the normal toilet. Aaron has never seen it before and I figured why not, we used to put Genevieve on the toilet before we put her in the bath and that worked well when we actually potty trained. Well, Spencer and Genevieve got all kinds of excited and helped us show Aaron how it worked and what do you know, he peed in it right then and after that he refused to put a diaper back on. Since he's already taking them off, it's not like we could really keep it on him. Instead he said he wanted underwear. I happen to have a few pairs from when Spencer potty trained and they were too small, so these were new. We put them on Aaron and he was beyond tickled. He spent the rest of the day going pee about every ten minutes on his own. He was totally enthralled. There was not a single accident.

The evening rolled around and he utterly refused to put a diaper back on for bedtime. Good thing we've potty trained two kids already and have lots of bed pads and that whole routine is old hat. We took him to the bathroom, put a pair of underwear on, and left him, fully expecting to have a wet bed when he woke up the next morning. Except there wasn't one. He stayed dry all night! By comparison, neither of my older ones could do this until much after they day potty trained and one still isn't dry every night. So at this point I'm totally blown away.

So yesterday we had more of the same. The toilet wasn't as much a novelty anymore, but he still only had one accident and it was outside on the porch, so totally not a big deal. My house has all wood floors, so even when there are accidents inside, it's not even a big deal. And this morning he woke up dry again.

Today hasn't gone as well. We've been in and out doing all kinds of things and he's had a few accidents, but he also pooped in the toilet, which is amazing again because that took Spencer a few weeks to figure out back three years ago when we potty trained. He peed during his nap too, but again, fully prepared for that, so not a big deal, just another load of laundry with a pad and blanket.

So there you have it. We're potty training completely at the mercy of Aaron. He started it and it seems we're going to keep doing it. In my experience potty training usually looks like an initial few days where you have like 30 accidents before the kid figures out, generally through bribery, that the toilet is okay to pee in. Then there's months after where you remind them pretty regularly to use the bathroom and eventually they figure it out and go on their own, but it's quite a few months. I'm just tickled that it looks like we totally skipped that first phase. I've always found that part so taxing and it's pretty well the best news all week that I may not have to do it this go around. Aaron is definitely earning favorite child status for this week. Hahaha!