Potty Training and Hobbs the Cat

PHEW! It's been a long 10 days.

Last week I decided to start potty training Logan. 🤯 He is 20 months old, and he's pretty smart. He talks A LOT for a not-yet-two-year-old, and he understands quite a bit. In November I went back to my potty training bible "Oh Crap! Potty Training" and decided he was capable and I was up to the task. I thought about pushing it off until January, but honestly this time of year isn't THAT busy when you live in Arco and your kids are small. Plus, any small outings like the festival of trees or even the ward Christmas party offered good practice for leaving the house and getting acquainted with other toilets.🤣

So Tuesday morning last week I dropped Emmett off at preschool and when Logan and I got home the diaper came OFF!

**side note**: I never blogged about potty training Emmett because he seriously learned so fast and after 3 days he was even holding his pee all through the night and his naps. I did do a video for each day going over the details of the day so I could reference it in the future. The future being now🤯 But for Logan I decided to update my blog for it because...well that's all that's been going on around here really 🤣 and I think it's fun to talk about.

I went into it mentally prepared for it to take at least twice as long for Logan to get this as it took Emmett. I trained Emmett at 30 months, so at 20 months (almost 21) I figured it would take more time for things to click for Logan. I was right. The first three days I learned A LOT about this boy. I have a small potty chair that I use - Emmett loved dumping his pee and poop into the toilet until we transitioned him to the regular toilet - and Logan is SO SMALL so I thought he'd need that transition. Not so. For three days we power struggled over the potty. He would NOT SIT ON THE SMALL POTTY CHAIR. I have no idea why. Upon first putting him on it, he did seem too tall for it, but for whatever reason he was not on board with putting his business there. And I learned it took him a minute to go from "I need to pee" to actually releasing his pee, so I'd get him to the chair, he'd sit for one second and say "all done" and then pee on the floor right after that. Repeat this for 3 days straight. Surprisingly, he didn't have this struggle with pooping. He picked up "potty" pretty quickly and he would tell us he needed to potty when he had to poop. We had hardly any poop accidents which was amazing. Emmett consolidated his poop for the first five days of potty training before we had any poop practice so - fun to notice the differences. I definitely attribute that small miracle to the fact that Logan trained younger - the younger the kids is, the less attached he is to his poop. 🤣 If you think I'm joking, I'm not - this is a real thing. Please see "Oh Crap! Potty Training" if you don't believe me.

We caught a little pee in the potty here and there and he enjoyed dumping it in the toilet and flushing it away ("bye-bye pee!!!" - lol), but for the most part he hated it. I would try him on the big toilet but he kept trying to fall in so...the struggle continued. On the 3rd day, we didn't catch ONE pee in the toilet - accidents everywhere - and I was at my wits end! By thist point, I KNEW he understood what was going on, he just wouldn't sit long enough to do his dang business.

watching Emmett do dinosaur puzzles

Day three was also the ward Christmas party Mom was in charge of. Dad asked "How's potty training going?" I said, "He's not wearing a diaper now so we'll see how he does!" while Logan was sitting on his lap 🤣 good job Logan for not peeing on Granny or Gramps.

Mom in the ugly sweater contest

Cue Friday morning. I decided if we went a whole week with this fiasco, I would bag the whole thing, throw the diaper back on and try again in a month. But my gut was telling me he had this, I just needed to figure out how to get him to sit longer (trust me, I tried a lot of things). And remember, he was sitting just fine for poops. Day four was also crunch time because he'd been naked up to this point with a few times of going commando for things like a trip to the post office, or right after he'd had a good pee, the Christmas party, etc. But it was important to transition him to commando to prevent the "only potty trained while naked" kid. But Friday morning Mr. Magic Justin decided to try something new. He took Logan to the big toilet and sat him toward the very back so he wouldn't fall in (why didn't I think of that?!) and said, "Logan, go pee and I'll give you a sucker." BAM. The boy peed. See? I knew he understood - he was just being a big stinker about it 🤣 Also, in the beginning he was much better with Justin than with me (shocker - anyone that's been around has noticed he much prefers Daddy over Mommy these days) but now that we had a reward system in place...things changed drastically. I didn't do rewards with Emmett and didn't start with Logan because I didn't want them to then be expected, and I wanted it to be more of a "this is just what we do now" thing. With Emmett that worked just fine. But it made a world of difference for Logan, and was a useful tool for the rest of the weekend.

