Mission Accomplished!

The one huge goal that I had to get accomplished over my summer vacation was to get Parker completely potty trained. He is starting a new preschool in a few weeks and has to be fully potty trained to attend.

I fretted and worried all spring that Parker was never going to master potty training. He showed no interest for such a long time that I was sure he would be the only kid in his kindergarten class that was still wearing diapers! Throughout his whole life, he has always been on the later end of reaching his milestones, but once he figures something out, he does it quickly and never looks back. For example, he took his first steps and started walking all in the same day. Also, I never thought he would learn to talk, but once he started, he has not stopped. I was hoping the same thing would happen with potty training.

Our first attempt at potty training was back in March over spring break. We had one successful day and then the stomach bug/morning sickness hit and potty training was quickly put on the back burner.

As soon as school was out, we tried again. This time Parker was completely ready for it and he did a great job learning to go pee on the potty. To this day, he has still only had 2 accidents and one of them was on Day 2 of training. At first, he still wanted nothing to do with pooping on the potty, so I would give in and let him have a diaper to do his business.

After several weeks of successful peeing on the potty, I decided that we had to take the next step and get rid of the diapers completely. After a LONG day with lots of screaming and crying, Parker was finally successful with pooping on the potty. It took several days for Parker to realize that I was not going to give in and put a diaper on him. There were lots of crying/screaming fits but my stubbornness won out, and Parker finally realized that his only choice was to go poop on the potty.

Because of how stubborn Parker was with learning to poop on the potty, we decided to reward him with a Hot Wheels car every time he was successful. He now has an entire bag full of cars that he plays with all day long and takes everywhere he goes. He even asks to sleep with them at night!

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of me now that Parker has reached this milestone in his life. It is so nice to be able to trust him to tell me when he needs to go potty and not have to worry about him having an accident during the day.

Over the past week, he has made the final transition from using the little portable training potty to only using the big grown up potty. Parker is now ready to start preschool and I am able to say "Mission accomplished!"