Potty Business

Before Colin started his second full year of pre-k (he was 4), I made a book for him to have at school that he could use for speech therapy or in class.  The book was all about his summer vacation and loaded with pictures that he could use to talk about while in school.  When Colin finished pre-k last year, the book came home and it's been hanging around and occasionally read.  One of Kailey's choices the other night at bedtime was the book and on one of the pages, I had highlighted the fact the kids spent several days in potty training "boot camp" (3 day method).  While Chris was reading the book, I had to laugh because it was so long ago that we had started working on potty training (Colin was around 3 when he started) and here we are  just finally getting to a place where I can confidently say that Colin is just about there.  There have been SO MANY posts about our trials and tribulations when it came to this process (Kailey wasn't easy either, my *typically* developing child - for the record) and in fact, I was really nervous when Colin started Kindergarten this year because he still wasn't fully communicating the fact he had to go.  

 

I can honestly say that we have come SO FAR and although it takes a lot of work every day, Colin has really made such great progress.  When school first started, Colin did really well and only had a few accidents (but only because of having to poop) but it prompted the nurse to set up a "potty plan" for him.  We really scheduled his bathroom breaks to ensure that he went enough during the day so that he wouldn't have an accident.  It has worked really well and I can count on one hand (or less) how many accidents he has had since school started.  In addition, while he is still mostly schedule trained, he is finally communicating the majority of the time when he has to go and we are seeing fewer and fewer accidents (and they usually are related to poop accidents).  We are doing a lot of celebrating around here when he does tell us because of how well he is doing.  I still feel that we really have to be on top of him because depending on how tired he is or what activity he is doing, he may not say anything and go for a long period of time (which then causes an accident).  We just make sure that he goes plenty of times and then if he tells us, it's a bonus. We are so happy with this progress!