Potty Party!

 Finally, after a good 8 1/2 months of begging, pleading, bribery, and countless bags of Reeses Minis, Haley is  potty trained (and probably has a mouth full of cavities)! After months of hearing "no pee pee!" she finally gave into the fact that, as convenient as diapers may be, it's just not socially acceptable to wear them into your teenage years. Our grocery bill is rejoicing.

Thanks for all the great potty training advice you offered in May! After evaluating our options, we decided to stick with the "stickers and candy" method of potty training. We went to Sam's Club and stocked up on a ridiculously large box of Reeses Minis and got to work. She got one piece of candy for sitting on the potty, then another when she did the deed. And by the way, I think would be a much happier place if we each got candy every time we went to the potty. Just throwing that out there.

For awhile, nothing happened. If she did go, it was because we happened to catch her at the right time, which of course still resulted in much praise and excitement from Patrick and I. This was more or less confusing for her at first. All she knew was that we stole her pants, plopped her down on some strange toy with a hole in it, and then made lots of noise and clapping when she stood up. But hey, she got chocolate, and that was good enough for her.

When she began to catch on I decided to make things more fun for her, so I bought supplies to make her a potty chart, similar to the one on Prudent Baby.

source: Prudent Baby

Theirs is all cute and color coordinated, and they even have printable labels to go along with the chart. But I was feeling lazy and didn't feel like printing anything at the time. (Because there's obviously a lot of effort that goes into pressing the "print" button...) So I decided to make my own version:

I know, nailed it right? 
(totally being sarcastic...)

Believe me, I wasn't trying to make it nearly as cute as the ladies at Prudent Baby did. I used a piece of poster board and some crayons, then did my best to draw a chart...thing. I let Haley help me decorate it because it thought she might get more excited about something that she helped make. I had to suppress the desire to tell her not to color inside of the potty chart and just let her do her thing, but my OCD was definitely twitching. I also had to suppress the desire to tell her to put the stickers in the right place, even when she has only gone pee pee in the potty.

On a side side note - do any of you other moms out there catch yourself saying "pee pee" when you're referring to yourself? On a date night recently, I had to catch myself from telling my husband I was "going to go pee pee in the potty." Part of having a great marriage is all about good communication people ;)

Now, how to master #2?