[lpurvis08]

My little girl is 18m old and i haven't begun any potty training things. We don't have a 'potty' for her yet and I am going to start using the "easy ups" in the next few weeks or so.. but is there anything else I should be doing.
I don't want to push this on her if she isn't ready but its getting so hard to change her diapers..
ideas, techniques... what works for you guys?
Thanks!

[emcmillan]

My daughter just turned 16 months old today. She has been using the potty now for a week. I'm so excited!!

She goes to the Nanny's during to day, so she's able to train with another little girl a few months older than her. We started by just taking her in the mornings and after lunch. She now enjoys sitting on the potty and I'm hoping in the next month to transition her over to Pull-ups.

Lot's of praise seems to work well with her.

[isavealot5]

My DS turned 16 mos last Sunday. When playing, he wears Pull-ups not
because he's potty trained already but because he will outgrow the pull-ups
if he doesn't wear them soon. He's 31 lbs 32 inches! Big boy.
So anyway, he sees the potty, opens the lid and then close it. That's about it.
We still have a long way to go...

Good luck OP!

[erinlooneybin]

You can buy the potty and have it around (I started out by letting my daughter sit on it to watch Elmo fully clothed) to get her used to it, but you probably won't make much progress until she starts to show the signs of readiness (has the language to tell you she needs changed, wakes periodically from nap with a dry diaper, etc).

I would strongly recommend getting The Potty Training Answer Book. It really helped me. My daughter would ask for a diaper change, sat a couple times on the potty, woke from naps with a dry diaper and so we started trying to do more PT. She SCREAMED any time we tried to get her to sit on the potty. You would have thought there were cattle prods involved the way she carried on. So we backed off. I left the potty in the bathroom, but didn't push her.

One fateful, fabulous night in February she cried that she wanted to sit on the potty. I let her, but set a timer since I thought she might be stalling before bedtime. When the timer went off, she FLIPPED OUT because she didn't want to get up. As I tucked her into bed, she told me she didn't want to wear diapers any more. So the next day we started going to the potty every 15 minutes. I had her sit on the potty for 5 minutes. When she sat on the potty, she got a (VERY VERY) small squirt of lotion. If she went potty, she got a couple M&Ms. She was in underpants by Wednesday and accident-free by Friday.

We've had some accidents since then, but for the most part, it's been smooth sailing. In no way do I attribute our success to anything I did - it was all her. She was ready when she was ready and all I did was give her the tools.

Best of luck to you! Once they are potty trained it is SO much easier than diapers.

PS: when I refer to diapers in here, I am talking about pull-ups and specifically the Feel N' Learn or Huggies Cool Alert kind. I wanted her to be aware of the wet diaper sensation.