Dexter is potty trained!

Or "potty learned," as the progressive moms would say (I think).

It has been 8 days (and nights!) since his last accident, and today he even used a public potty. Stopped playing and everything to tell me he needed to go.

We've been rewarding potty usage for months - 2 m&ms for pee, 5 for poop. (The first time we told him "you get an m&m!" he heard that as "two Ms." So yeah, we gave him 2 Ms and had to up the ante for poop somehow. 5 is Dexter's go-to number for anything.)

Still, the rewards weren't helping all that much. It was still all coincidence, and he was still perfectly content to use his diaper most of the time. He was also not at all bothered by being wet or poopy, even though we told him it would make Thomas (the character on the underwear) sad if he got peed on. (Yeah, Dexter wasn't too worried about Thomas. He also quite wisely pointed out to me after one accident that Thomas was still smiling, so he wasn't sad at all!)

The tide started to turn in mid-August, during our trip to Mississippi to see Tootsie and Pop. Honestly, we almost didn't even bring the training potty because we thought there was no point.  He and Desmond spent a good chunk of the trip naked and in the pool. Somehow, magically, Dexter decided he was willing to use the potty instead of just peeing and pooping on the floor.

After we got back home, he continued wearing the diaper for a while but was using the potty pretty consistently.  His daycare teachers agreed that he was ready for big-boy underwear sometime around August 30.

Here's what I had to say about it on September 5 - another blog post drafted but never published:

BIG news over the last 2 weeks is that Dexter is using the potty!  I don't think he's had a single poop accident since about August 25. He still doesn't care too much about wetting his pants, and he has about one accident per day (more if you don't make him use the potty periodically). I think it's starting to bother him a little more, though, so maybe we'll see even more progress there in the coming weeks.  (We are not even attempting nighttime potty training at this point. His diapers are WAY too wet in the morning for us to consider that, I think, especially since he is so sleep-deprived as it is.)
Edit: Naturally, the day after I wrote that, he woke up dry. Mark it - September 6, 2011.  We'll see if it's a trend or a one-time deal.

  Well, he only had 2 bedtime, one naptime, and one daytime accident after that. The last one was September 16. I said I would declare the training official after 7 dry days. Thus, here we are.

He still has to wake up once/night to use the bathroom, and for some reason this is really upsetting for him. I guess it's no fun for anything to wake you up in the middle of a good sleep. Anyway, he still goes to the potty, so I guess we'll just hope it becomes less traumatic over time.

I always maintained that kids are perfectly capable of potty training between 18m and 2 years. And I still believe that's true. But this was SO EASY since we let him do it on his terms, it was (almost) worth paying for diapers for an extra year. Hopefully Desmond will see this happening around him and catch on sooner than later, though I can say it doesn't look promising just yet.

So, YAY for Dexter and YAY for slashing the diaper budget in HALF!  (And yay for adorable big-boy underwear. I mean, it really is adorable.)

This was June 5. So yeah, I guess we *have* been working on this for a long time, even though it seems now like it was an overnight success.