Michaela started casual toilet training in March 2005, 4 months before she turned 2. With the help of VeggieTales (the potty was placed in front of the tv) and M&M rewards, Michaela was trained within 2 weeks. Well, she would always pee and poo in the potty if she was naked. If she was wearing panties, pants or a diaper, she would pee in them. Here's a picture of Michaela who fell asleep while sitting on the potty.
By May Michaela was using her potty as a stepping stool to climb up onto the toilet. This worked very well, because I no longer had to empty the potty bowl. She continued getting M&M rewards, but I still couldn't teach her not to pee in her panties, so Michaela spent most of the summer completely naked, because that was the only way she would use the toilet. A month or so later, she stopped using the potty as a stool, and the special toilet adaptor and started climbing up onto the potty on her own.
We were having no luck getting Michaela to remove her panties to pee. I took her to the daycare one day in pants and panties, determined to help her figure it out and she wet through 4 pair of pants before I ran out of changes of clothes, and put her back into a diaper. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I bought her this gumball machine and filled it with peanut M&Ms. Every time she used the toilet, I gave her a coin, which she put into the machine and got an M&M. This worked really well. On Monday Oct. 24, I took her to the daycare with me, and she only wore pants (no pull-up), and except for one small leak, she did really well. Yesterday I took her out running errands. I put a pullup on her to be safe, at one point we were on the bus going to walmart, and she asked to go potty. I told her she would have to wait, and 15min later when we finally got there, her pullup was still dry, and she peed in the toilet. We left our house at 9:30 am and when we got home at 1:00pm her pullup was still dry!!! Then I put her down for a nap, and for the first time she woke up with a dry diaper. And then this morning she got up and asked to go pee and her diaper was still dry! We couldn't believe it! We are so proud of her. Thank you M&M, and thank you Gumball machine makers. By the way we are accepting donations for Michaela's future dental bills, which we are guessing will be quite expensive. (thank God for fluorinated water!)
We went trick-or-treating with Jake and Stephanie. As you can see Michaela adores Jake, who's like a big brother to her. They all have so much fun together. We went out for almost 2 and a half hours, it was pretty exhausting especially considering that only 1 out of 10 houses was giving out candy, so we walked FOREVER! Michaela was wonderful though, saying "trick-or treat", or sometimes "chocolate treat", and even a few times she said "Michaela treat!", but then she'd always say thank you. I felt really bad for her though because she kept asking to go potty on the way home, and eventually paused to pee in her pull up, she just couldn't hold it in anymore. Poor thing. All in all, it was really fun.
