new motivators

My third and final blog of Day One, of bathroom business

The on/off practice from this afternoon gave us an idea. Maybe it was also the hard, cool seat that was making him nervous. We relieved ourselves of house arrest to treat him to dinner, and a trip to the store. We picked out a nice, cushion-ey toilet seat complete with chrome hinges. 

He was excited that we bought it, but didn't want to sit on it yet.

I left my boys at home and went to the grocery store to buy more ammo, while acknowledging H's new fondness of the color "geen". I filled the cart with specific snacks (both Hayden-faves and drink-encouraging) such as animal cookies, tea biscuits, cheese-flavored crackers, ranch-flavored crackers, big, shiny glazed doughnuts, a new box of personal wipes with a green character on them (meant for post-toilet use, vs baby wipes), and a green refillable water bottle. Oh, and Hebrew National hot dogs.


I saw the window shade was down in his room when I got home, which meant he was already in bed. I'm sure he heard my truck and within ten seconds of pulling in the driveway I saw the shade go up (and heard him squealing).

He bolted out of his room to greet me, and was very excited to hear I had new prizes for him tomorrow. When I mentioned about his own new container of wipes he wanted so much to see them, that he started to pull his pajama shorts down while he was running to the bathroom.

Now, he was very happy to sit on the new seat. The wipes were the cherry (or doughnut hole) on top.


So we concluded Day One with him sitting, and legitimately happy about it. Nothing in the bowl yet but he's following his potty chart, he knows all the steps already, and these little bribes (I mean rewards) are clearly helping.


Tomorrow, I buy size 6 underwear. Someone once gave us the idea of putting them inside the pull-up so in the event of an accident, he'll feel it and hopefully prompt him to sit on the (cushioned) throne.