Joey's potty training: Round 1

I've been trying to play it cool with the potty training and decided that I was just going to let things run its course and that we would start only when Joey let us know that he was ready. Over the last couple of weeks, Joey started asking us to take him to the potty and actually successfully went pee-pee and poo-poo several times. So I took that to mean that he was giving us the green light (and I was also admittedly excited about cutting down on diaper purchases).

So we got the boys' bathroom ready to go with all the requisite potty training items:

Toilet seat

Kid-sized urinal (aka the Peter Potty)

Reward chart

Bribes (er, rewards)

Our plan was to give Joey 1 sticker each time he went pee-pee and 2 stickers each time he went poo-poo. Everytime he earned 2 stickers, he would get a car. Joey wore big boy underwear during the day and wore Pull-Ups only at night or when we were leaving the house. The training went surprisingly well for about 5 days as far as the pee-pee was concerned (as evidenced by the chart pictured above). He earned a lot of cars and we even had a song and dance routine that we would perform each time he went ("Joey went pee-pee in the potty, repeat, repeat, repeat). The pooping started out okay and just slowly deteriorated throughout the week until finally he was pooping in his underwear and freaking out when we would try to change him. Then he started peeing in his pants too and it was around that time that mommy's patience started to wear thin. And that was that for round 1 of potty training...