Potty Training

It's official. Tori has been potty trained. Best $20 I've ever spent. Here's what we did: (Ok, OK... Anna did it.)

Tori is really into Dora the Explorer these days. So, Anna took her to WalMart and bought a bag of candy and four Dora play figurines. She told Tori that every time she would pee in her potty chair, she'd get a piece of candy, and every time she pooped in the toilet she'd get one of the toys. She then placed all the goods on the back of the toilet where Tori could see them all the time:



And it worked marvelously. Tori went #1 on the potty 6 or 8 times the first day. On the second day, she worked up the courage to poop in the potty and earned Dora. She ran around the house yelling, "I did it! Yeah!" (That's what Dora says on her show.) Then she proceeded to run to the bathroom, pull down her pants and began to grunt and push on her tummy. "I have to get Diego!" she exclaimed.

So, she's been potty trained for almost a month and hasn't had any relapses. However, we are still working on perfecting some of the finer points of her potty technique, namely wiping.

A few days ago, I got Hope up for school and started working on getting her breakfast while she went off to the bathroom. A few seconds later she came running back into the kitchen yelling, "Dad, there's something in the toilet!"

Here's what I saw:



Tori got up in the middle of the night to go potty (Yes, she really does get up and go all by herself) and dutifully went to wipe herself. At the time, she hadn't quite mastered the art of tearing toilet paper off the roll. So, apparently in an effort to not make a mess, she proceeded to unwind the entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet. Thank God she forgot to flush!