potty training - day one

Complete and utter defeat.

I got Charli this Elmo underwear pack, and she just loves them. So we put her in them, and let her wet her pants in the hopes that she really wouldn't like it and would start using the toilet instead (which is just like the one her friend Bella uses). Some of the online stuff suggested just using the cotton undies so that the child can really feel when they're wet (Bella really hates being wet, and I was hoping Charli would too), and taking them to use the bathroom every 2 hours whether they ask for it or not, and instituting some kind of rewards system. So that was my starting plan.

No dice. Charli wet her pants about every half hour. She didn't like it, and would immediately want to change her pants, but it didn't seem to encourage her to try to control anything, or warn us beforehand - instead we were notified the instant after things happened. So we went through about 4 sets of undies ("unda") pretty quickly. After that, I thought I would just hang out with Charli in the bathroom with or without undies for a while. That lasted at least an hour, with Charli having fun taking her undies off and putting them back on, and sitting on her toilet perfectly willingly for short periods of time, but never producing anything. Eventually she actually fell asleep on me, because she got up REALLY early this morning for some reason, and I gave up. She's clearly not ready for no diaper while she's napping, so I put a diaper on her (she screamed bloody murder, so we had to put the undies on over it), and put her down for a nap. That also didn't go well - she fell asleep the instant she finished some milk, but woke up when I put her down and then screamed for another 20 minutes. I went to check on her after she was quiet for 10 or 15 minutes, assuming she'd be asleep and I could put a blanket over her, but she was wide awake. So now she is up, in a diaper, and I have given up for the day and will make a second attempt tomorrow.

Potty training = the big suck.