well, THAT was easy...i think

thursday was potty day around here. and by potty day, i mean a day i loathe and dread. bill and i have used an adjusted version of the "toliet training in less than a day" method to potty train our kids. which is usually more like "toliet training in less than a week" for us. here's the distilled version. put your kids in undies. load them up with salty snacks so they will be very thirsty. pump said thirsty kids with juice and water so they will be peein' all over themselves. they won't like that feeling so, with the help aids like teaching a doll to pee pee, giving treats for dry pants every 5-10 minutes and unbelievably monotonous repetition, they will catch on.

it has had varying degrees of success. (though i guess i have to say it was quite successful since at 13, 10, and 8 they don't really doo-doo in their diapers anymore.) here's how it went in the past:

tate was about 21/2. he didn't show any signs of readiness, but we showed a lot of signs of readiness to stop paying for diapers. he didn't seem like he was going to catch on and i remember despairing in the early afternoon. but, thanks to a wee bit of diarrhea, he caught on much quicker in the afternoon.

em was closer to three. she caught on fairly quickly i think, but that's really all i remember except that i hosted a "potty party" the next week. i highly recommend it, there are lots of fun games that can be played with toliet paper!

jack, round one. epic fail. just not ready. the floor was wet from his accidents and the couch was wet from my tears. round two went much better. mostly because i think i had bill do most of it while i took a nap. either that or i blocked it out because i really have no memories of it except that it worked. and i survived.

with all three we went cold turkey. we didn't want to mess with pull ups. which meant we did mess with being up in the night changing sheets for several nights. now that i think about it, that was kind of mean. and gross. but it made sense to us at the time. and it only took a couple of nights for our sleep-loving kids to catch on.

fast forward to miss lulu. she is 21/2. and she is our baby. i wasn't really in a hurry to potty train her except that the girl kind of decided to get going on the job by herself. for a couple of weeks she has been doing her doodies on the potty most of the time. so since the kids are in school now and she has been begging to wear her "big girl underwears", i just decided to go for it. the night before we had all the toys in the kitchen. we had the snacks ready to go...

i was ready. but the question of the day was, was lulu? here's how it played:

6:45am- she wakes me up.

7:12am-i ask her to go on the potty...and she does! all this before we have even started the "regimen".

8"04am-we start loading her with juice and i am feeling mighty good about this situation. we were having fun in our kitchen playland...

8:33am-she runs out to get something from the front yard and pees all over herself in the driveway. she thinks it's funny. mind you, the secret of this approach is that it will both them to be in wet pants. so this makes me a little nervous.

8:40am-just got her cleaned up and changed and the second accident comes while she was sitting on a chair at the kitchen table.

8:45am-i am ready to quit. seriously. i'm not known for my perseverance.

8:50am-we are BOTH eating pringles

i have a "pants check" planned for 9am.

8:58am-peed in undies again. kept on playing as if nothing happened.

me: "lu, we don't pee on the floor"

lu: "right. or on the chair. or on the driveway."

i had hope that maybe she would catch on. it could have gone either way at that point. but catch on she did. thanks to god's gift to potty trainers, skittles. (known as 'kittles around here). she didn't have an accident until 7:30 that night. only a little one yesterday. and a little one today. she has woken up from naps dry (we are totally doing pull ups this time!) and even woke up dry two mornings in a row!

i am sort of opposed to posting potty pix, but here are some pix of her celebrating her big accomplishment...

(calling emory to brag share her joy)

maybe it's ironic that i won't post pix of her on the potty but i will post pix of her in her skivvies. all i can say is, if this girl isn't the cutest thing to ever put on boy shorts, i don't know what it is!!!

so far, so good. we'll see what this week brings...