Potty Training

I have had potty training Jaydon on my ‘to-do’ list since last fall. Everything I had read about doing it said to start the training when you have a few days at home to focus on it. Well with both Steve and I working that left the weekends and we never had one that wasn’t full of plans. One of Jaydons first words was ‘bye-bye’ and he used it from age 1 to tell us he wanted some privacy to take care of his business. It never failed to put a smile on our face when Jaydon would crawl (and later walk) to the corner to get his privacy and if anyone came around to check on him he’d promptly tell them ‘bye-bye’ (and get upset if you didn’t leave). Later, he would actually tell us he was going to go ‘poop in the corner’ so we knew he was ready for the transition but we weren’t - I also was not excited about having another reason to visit the public restrooms in Doha... With me not working, it being summer time and Tylor around all of a sudden we found our weekends to have cleared up. So one Friday morning we asked Jaydon if he wanted to run around with no diaper and get potty trained. He was all about the new game and happily played along for the first 2 days. He loved running around the house naked and never had an accident. On Sunday we sent him off to day-care, he did fine but our normally regular pooper decided not to poop that day at his normal time and instead waited for Dad to get home that evening (he could no longer go in private so decided daddy was ok to have around). Throughout the week this escalated to the point that Jaydon decided to just stop pooping all together. Our happy easy going, pooping 1-2 x/day toddler turned into a frantic, grumpy 4 day constipated mess. When he needed to go he’d run around the house screaming and crying “change diaper!” but wouldn’t let any of us come near him. By the end of the week I had given up and decided to throw in the towel. We told Jaydon he could wear his diaper and went back to having him in one all time but this didn’t work either because now Jaydon knew he wasn’t supposed to be using his diaper. Also during all this he started waking up 2-3 times a night to go ‘pee-pee’. So our well rested, sleep 11 hours straight every night toddler, was waking up almost as much as his 1 month old brother. At one point Steve looked at me and asked “what have we done?” Since I’m actually writing this 1 month after the fact I can assure you that we worked through it and Jaydon has had very few accidents and has only peed in his bed once during nap time. He uses a diaper at night and sleeps through most of the time (we prefer wet morning diapers rather than waking up all night). Every so often he asks for a diaper and we agree but he never actually uses it, just needs it as a kind of security blanket. When Jaydon does poop in the potty I always make a big deal of it and tell him how proud I am. Well this has escalated into Jaydon asking me if I’m proud of him for doing all kinds of things (taking off his shoes, eating his dinner, etc). Also the other day Jaydon joined his Daddy in the bathroom and told Steve how proud he was for using the potty. Steve’s self confidence has really improved now that his 2.5 yr old is telling him how proud he is of his Daddy.