Potty, Potty, Potty…

Yes, we are potty training! Round 2 of potty training that is. We gave it try in October, but after several days I found that the frustration and stress Levi was experiencing wasn’t worth it. Even though he was showing great interest in the potty, underwear, telling me at times when he’d peed or pooped…he just wasn’t ready. I promised myself, when we began this process that I would not carry an agenda or time frame, that I would not push to the point of stress. Yes, it would be wonderful if he was potty trained before Shelby arrives in March, but again, not holding to that….more a faint wish than a must have. After 3 days of giving it our best we called a time out. I think we both were relieved. I don’t think I’ve every done anything (even training for a 5k) that called for such dedication, consistency and perseverance. You want to work on your character, potty train a child!
Over the last two months, we continued our potty awareness program (haaa!) We’ve talked about the potty, read books about the potty, demonstrated how to use the potty (just keeping it real), used the potty at bath time, bed time and any other time Levi initiated. He’d have weeks where he was very interested and others we he could care less. 
RE-DO! With Christmas behind us and nothing really on our schedules, we thought we’d give potty training another try.We felt like he was more ready and his body more mature too. I will be honest and say that I’ve had to gear up emotionally for this myself. The energy and effort it calls for isn’t fleeting. So, I also had to mental dig deep to step out there again.
So, with a stack of clean underwear, a bag of gummy bears and more stickers than a sticker chart can hold, we began. We are day 4 into training. All and all things are going great. We had a rough start, but consistency has paid off.  Praise God! And after 1.5 days of not pooping, we finally reached success this morning with our 1st poop in the potty!!! He was so proud of himself. We are so proud of him. We still have a ways to go, but all in all I feel like we are making head way. You can tell he is figuring it out though. He is having more and more success, longer periods of dryness and less accidents. One of our biggest hurdles has been getting him to stop playing to answer the call of nature. Today, he has shown progress in this area too. Our next adventure will be a public outing. We haven’t really gone anywhere since Sunday. Public restrooms here we come!