Adventures in Potty-Training

Alternate Title: The Hardest Thing About Raising Twins Thus Far (including twin pregnancy, pushing out two babies, nursing two babies for 18 months, any of it. This wins the prize, hands down.) 

{Note: This all happened in early March...I must have needed a little time & distance away from the experience to be able to blog about it.}

Okay, so it wasn't the worst thing to ever hit our house. I'm sure being 7 months pregnant while undertaking potty-training twins had a teeny bit to do with it. But I knew there was no way I was going to do three kids in diapers, so away we went...

We started out Day #1 with 20 pairs of assorted super hero, Cars, & Toy Story underwear, two potty chairs, a huge bag of M & M's and Dum-Dum suckers, and plenty of Lysol. After about 2 hours of our potty experiment, I came to the conclusion that 2 boys + 2 potty chairs + pregnant me did not equal a lot of space to move comfortably in the bathroom....so out to the living room came the potty chairs...

The first few days were pretty rough. I think the first day, we had 7 accidents and only one success. We quickly discovered that the boys had two very different responses to the concept of potty-training.

Alex had little to no patience for sitting on the potty chair, and would pee on the floor almost immediately after getting up. Nice.

Maguire. Oh, Maguire. For some reason, he loved sitting on the potty. Loved isn't even a strong enough term. He would plant his little butt on that potty and refuse to move. For hours. He would pile up a little selection of toys & books around the seat and be all set for lengthy periods of time. Needless to say, he had the majority of our first several successes. But the kid can't walk around with a potty chair glued to his butt, so we had to frequently remind him to "get up and take a break." No sooner would he get up, we'd hear "Ooh, ooh! I need to go pee!" And back on the chair he'd sit...

Somewhere at around day #5-6, things started to make sense. Thank the Lord.

Here they are, both proudly proclaiming "I pooped in the potty!" Such a proud moment. For all of us.

We spent the next week weaning Maguire from his constant potty-sitting, but as you can see we all grew pretty used to the idea....Alex even liked to "read" him books while he sat.

This picture really has no story to go along with it...it just cracks me up. Potty training as contact sport.

I'm happy to report we've weaned off all the rewards (M & M's, suckers, chocolate chips, stickers) and both boys are fully trained! Yay! I'd say the process took about 2 weeks from start to finish. We cured them of the "potty chair in the living room" problem when we visited Grammie's house

in mid-March.

One last funny potty-related story: We've obviously been reinforcing how grown-up the boys are for wearing underwear, peeing in the potty, telling us when they need to use the bathroom, etc. The other day we were at Walmart & talking about it as we shopped.

In the middle of the (very crowded) produce section, Maguire was kind enough to provide me with some positive reinforcement when he loudly proclaimed "And Mommy, I'm very proud of you. You are a big girl who wears underwear every day!"