Potty-training success!

SB and BW sailed through their first few days of daycare wearing underwear.  I expect there will be accidents here and there, but it seems we are firmly in the underwear-wearing camp.  I am still so impressed with how  smoothly things went.  I think we just managed to hit the sweet spot with timing and them being ready to train.  I know I'm always anxious to hear what has worked for other people, so I'll share our potty-training weekend - although I make no claims I actually know anything about how to be successful at potty-training.

As a bit of background, we have had potty seats in our house since SB and BW were about 18 months.  We offered that they could sit, but never really pushed it. We also bought undies and allowed them to wear undies here and there, but didn't pursue anything.  Although I had originally hoped to have them trained before Nugget's arrival,  As I started to get closer to Nugget's delivery date, they started regressing and refusing the potty, or sitting for only a second or two, so I stopped pushing, figuring they would regress anyway even if we did get them trained before Nugget was born.

I decided to try a rough 3-day method because BW was definitely showing interest here and there, and I had a 4-day weekend coming up where we could stick close to home anyway.  I was a bit worried if we could make it stick at daycare though, because neither of the twins were using the potty at daycare.  I mentioned it a few times that we were going to start wearing underwear on Friday, and we picked out new underwear, but didn't spend a lot of "build-up" to wearing undies.

For our initial training weekend, I had two potty seats in addition to the regular toilet in our main floor bathroom.  Our regular toilet also has the seat with the built-in child seat.  I let them pick what they want to use each time.  Now, I have one potty seat in the main floor bathroom and one in the upper level bathroom near their room.  My "plan" was to have them try every 20 minutes for 5 minutes at a time, but we deviated from that pretty quickly.  Here's a brief summary:

• Offered potty.  Reminded them to tell me if they needed to go.  Offered every 20 minutes, if they refused reminded them to tell me if they needed to go, the first day.
• Kept them within 8-10 feet of the bathroom the entire first day.
• Cheered like crazy and encouraged them to cheer for each other.  Gave 1 m&m for pee, 3 for poop.
• Pushed drinks like crazy.  Mostly water, but some milk and some lemonade.  Played "tea party" to keep them drinking fluids.
• Used diapers for naps/bedtime (this has been a struggle, as they take their diapers off at naps, and don't nap.  I was also worried that BW would use this time to poop in her diaper, as she normally poops at naptime.  However, she has pooped in the potty since day 1.  We have switched to some leftover pull-ups from a friend for nap/bed, which the girls will leave on - so I guess the rest of their diapers can go into storage for when Nugget gets to that size).

By the middle of day 3, we were all a bit stir-crazy.  You can only paint and color and play with play-dough in the kitchen so long. I had wanted to try a short outing, so we decided to go over to visit friends (who knew we were potty training).  However, we needed to pick some stuff up to grill, so we also needed to make a short grocery store visit.  This also went amazingly well.  SB even used the toilet at the grocery store.

We were having such good luck that by day 4, I loosened the reins considerably.  We set up the kiddie pool and let them play outside most of the day, and still did a great job of telling me they had to go and running into the house.  Zero accidents. All poops in the potty.

I was really nervous to send them off to daycare because (1) they wouldn't get m&ms there (although by day 3 I was no longer giving them for every success) and (2) they would have to tell someone other than me they had to go.  I talked with SB and BW the day before about people they could tell at daycare if they had to go potty.  I packed up 4 pair of undies and 4 pair of pants per kid, told daycare how we had done and hoped they wouldn't be in diapers again at the end of the day.

I need to give my kids more credit.  No accidents.  3 days of daycare in undies and we haven't touched the extra clothes.  Woo hoo!