Potty Training

 Two months ago I forced myself to start potty training with no clue of what I was doing. I knew it was going to be hard but had no idea how intense and exhausting it would turn out to be. As another twin Mom said to me "Potty training twins is not for sissies!" That's for sure!

Weston had been showing signs that he was ready since about March and I didn't want to lose the window of opportunity. I wish I could say they are both completely trained and never have accidents. We are doing pretty well at home. Weston rarely has an accident & loves earning stickers to put on his chart. Troy has good and bad days he follows Weston's lead quite a bit though. They don't go out in public in underwear unless I have Ty with me but I do encourage them to tell me when they have to go with a pull up on and when they tell me very often they do actually go in the public potty. They also get rewarded a sticker if they don't pee in their pull up and can stay dry for outings.  My sister told me about this website: Potty Training in one day and that's where I got the ideas of where to begin. With twins it was very hard to do it this way by myself during the day but I pushed through thinking of all the money we could save on diapers. Ty helped me a lot when he got home at night and the boys were more successful having one on one attention.

Disclaimer: I am going into detail of the whole process feel free to skip over it if you want but I need a future reference for myself so I know what to do for the next child we'll hopefully have someday.

Anytime Troy or Weston went potty they got to choose a person to call from on top of the board: Grandma and Grandpa Turner, Grandma Cog, Aunt Lue,  Meg or Daddy. They also received a dum dum sucker for going pee or a dollar toy for going poop.  I didn't do much with charts until after the first week or two.

This whole container of underwear lasted about a day and a half starting out!

This is Joe I found at Goodwill and I used him to show the boys what a big boy he was. Joe went pee in the potty (water with yellow food coloring worked great in a medicine dropper ) the boys were so excited for Joe they clapped and couldn't wait to do it themselves I was shocked by how excited they were for him! Then Joe had an accident on the floor and I took Joe back & forth to the potty to show the boys where the pee and poop go and not on the floor. This part was exhausting. The blog suggests going back & forth 10 times to the potty then to the scene of accident carrying your child. Imagine doing that with two kids several times and yeah you'll know why I quit doing that step after the first day.

I gave the boys lots to drink and lots of snacks the first couple days. We set a timer for 15-20 min. and when it went off the boys had to try and go potty.  The only problem with this is the boys bodies were not in sync so while I was helping one wash their hands or helping them get underwear back on. The other had jumped off the potty and then would have an accident two minutes later.

 For the first week I tried to keep the boys upstairs where the wood and tile floors were or downstairs in the bathroom so that clean up was a little easier. I had to get real creative with things to do while we waited to go potty. They loved drawing all over the walls with these washable bath crayons.

Anytime Weston went potty he'd yell "SUCKER"  I eventually had to cut him off from those, They have earned enough stickers for different toys and a trip to Chuck E. Cheese for rides and games.

Troy enjoyed calling people the most when he went potty. He always started the conversation with "pee pee or poo poo" Thanks a ton to our families who let us call them non stop that first week and were always just as excited as the last time we had called.

My favorite part of potty training has been getting to see their cute little bums in underwear every day!