Thursday, October 28, 2010

Going Potty for Pennies

I have been sad lately about something. Or maybe the right word is stressed.
Little Miss has been "potty trained" for a little over 2 months now. The quotations are there because ever since I stopped giving her treats, Little Miss Petey stopped using the potty as often. She just doesnt care. I make her clean up her messes, sit on the potty, change her own underwear, and put the underwear in the hamper when she has accidents and she is just ok with doing that.
I've heard a lot of opinions on this matter. Put her back in a diaper, don't put her back in a diaper, etc but I am choosing to listen to my heart and brain on this one. If Petey knows how to use the potty, I am not going to continue to put her in diapers and pay for them. I'm just not. After 2 months of underwear every day, we really can't go back...because to her, that would be success.
So I went looking and found THIS blogpost on Make and Takes. Because here was my other dilemma. In my opinion, Little Miss is over the days of getting candy for going peepee. She is smart enough to do it without added sugar intake during the day and I refuse to give her sugar as a reward for something she needs to just be doing now, not because of her age (because I know there are kids her age who aren't ready) but because she understands and IS ready and COULD stay dry if she wanted to.
I talked to Boss and we thought we'd give it a try. Maybe some type of reward system would actually help her and I like that this one is not something she gets to have right away. She simply gets to put a penny in her jar every time she goes and we decided once it's filled up, she gets to go to the dollar store and pick out a prize.
The other thing I tweeked about this Going Potty for Pennies was that Petey knows if she has an accident in her panties, she has to take a penny back out of the jar. For a while, we tried time out for her going peepee in her pants and I know you will probably think that was wrong but oh well. We tried it and that didn't even work.
With the hopes of not jinxing myself, I will say that Petey has been dry for 2 days since we started giving her pennies. She talks about it all the time and loves picking her "favorite" penny out of the cup to put into her jar.
Wish us luck on our journey. This has been one of the biggest challenges I've faced lately. I've been stumped as to how I should go about fixing the problem Miss Stubborn has and hopefully this is the answer.

On the other hand, dos anybody have any tips for getting your "kid that should know how to walk but doesnt" to walk? :) I thought not...

And thats how Suze sees it.

1 comment:

Kelly said...

As long as he's crawling, there's no harm. And he is. The average American child walks at 13 months and that means some earlier, some later. But that's just my opinion, though. My words of reassurance, I hope.

This is why I'm terrified to potty train on incentives. Any incentive. Stickers, candy, pennies, or anything else... because it's kids like yours and mine that will stop doing something if the incentive is gone. Let me know how it works. Certainly better, as you said, than continuing the candy, even though that was a great jump start and helped her learn to begin with. ... Isn't it amazing how we imagine all the things we'll do different with the second child? And then the second child is TOTALLY different!