Toddler underwear! Nah, he's not ready.

That's right. We bought Tristan his first underwear. Actually, we bought him like ten underwear. It's all very exciting even though Tristan is not ready for them yet :) That's okay because he will be soon!

Tristan is actually doing quite well. He's trained for #2 (a.k.a poo), if you don't count the unusual accident he had a few days ago. His diaper stays dry more and more each week. He pees in the morning many times when we put him on the potty and some times after he wakes up from his nap. He some times tells us he has to pee and when we put him on the potty, he does pee. However, he still pees a lot in his diaper.

Last week when Tristan was home with me, I let him wear underwear. I knew he would pee in them so I put on tight pajama pants on him. This way when he did get wet, it would mostly be contained, even if I had to change everything from the waist down. Not even 20 minutes into the underwear test, he peed his pants. Yup! The second underwear test that day stayed dry for almost 2 hours.

You may be wondering why bother with underwear since he is clearly not ready yet. The way I see it is that he needs to feel uncomfortable to want to pee in the potty. If he gets soaking wet, he will clearly not ignore it and continue playing. Some pull-ups allow him to feel a bit wet but we found that it hasn't been helping. He would pee and pee into it and then it would leak. Also, the pull-ups just seem like fancy diapers. To us and probably to him too. Underwears are totally different. In other words, Tristan feels like he can still pee in the pull-ups because they can absorb pee like diapers. He is learning now that he cannot pee in underwears at all!

This week I'm doing the same thing. Thursday more or less ended the same way as last week but today went exceptionally well. We only went through one pull-up this morning and he has remained dry since. The trick is to put him on the potty every one to two hours. When we went out, I put a diaper on him. We came home two hours later to a dry diaper. When he had his nap, I changed him out of his underwear and put the same dry diaper on him. He woke up with a dry diaper. As a result of putting him on the toilet every one to two hours, he peed in the toilet four times today and pooped once. I can certainly see how this method can work really well!

Sounds easy, right? Not so much. Even when he didn't want to go potty, we had to insist. To avoid tantrums, we bribed him with a reward sticker if he pees first. We don't have to bribe him all the time but today, we handed out two stickers to him. It's okay, we have a thousand stickers and he will likely be potty trained before we use them all :) We really don't like to bribe but we hate tantrums more. Also, in the past we learned that tantruming over the potty can give pottying a very bad experience for him :(

If we can keep this method up, I think he could be trained fairly quickly. My friend did this exact same thing and her boy was fully trained after two months. Her boy was 25 months old when she trained him. Tristan is now 28 months old. Tristan is far along enough in pottying training that I think he could be trained in less than a month if we could be consistent. Sadly, I can only do this with him a few days a week since daycare has their own pottying routine. Hopefully our method will register with him enough that his diaper will remain dry most of the day at daycare. That would have to mean that he holds his bladder for longer periods at daycare or he speaks up about having to pee.