Potty Training

I had a question from a blog reader about potty training.  I have to admit that although I successfully potty trained four kids, I really don't have a lot of ideas as all of my girls learned fairly easily. This subject isn't fresh in my mind either as it has been almost 3 years since K was potty trained but here are some of the things that I think helped:

Although we considered potty training readiness & waited until we thought K was ready, some things we worked on earlier such as:

We talked about bodily functions when she was really little & explained what was happening when she went.  We also used proper body part names so K would understand the terms associated with potty training.

Once we thought K was ready, I created a potty training story book with her as the star of the book.  In the book we talked about all of the steps to successfully using the bathroom including dressing, washing hands after including the hand washing steps, etc. Later we included pages with family members pictures saying how proud they were that K was using the potty.

I did read up on the 1 day / 3 day potty training method & followed some of those ideas although some of the concepts just seemed a little harsh to me (I'm such a softie:). Based on an idea from that method we did try to set aside some time to be able to be very consistent at taking K to the potty & tried to encourage her to drink lots of fluids in order to give her lots of opportunities to practice.

Once we got started we tried to leave K in panties except at night time & rare occasions when we just couldn't chance an accident. We wanted to be consistent & our expectation was that she should use the bathroom now so we didn't want to confuse her by switching back to pullups or diapers.

We tried to be matter of fact about accidents & spoke in a positive manner about what we expected from her.

We gave K the opportunity to help with dressing, choosing panties, which bathroom she would like to use etc, so she felt that she had some control.

We purchased this potty. K loved the fact that it played music when she went & was more motivated to use it.  

Some families have success with sticker charts but K was not at all motivated by that method. 

That's all I can think of for now but here are a couple of links from some forums that give lots more ideas:

Here is a discussion with some ideas on Potty Training

Here is a potty training discussion on forum that has some parents of older kids with DS.

Please feel free to add any potty training tips you have by commenting below.  Thanks & good luck!