Operation: Diapers No More

We first started putting the bean on her potty when she was a little more that 6 months old and our expectations were very low. We wanted to get her comfortable with sitting there once a day and hoped that she might do so without complaint after a month or two. The bean actually never complained about it and was very happy to sit there and read a book each morning. We were also surprised that it didn't take long for her to actually start using the thing--it was about two weeks before she was going consistently.

At some point a few weeks ago, we realized two things. First of all, the bean had gone to the bathroom in her potty each morning for the last 7 days, at least. Second, the bean had been going to the bathroom on her bath towel after every before-bed bath. The next logical step was to add another "sitting" right before bed (ideally before her bath). That second sitting has not been quite as successful as our early morning one--mostly because its harder to really schedule it at a specific time since we don't take baths every night. Still, she uses the potty at night about half of the time.

The plan for right now is to continue with twice a day until we hopefully have some more consistency at night. Then I think we'll keep adding sessions into the day until she's pretty much going every 3 hours or so.

The second part of our plan involves getting rid of disposable diapers. With the bean in cloth, she'll be better able to tell when she's wet which will help with our training efforts. You may remember that we had planned for the bean to be in cloth diapers all along, but we ran into a bit of a roadbump with that when she kept getting really painful diaper rashes that were only healed by switching to disposables. Her skin has toughened up a bit now and we're ready to switch again--the only problem being that she's outgrown the diapers I made and I'm still working on making new ones. Once they're all sewed, we'll switch back to full-time cloth and hope she handles it well.

We don't plan for her to be "full-time" on the potty until sometime after her first birthday, so we still have lots of time. As a newborn, the bean used more than 12 diapers a day--now, at 8 months, we are down to around 5 and we'll be working on getting that number down.