Whaddya know, when they're ready it really is that easy.

I haven't been blogging in the last couple of weeks because I've been knocking on wood. Crossing my fingers. Warding off the evil eye. Basically, avoiding putting it in print and thereby jinxing it.

J is (for the most part) potty trained. Just like that. Just a few weeks ago I was asking the blog world for advice, and J was screaming and crying and fighting not to sit on the potty. He was soaking his Pull-ups every night and completely mystified by real underwear.

So what happened? We're not sure. The tipping point seems to be our little trip to California two weeks ago. It wasn't the traveling itself, but the traveling companions. The trip consisted of me, TH, J, my twin sister, her husband, and her two kids. The key factor being her 9-year-old son, X. J IDOLIZES his cousins, and when they're together he's the little kid tagging along trying to copy everything they do. Including using the potty. Every time X would excuse himself from the table and say "I'll be right back, I have to potty," (you know, like a grown-up) J would pipe up, "I wanna go potty, too!" Not that he actually went potty with X while we were on the trip, but the day we came back, he kept talking about everything X and his sister did. So on a hunch, with less than 36 hours before I had to go back to work and J had to go back to daycare, we tried the underwear again. J was suddenly all too willing to sit on the potty a bazillion times, and he only had one accident. One. The next day, one accident. The next day, wearing real underwear at daycare, only one accident. Since then, we've gone 8 out of 10 days without a single accident, at home or at daycare. It's like a lightbulb went off over his head, and he just...got it.

That's not to say we're totally out of the woods. All of this talk about him getting it and being potty trained is mostly in reference to going #1. Although J has managed to poop in the potty three times since we started...he's also only gone poop three times since we started. He's actually holding it in and making going #2 extremely hard on himself by waiting until he's super constipated. Not sure how to help that one. He's also still wearing Pull-ups to bed, although the last 3 nights he's woken up dry and stumbled into the bathroom in the morning to pee before getting them wet, so I figure within the next few weeks we'll be totally done with the whole thing.

Huh. What do you know. I guess he was "just ready." (I can hear people muttering, "I told you so" right now. Yeah, yeah, you were right.)