I forced the kids to go outside with me one morning - we lasted maybe 5 minutes. There was a COLD north wind

When Justin came to tell me he peed in the toilet, the pure joy in my heart led us to throw pants on Logan and drive to the A&A to get that boy a sucker!! While we were at it we bought a bag of dum dums to use for the next little while. This became a fun game for the boys because Emmett would say, "I want a sucker," and I'd say, "Ok, as soon as Logan goes potty on the toilet you can have one," and Emmett would say, "C'mon Logan!" and they'd run to the bathroom. We also had Emmett model for Logan anytime he went potty so Logan could see he was becoming a big boy and using the potty like everyone else. From there the accidents began to dwindle, and Logan even started to initiate when he had to pee as well as poop. This was also the start of Logan holding his pee for his naps and him staying commando. With Logan using the big toilet now, because he's so small when you sit him up there he's pretty much stuck so that has been great for giving him proper time to release his business, which was the whole problem with the small potty to begin with. On Day Four he went the whole afternoon without one accident. Holy. Smokes. We definitely turned a corner on that day.

Justin getting his holiday baking on with the kids

The rest of the weekend accidents continued to dwindle, but were more frequent in the mornings so we learned to take more potty breaks. It makes sense, considering he's been holding it all night (or not, but still). He consistenly stopped having any accidents after his naps. Sunday night was the Christmas concert and Hart and Jory came. It was fun chatting with them and they came to see our place Monday morning before heading home. Also, Monday morning Logan woke up at 5:15 DRY. The boy held his pee all night long! It was Mom's birthday so I took her to the Mexican restaurant for lunch. It's fun living by Mom and Dad! But anyway, Wednesday he got up at 11:00 at night needing to pee (he held it until we got him to the toilet) and then he slept until 7:00 and stayed dry! So we are figuring out a rhythm for night time but as of now he has had two days with zero accidents, and he consistenly tells us when he needs to potty for pee AND poop. Say whaaat? We've been practicing peeing in new places, so earlier this week we went to the library and he peed there, and tonight we visited Granny and Gramps for an hour and he peed at their house too. Nice work Logan boy! As with Emmett I took detailed video journals at the end of each day.

We went to the nativity scene Monday night for FHE.

Ugh. So messy.

Meet Duke: the neighbor's dog. Justin insists on feeding him and his companion (no name tag) peanut butter so they come to the house every day now. Justin is convinced we need a dog. I keep telling him no way. Cats suit me just fine - you don't have to find a dog sitter when you go out of town, and cats hunt mice!

Our dryer stopped working last week - yes, right in the middle of potty training! So we got a used one pronto off Craiglist, and it matched up with Mom and Dad going to Idaho Falls so they picked it up for me on Tuesday - bless them. They let me come over with laundry all weekend to use their dryer.

This boy loves these Christmas trees

reading books together 😍

It's been a long 10 days, but here we are, day ten, and he's 95% potty trained - I'll give him 100% when he's holding his pee all night. After much nighttime trial and error, we've figured out we can wake him up once around midnight to go pee and he'll sleep until a normal time (7:00) and stay dry. We'll see how long we have that routine until he's able to hold it all through the night.

In the meantime, we officially named our adopted cat - please meet Hobbs, named after Calvin and Hobbs. We still hadn't decided on a name because nothing was fitting, but this afternoon I was reading one of the comic books to Emmett and I noticed that Hobbs has coloring kind of like that cat. I proposed my idea to Justin and he agreed it was the right fit - our kids took to the name as well. Taking care of this cat is my penance for running over Ginger, so she has a makeshift shelter on the porch with a towel to keep her warm-ish.

"meow" is "cat" for Logan

more puzzle fun