Theo is mostly potty-trained, and I mean it

Okay, so we've had plenty of false starts with the potty training, but I think we really have something here now. At the end of November, I got a two week vacation. Dad and I kept Theo at home pretty much the entire time. We already had a Costco bag of gummy bears in the pantry from previous potty-training efforts. Before, he wore pull-ups all day and he would get one gummy bear for pee and four for poo, but the number of times he got the gummy bear prize was approximately zero, and he didn't care. So I changed things up. I put him in real cotton shorts, and with my cell phone as a timer, I made a rule that he had to sit on the potty every twenty minutes. What I meant by that was, every twenty minutes, he had to practice going to the potty, pulling his shorts down, and sitting. The deal was, he had to count to five, and if nothing happened, he got a piece of gummy bear (about one-third.) Pee got him one gummy bear and poo got him four.

So the first two times we did this were a big struggle. We would spend 15 minutes or so in the bathroom with Theo yelling that he did not want to sit on the potty, and I explained that we were not leaving the bathroom until he sat, just for five seconds, and "Don't you realize that if you would just sit and count to five this would all be over and you'd have a piece of gummy bear already?" After a while, he got the hang of it. He even got a gummy bear out of it most times because I kept him pretty well hydrated. I'd say I kept him too well hydrated, because sometimes he wouldn't even make it the whole twenty minutes without needing to sit down again. After two or three days, he hardly needed the timer anymore, but we had tons of accidents because he would just forget, or maybe he was so interested in what he was doing he didn't want to take the time to get up. That went on for another few days.

So the update is this: Theo spends all day in his big boy shorts and he has had zero accidents in the past week. There's no need for any of that knock-on-wood stuff, because Dad and I have accepted that accidents happen. He goes to daycare, to the store, to grandma's house--everywhere!--in his cotton shorts without any problem. He still wears a diaper to sleep, because one time I tried cotton shorts and he woke up at three in the morning distressed because he was wet. Then we had to get up and wash him and change his sheets and it was just too much to do. Recently he was woken up in the night to go the bathroom and has managed to stay dry until the morning, but I am still not brave enough to give up diapers completely. Finally, he did have some funny poo issues, where he would hold it in for two days, and then finally poo in the morning when he had his diaper on. Then one night he asked to put on a diaper but wouldn't say why, so I told him to go sit on the potty which he resisted, complaining that he didn't need to go pee or poo. I set a timer for one minute. At about 45 seconds I heard him say, "Mom, I think something is going to come out!" And sure enough, it was huge. I think that was the experience that taught him that it was okay to go poo in the potty too.

So there you have it. Score one for the moms and dads of the world.