Potty training

Jon is 3 1/2 years old and up until this past month he was not potty trained. . . . . not because we haven't been trying, but because our little Jon is a very strong willed little boy.  James Dobson missed a chapter to cover Jon's level of strong willed behavior.  There are things we KNOW Jon can do, but because we want him to do it, he refuses.  CONTROL is the name of his game, he wants it and he is determined to take it away from us.

Just like with Davey, our first step of potty training was putting him on the potty before bath time each night, and each and every time he peed.  Jon has been able to do this first step of potty training for over a year and a half.  However, he had a really great day one time and actually went poop in the potty and when he saw it he said it was "disgusting".  From that day forward he refused all of our efforts to move along the potty training efforts . . . . . he didn't want to see "it".  So we stopped trying. 

Although we felt the oncoming pressure of two children in diapers, we decided to take some friends advice and allow Jon to let us know when he was ready to potty train.  We kept encouraging him to go potty before bath time, but never pushed for more then that.  When he started the three year olds preschool class he was supposed to be potty trained in order to attend.  BUT, with all we had going on with the pregnancy and upcoming arrival of Rachel, the preschool said they would work with us.  We decided we would make an effort again after Rachel arrived if he hadn't made any progress on his own.

So in November we started pushing again for him to gain this step of independance.  Jon was showing us signs of wanting to potty train because we often found him stripping out of his wet pullup and going into a corner to hide and do his poop and then asking right away for it to be cleaned up. 

I tried putting him on a 30 minute schedule one weekend . . . . . it worked until mid day when he decided he was boored with it.
I tried a sticker chart . . . . . it worked until he decided had enough with stickers
I tried M&M's . . . . . it worked until he decided I wasn't giving him enough M&M's and I didn't want to give him more because I didn't want a child hopped up on sugar all day.
We decided to take him to Walmart and let him pick out a bike, and told him he would get his big boy bike when he was successful with NO accidents for a week . . . . .

he sat on it, happy as a lark and then said, "I want to save it for later".

Can you believe it, he was willfully deciding to keep using the bathroom in his pants and save a BIG BOY BIKE for LATER???????

We were frustrated to say the least, sadly I have to admit we even got to the point of yelling at him and even popping his little butt.  Then one night while I was out with some friends for church a friend suggested Naked Day.  I was flabbergasted at the suggestion, but at this point I was willing to try anything.  So that weekend we tried Naked Day and to my surprise it actually worked . . . . . for that day.  But the next day he decided to not do it anymore unless he could go naked all the time, which isn't really possible when your going to church. 

So I put on my big girl panties and I decided to do a four point effort to bring Jon's way of thinking over to our side.  I used the Sticker, M&M, partial Naked Day, and Big Boy Bike reward system.  For two whole weeks we allowed Jon to go naked from the waiste down while he was at home and gave him 1 sticker + 2 M&M's for pee and 2 stickers + 3 M&M's for poo with the ultimate goal being no accidents to earn his big boy bike.

Finally on February 18th we rolled Jon out of Walmart with his new big boy bike.  It has been a very long journey, but I am so proud of Jon and us for working at it until we found the formula of encouragement that finally worked to get him to success.

And off he went . . . .

fall down and get back up again . . . .

Jon is a Big Boy NOW!