Potty training missteps

Here’s the story, warts and all:

Thursday night I attended a Pampered Chef party and sat next to a woman who goes to our church.  She has five kids, four of which are boys.  Naturally, I thought she’d be a good resource on the topic of potty training.

Before I told her anything about our situation with Jett, the very first, most important rule of potty training according to her is not to stop once you start.  Crap.  She had other good suggestions which I’ve heard before, and I went home with a renewed sense of dedication to this thing.  I want to close this chapter and if that means another week, or egads – two weeks – that’s ok.

And then Friday Jett so marvelously demonstrated that again, it wasn’t up to me.

Jett was wearing training pants and went quite a stretch in the morning staying dry.  He was actually playing very nicely in my bedroom while Jude was doing his own thing in the living room.  I was checking on him frequently because I felt like the dry spell would give way to water works at any moment – each time I checked on him, I reminded him that he needs to use the potty when he feels like he has to go.  Several times I’d checked on him and he was content and dry. 

The next time I checked on him, I got quite a shock.  Jett had opened our closet, pulled 80% of the shirts off the hangers into a large pile, got on top of that pile and peed on the clothes.

Oy.  I was so mad.  I had warned him several times, telling him that he knows where the potty is supposed to go when we’re inside the house and when he felt like he needed to go, he needed to go in the toilet.  That’s the most frustrating thing – he does know.  After all this time, the going in the toilet thing is not a new concept.

I spanked his bottom.  Not only for peeing on my clothes, but for also emptying the contents of the closet.  Then he had to stay in his room for time out while I picked up all the clothes, sorting which ones were clean and dry and which ones needed to be re-washed.

I decided to try another strategy.  I put a diaper on him for the rest of the day.  Amazingly enough, he used the potty once without being told while he was wearing a diaper.  He peeled the diaper off, it was a little wet, so he threw it in the garbage and did his business on the toilet.

Later that evening while Josh was home, Jett disappeared.  He’d been wearing a diaper.  Josh went looking for him and found that Jett had taken off his diaper, put on regular underwear and pooped in the underwear.  And once again – poop was all over the bathroom. 

Seriously, people.  What do I do?

The rest of the weekend, we mainly had him in diapers.  We haven’t talked about it a whole lot.

We saw Josh’s aunt Lyn yesterday afternoon and she had a good suggestion (she’s a teacher) that we’ll try maybe later today.  She suggested writing a social story.  I think that’s what it’s called.  It’s a story about Jett and I think I’ll do it on the computer so I can insert pictures of him and put it in a Powerpoint slideshow or something similar so we can read it together.

The story will be something like this:

This is Jett.  He’s a three year old boy.  In September, he’ll be starting preschool.  Before he can go to preschool, Jett will have to use big boy potty…

We’ll also get a calendar going to help visualize when preschool will be starting.

I’m willing to try anything at this point.