call me crazy ...

I have this notion that Marty will be potty trained before the baby comes. That's about 8 weeks from now. (!)

Max was a cinch to train (at least in my foggy memory of the process). I don't really recall much opposition from him. Certainly not the opposition the little Bug is giving me. The biggest hurdle has been to actually get him to sit on the potty. Early on I moved it into the living room. He gets to watch cartoons when he's on the pot, and it's much closer to all the action in the house than the bathroom way down the hall. At the suggestion of my sister, I finally forced him on the potty and them pumped him full of as many jelly beans as he wanted. The boy is a chipmunk so it was a lot of jelly beans! Trouble is, I feel sick after eating just a few, so I'm not surprised that he's not so eager to eat jelly beans every time I want him to sit. We had one successful pee on Monday and nothing but messes yesterday. This morning I pulled out the marshmallows. Big hit! I gave him one and snuck off to the shower. Max came running in to tell me that Mart had pooped on the potty! (Here's where more of the crazy bit comes in ... turns out this pregnancy still causes me to have a hyper-sensitive gag reflex. Nice.) Then it was time to take Max to school. We did that and even made a few stops, all clean and dry. We came home and I offered some coloured marshmallows (that we had stopped to buy on the way home). He wasn't interested until I gave him a teaser to try, then he really wanted them. I set the oven timer for 3 minutes and when it beeped, off he went to the potty. I gave him about a dozen in a little cup. He'd only had two or three and started to pee! Yay! I took the rest of the marshmallows away until next time, and set the timer for half an hour. There's about eight minutes left till we try again before getting Max from school. From no success yesterday to two before lunch already, I'm very pleased.

His reward for actually producing is a "Dibs" (bite-sized chocolate ice cream covered in chocolate). Thanks to Kelly for that idea, who expertly trained Taeya (just one day younger than Marty) in the summer. I originally tried the Dibs as incentive to get him on the potty, but it melted. Works much better as a reward.

I've kept him in underwear for his naps (with a mattress protector), and he's woken up dry both times. I think part of what made Max so easy to train was that he had been waking up from naps and night-time dry for a long time. Marty's still quite wet in the mornings, but hopefully as he learns control during the day, the night will change too. We've kept him in a diaper at night as I really don't want to deal with changing sheets in the night. Not sure what to do about church on Sunday. We'll see how the rest of the week goes.

I'll keep you posted.