Jed is Potty Trained at 21 months!

Yes, you read that right!
After hearing about this idea of potty training before age 2 and then seeing it work first hand with my friend Jen's daughter Eleanor, who is 19 months, I decided Jed could do it and it was worth a try.
The idea is that when they are younger, learning to use the potty is just another skill that they learn, like using utensils or talking. There are no emotions involved, it's just a physical thing. You take away diapers and make the potty the only option, so they just figure out that that's what expected of them. You make it matter-of-fact, so that when they potty, you just say something like 'pee pee goes in the potty' and maybe a good job or high five here and there. There's no praise, no shame, no pressure.
Sounds too easy, right? But it truly works if you stick with it, have some patience, and are willing to clean up some messes and do some extra laundry for a couple weeks.
I figured it's better to do it now rather than dragging it out for months. Eli did a great job potty training and was totally out of diapers 3 months after he turned 2. Now that I think of it, we did a lot of these same tactics with him so that he was mostly out of diapers before 2.
Jed did well overall with potty training. There were times when I wanted to quit or wasn't sure he was really going to do it, but perseverance prevailed! I gave it two weeks, and by the end of the two weeks, he was doing great using the potty. He still has occasional accidents, and I do have to initiate him going to the potty most times. We still put him in a diaper at night for now, but he's been dry lately in the mornings, so I'm thinking we'll try no diaper at night soon. The hardest part for me was staying home for a week to get him used to the sensations and going on the potty. I think I only made it two days at home. After that I just made sure he went or tried to go often when we were out. There's only been a couple accidents while we've been out. No big deal, though.

I am a believer now! It's so nice not to mess with diapers anymore. I did mostly cloth with Jed but had gotten lazy the past few months and was using disposable diapers. Now, we use none! Hooray! We did it!

PS- there are several cute potty pictures that I can't get and some that I've missed
due to our broken camera....booooo!