It's official!

Ava is now potty trained. After four-five days of hard work, Ava is now not afraid of the potty and has embraced its usefulness. Tyler and I are extremely excited about the fact we no longer have to buy diapers for two babies. I am posting a full report on how we potty trained below for any inquiring minds who want to know the dirty details.

To preface this, I had read a couple books and looked online. One book was titled, "How to potty train in one day." This book relies on the child understanding mentally what potty training was all about. I did not rely on this book - Ava's physical readiness cues were enough for me to try!

I was very apprehensive because I did not want Ava to fail and in turn I did not want to fail. For the past couple months Ava displayed a lot of the readiness cues, including: taking pants off, taking diaper off, saying "stinkies" after she went in her diaper and waking up with a dry diaper. She however refused to sit on any potty and acted very afraid. She also constantly ran around with no clothes on. The final straw came when she took her diaper off, put her pants on and pooped in them. That put me over the edge! For Ava's entire two year life she has been an all or nothing girl, so we went to the store, bought underwear and put her in them that night.

For the next three days Ava either had just underwear or nothing on. When she had nothing on she would hold it, but when she did, it was a little hard for her to realize, "hey, I don't have a diaper on anymore to hold this wetness!" We stayed home the whole time and I just watched her very carefully. She would hold it for hours to avoid going, but one morning we just locked ourselves in our 5x5 bathroom and waited until she went. When she did go, she was not on the potty but I grabbed her and sat her down on her elmo potty. Her reward for even sitting on the potty was an M&M. This sort of worked, but not really. So she gradually got the hang of it and although we're not 100 percent every day, yesterday we didn't have any accidents. This morning Ava didn't pull her pants down, but she still went on the potty. She loves going at church on the little potty.

So that's the big long story! Horray!