"I Pooped!"

After about a year of attempted potty training, Taelyn had her first success on the toilet. Last year, she showed signs that she was ready, but we only had a training seat that went on top of our regular toilet. Taelyn would sit on it for a couple of minutes after she told us that she needed to go "poo poo," but then she would hop off the toilet and go in her diaper a few minutes later. This went on for several months. Then we decided to get her a little potty to sit on; that motivated her to play pretend potty for a little while, but shortly she lost interest in the potty altogether and it seemed as if potty training was done for a while. She even started to scream any time we mentioned going to the potty.

This morning, however, was full of signs that we might be able to attempt the deed again. I was cleaning out one of our closets and found the original training seat that goes on top of the toilet. It has the Disney princesses on it, and Taelyn has just recently started watching Beauty and Beast. So I showed her Belle on the seat. She immediately said she wanted to sit on it and go potty. We ran over to the toilet, set the seat up, and began the waiting process. We read books, drank glasses of water, snuggled up in her blankie, encouraged Kaelia to sit on the little potty, and tried just about anything to get Taelyn to sit on the toilet for a long as possible. Surprisingly, she made it 35 minutes - still no success but the longevity was promising.

About ten minutes after this attempt, I told Taelyn that I needed to go potty before my run, and she said that she wanted to do it too. She still wanted to use the toilet instead of the little potty, so we went in to different bathrooms and said we would race each other to see who could go potty first. To my surprise, Taelyn ran in to my bathroom one minute later screaming, "I did it mommy. I went poo poo!" I wasn't convinced that this was true; I though that maybe she was just excited about the race we were having. But when I went in to her bathr0om, there it was! We hugged and screamed and jumped up and down for a while and then ran to the kitchen to give Taelyn some M&M's as her promised potty reward.

I am so proud of Taelyn! What is surprising is that kids usually go #1 on the potty for a while, and #2 can be a challenge, but Taelyn jumped right ahead to #2. I guess she has known what to do for quite some time, but it just took her a while to decide that she was ready. Now we'll see if it will continue.