Is poop training different from potty training?

I don't know where I got this crazy idea but I decided to potty train Charlie this weekend. I had planned to wait until he was at least 2 1/2 but the more I read about it online the more I realized there was no need to wait. He's 2 years and almost 2 months and according to the Internet that's old enough and since the Internet is never wrong I decided to go for it.

On Thursday I let Charlie pick out a bunch of underwear from the store that he liked so he'd be excited to wear them when we were ready to start on Friday. My trickery worked because on Friday when he got up I told him he's going to start wearing underwear instead of diapers and he immediately asked if he could wear his Thomas the Train ones. My plan was working. This was going to be easy.

I made him wear just his undies with a shirt all weekend so I could catch the dribbles right away and so he would learn the 'wet feeling' was bad right away and hopefully would remember that next time he had to go. That's a nice run-on sentence ah?

I had bribes all lined up. Stickers for every hit. Presents after 5 hits. What child wouldn't learn to control his bowels for the pleasure of putting a sticker on a piece of paper? It sounded stupid when I read the idea online but for whatever reason he actually got really excited about picking out a sticker.

Oh and for the record I didn't dream up all this madness on my own. I bought an ebook online that promised to have my child potty trained in 3 days if I followed their method to a T. So for the cost of a week's worth of diapers I paid for access to their method.

So. Surprisingly at the end of Friday, day 1, I was about to give up. The score was something like floor 10, potty chair 1. The night was even worse. I changed his sheets 4 times. The worst time he was laying butt up in the air, underwear filled with poop, face down on wet pee-pee sheets. He was actually sound asleep like this.

Saturday got a bit better and the score evened out a little. I think we were like 50/50 on the floor/potty chair ratio. The poop ratio was still terrible as he seems to prefer to poop in his sleep. Let's just say nap time wasn't pretty.

Today, Sunday, has been way better. He's only had 2 accidents and the rest has made it in the pot. I was so proud of him when he woke up from his nap dry and poop free that I sent him outside to help Matt work. He came back 2 minutes later with a load in his pants. I guess I got a little ahead of myself.

So we're obviously not there yet and we're certainly not ready to go out in public, but we're making progress. Now when I ask him how his underwear is the answer is usually "still dry".

At this age I think potty training is just as much about training the parents as it is the child.

Considering how many signs I've missed I'm clearly still being trained. There are so many signs that I didn't even know were signs before this experiment. Like when he's playing with his toys and he pauses, gets a far away look in his eyes, and resumes playing. Somewhere between the pause and the eyes turning distant the pee starts. I know this now.

I'm not sure where we're going to go from here. Do I let him sleep in diapers? Will that just make getting rid of them down the road even harder? Do I go the Pull-Up route? Do I just call this whole weekend practice and try again in a few months? Or do I just keep up the broken record technique and ask him every 5 seconds if he needs to poop? We'll see how tonight goes before we make any definite decisions. I don't know what I was thinking starting this whole process. He probably won't be scarred for life if I let him start kindergarten in diapers will he?