Thanksgiving and Potty Training!

We had a nice Thanksgiving this year.  We certainly missed our extended families...a lot!  The stomach flu that I got on the retreat last weekend also got a few other people from church sick that went to the retreat.  So we decided to just do Thanksgiving as a family and not join our sweet friends from church just in case Caden's immune system was down.  We want to keep him well.  Getting good medical help for him is very difficult here and he is finally do very well, healthwise and not throwing-up. 

Turkey Schnitzel out

To celebrate Thanksgiving, we went out to lunch at a greek restaurant in town.  Their special was turkey schnitzel so we had that.  For dinner we cooked some ham, sweet potatoes, and green beans.  Collin picked up a pecan pie the other day when he went to the commissary.  It was delicious!

Thanksgiving at home

Yummy!

The biggest thing we started was officially potty training!  Caden has done great!  It is so hard to find a time when we can be home enough days in a row to potty train.  He was almost potty trained at the end of August/September before we went home to the States.  While overseas we stopped the training, then he's been taking iron which makes his poo very black and sticky so we decided to wait.  He has been going in the potty for a while now.  When we're out if we ask him if he needs to go, he usually goes.  Same when we're home, we just haven't taken the chance of taking the diaper off and letting him really go on his own.  Here's what we did and how he's done.

Hey!  A little privacy please.

Thanksgiving was Day 1.  Caden peed in the potty with no accidents at home.  We're doing the bare bottom method but when we went out we put a pull-up on him.  He peed at the restaurant but at Toys R Us (we needed to do some Christmas shopping price comparisons, and yes, everything was open in Germany on Thanksgiving since Germans don't celebrate the holiday), he peed in his pull-up.  He didn't poop all day which is no like him unless we travel.  Typically he'll save his poop until we get home.

Friday, Day 2: Caden did great peeing in potty.  This day we didn't remind him and constantly ask him if he needed to go, just occassionally and he did great!  We had to run an errand and ate lunch out, put a pull-up on him to do that.  Got home and he pooped in it.  Then later started to poop in his log cabin upstairs, Collin caught him and put him on the potty.  He finished there.

Saturday, Day 3:  After breakfast Caden ran and sat on the potty.  He peed and said excitedly, "I went pee pee in the green potty!"  We cheered for him and were very happy he took the initiative to go on his own.  He passed some gas this evening so I asked him to sit on the potty and see if he could poop.  He did and was super happy about it!  We were too!  No poop on the floor.  Collin reminded me of two setbacks today while they were together. It seems that all the diaper-free time and has got him thinking of all the ways one can pee.  Two times he stood on exercise mats and peed on them. Both times he announced that he was going to pee on the floor but Collin couldn't get there in time to stop him.  Collin then put him on the potty and Caden peed some more then, laughing like crazy.

Tomorrow we are venturing out without a pull-up.  Hopefully he'll make it through church.  There's no bathroom upstairs where we worship.  You have to go outside, down a sidewalk, into the other building.  Wish us luck!