{"id":15350,"date":"2011-12-04T15:52:37","date_gmt":"2011-12-04T07:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=15350"},"modified":"2012-08-01T21:55:35","modified_gmt":"2012-08-01T13:55:35","slug":"potty-training-for-hannah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2011\/12\/04\/potty-training-for-hannah\/","title":{"rendered":"Potty Training for Hannah"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Learning aids for potty training. Hee hee :P<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Getting Hannah to be potty trained has been a nagging issue at the back of my mind. I know of babies who were potty trained before they turned one while others only mastered it around three to four years old. Internet baby websites say that readiness for potty training usually occur around two to three years old. I think that makes sense as it is the age when a toddler would be able to communicate better and understand adult’s language, walk steadily to the potty and manage to pull up and down their bottoms.<\/p>\n

We planned to formally start Hannah on potty training over this year-end school holidays. Although we had presented the idea of using the potty to Hannah for many months now, she was still wearing diapers \/ pull-up pants and much preferred not to ‘do it’ in the potty. The advantage of using the holidays is that I don’t have to work and can therefore stay at home to monitor her potty training closely.<\/p>\n

I gathered a few ideas here and there to encourage Hannah to use the potty:<\/p>\n

1) Remove her dependence on pull-up pants<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

For a start, I stopped using pull-up pants on Hannah and replace it with an underwear. The exceptions are when she naps in the afternoon, goes out with us and sleeps at night. One thing at a time. Let her overcome her reliance on pull-up pants in her conscious state first.<\/span><\/p>\n

2) Buy underwear that has cartoon characters<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

To entice her to put on underwear. I bought a pack of panties with Dora pictures printed in front from Kiddy Palace recently. I told her that she shouldn’t wet Dora. Hee hee :)<\/span><\/p>\n

3) Buy stickers as incentives<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Hannah was told that she could get a sticker fr<\/span>om my ‘collection’ if she ‘wee wee’ or ‘poo poo’ in her potty. As she has no problem sitting on the potty, there’s no reward for doing just that. She has to pass urine or motion to earn her sticker. It works well for Hannah so far as she enjoys getting new stickers and pasting on and peeling them off her shirt, floor, book, everywhere you name it. We got our stash of stickers from Popular Bookstore. For $1.90, you get a collection of 60 different and colourful stickers :)<\/p>\n

Today is her first day without pull-up pants. Already got one accidental wetting of herself but she learned her lesson (as mommy pretended to make a little fuss and repeated the correct procedure to her). That’s why it is important to be able to stay at home for the training. We also try to remember to get Hannah to sit on the potty every 30 minutes or appropriate (depending on the timing of her meals and drinks) as she didn’t seem to know how to tell the urge until it is too late. Our attitude towards the whole new training is ‘take-your-time’, be encouraging and ‘don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff’.<\/p>\n

For the record, Hannah earned one sticker at the end of her first day of training and she treated it like a real treasure! :)<\/p>\n

Updates on 2nd Jan 2012:<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

1) ‘Accidents’ – As far as urinating goes, Hannah has stopped urinating in her panty after three to four wetting incidents all within the first week. The frequency of me asking her to go to her potty is every 1-2 hours now. However, passing motion in the potty is still quite iffy due to her irregular rhythm and failure to read her own urge. She just soiled her panty today again. <\/span><\/p>\n

2) The sticker reward method worked so well as Hannah has gotten so many stickers stuck to her easel. Of late, the novelty has started to wear off as she didn’t ask for the stickers regularly. It is about time :)<\/span><\/p>\n

3) Hannah could go without diapers on our outings too. She was the one who wanted to wear her panty instead of diaper when I asked her for her preference :) And she enjoyed visiting kiddy toilets at shopping malls.<\/span><\/p>\n

4) Finally, she seldom wet her diaper during naps and night-time sleep. Hence, I could re-use the dry diaper again! :D<\/span><\/p>\n

Updates on 26th Jan 2012:<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

1) Hannah has upgraded from using the potty to child training toilet seat at home in early Jan to get used to the idea of doing her ‘businesses’ on the toilet bowl as it would be case in her kindergarten and public places.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

2) Hannah has not had accidental wetting or soiling of her panties since the last update. We managed to nail down her ‘poo poo’ rhythm by conditioning her to do her daily big business during her last toilet visit before bedtime. She would pass urine on the toilet bowl and then sit for around 5 mins for her poo poo to start coming out. I discovered a reliable indicator if she’s got poo poo on the way – she will get goose bumps all over her arms and legs! In fact, she also recognises this signal herself – hee hee. There were also days when she would tell me that no poo poo was coming after she sat on the toilet bowl for a while. Well, I just told her that we could try again the following night.<\/span><\/p>\n

3) Hannah is still on diapers during naptime and nighttime sleep. She still wet the diaper occasionally and hence I’m not too keen for her to sleep without the diaper.<\/span><\/p>\n

Updates on 1st Aug 2012<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Time flies indeed. It has been 7 months since my last update on Hannah’s toilet training. <\/span><\/p>\n

After our first overseas trip to Telunas Beach Resort in June, Hannah has been sleeping through the night without her diapers. I took the plunge to go diaper-free after noticing that she had dry diapers throughout the Telunas stay. There was another factor which made me want to stop using diapers on her – she has been getting diaper rashes and the desitin cream didn’t appear to be effective anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hannah fared pretty well so far with occasional wetting of her bed. We found that communicating with her on her wetting accidents helped to make her conscious of the fact that soiling her bed was not desirable. We also told our girl that she should call out to us, even if it is in the middle of the night, to bring her to ease herself if she finds that she wants to urinate. But in all her ‘accidents’ so far, she never did. Oh well. <\/span><\/p>\n

As for her nap times, she has been off diapers since around March as we noticed that she didn’t need them at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

As of now, Hannah is fully capable of communicating her need to use the toilet and whether it is to urinate or pass motion. So all in all, she took about 8 months to reach this stage.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Getting Hannah to be potty trained has been a nagging issue at the back of my mind. I know of babies who were potty trained before they turned one while others only mastered it around three to four years old.<\/p>\n

Read More Potty Training for Hannah<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-children-blues","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-7-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}