potty training - what's normal?

southmiamiwifejen

so we started on our potty training adventure this weekend, and while i think it's going well so far, the more i think about it, the more i feel like i don't really know what to expect or what's "normal." of course i've heard things here and there from other mommy friends and have read up on the whole thing on babycenter.com, but i still feel like i'm a little unsure.

i could write a novel about what we've done so far and how it's going, but in a nutshell, we just switched cold turkey to underwear (no pull-ups) except at nighttime when she's still wearing a diaper. we started on saturday and so far, each day, she's gone pretty long stretches (5-6 hours) with no accidents and consistently peeing in the toilet, but then will have some accidents sporadically throughout the day. yesterday (day 3 of potty training) was the best day (only one accident the entire day from the moment she woke up till she went to sleep), but today (day 4) has been the worst so far besides saturday morning when we first started the process. she pooped in her underwear (which i guess is to be expected...it's the first time she's pooped since we started, so i'm just glad she finally pooped regardless of the fact that she didn't go in the toilet) and has had 3 peeing accidents.

for the record, for the first two days i was home with her all day and then monday and tuesday she's been home with my mother in law. i am contemplating whether i should already send her to school tomorrow to practice staying dry at school or whether i should keep her home until she gets the hang of it better.

anyway, i KNOW she's still really young and i KNOW it's only been a couple of days, so i'm trying not to get frustrated about the accidents. but my concern is that from what i seem to have heard from talking to other parents is that at a certain point, the whole process should just "click" and once that "click" happens (whether it takes 3 days or 4 or 7 days or whatever), the child stops having accidents. i feel like it "clicks" for emma when she feels like letting it click, as she has proven that she can go an entire day with almost no accidents, but then she'll have a day like today where it almost feels like we're back at square one and she's just not interested in even trying to stay dry. the one step forward, two steps back thing is sort of driving me insane.

so - is this normal? should i just expect for it to take several more days before she stops having accidents? or is the fact that she doesn't seem to be consistent about it now mean that maybe i'm doing something wrong? my biggest fear is that i'm doing something wrong that's going to delay the whole thing and take her forever to get fully potty trained. if i knew that this type of progress were normal (where she seems to "get it" one day, and then the next day everything goes out the window), i'd just continue to do what i'm doing and hope that she gets the hang of it with a little more time. but if i'm doing something wrong, i want to know so that i can change my approach as quickly as possible.