The time we’ve both dreaded and craved has arrived: we have started pottytraining Brenden.

We started off by talking about the potty, reading a few books, and watching a slightly creepy Elmo video on the subject. Then we picked up a portable potty and drop-in toilet seats decorated with – you guessed it – Sesame Street characters. He spent about 10 days in training pants as part of a market research study, but now he’s back in diapers. He gets to sit on the potty a few times a day and loves to drop toilet paper in and flush. In the process, he loves to repeat, “Paper towel goes in the toilet.” Don’t ask me why.

So far, we’ve had success four times! We let him sit down, and sometimes things happen! We both praise him like crazy, and he seems really proud of himself. Sometimes he claps and cheers. =) Other times he asks to sit on the potty, but nothing happens. Once he asked Jenny to go to the potty, but he could quite hold it for the few seconds it took to get there. Obviously, we have a long way to go, but we are making progress.

I’m sure all of you have your own ideas about pottytraining. I’ll bet most of them fit into this approach from BabyCenter, which is similar to our current approach. However, next week we plan to rev things up with an alternative: the three-day method.

Sounds crazy, huh? Our friends Jon and Amber tried this approach with their three boys, and it worked great. We’ll probably modify it a bit like they did by switching B to real underwear (with a fun theme that he picks out) instead of running around naked. We still need to decide on all the details. Yes, it will be messy and frustrating at first. But it seems to work. I have most of next week off, so we’ll be at home most of the time working on it. Wish us luck!