I have 5 children, 4 of them are successfully potty trained. My girls potty trained the quickest, at 2 years old. 2 of my boys were 4 when they finally conquered potty training.

And then there’s Zavier. He’s going to be turning 8 soon and he’s in the last size of pull up diapers. He’s successfully peed on the potty many times. He’s pooped once, when he was sick and we timed it perfectly.

While I would love to stop changing diapers, I feel like I’ve spent 1/3 of my life doing it, I appreciate every moment of growth from Zavier. Over the last year, he has been recognizing when he’s used the bathroom. He will either announce it, saying “diaper” or “eeww, poopy”.

The most frequent thing that he does is to grab a diaper (or a pack of diapers) and his baby wipes. He brings them to either his dad or me with a big smile on his face.

Sometimes, he’ll bring us a diaper right after we changed him. The diaper may have just a super tiny amount of urine in it, so we’ll tell him to wait, knowing that he’s about to have a feed and will fill that diaper very quickly very soon.

He’ll get mad and start laying down in front of us in the diaper changing position. If we tell him “not yet” again, he may begin to tear up a diaper. It’s frustrating, yes, but I can’t help but laugh at how he communicates with us. He is adamant about what he wants.

The other big struggle we’re having with potty training is that he HATES every type of underwear we’ve tried to put on him. We got him boxer briefs, we got him the potty training underwear, and we got him super soft autism friendly underwear, but he will NOT wear anything but a diaper.

He’s been talking so much this week though and eating so much more. He’s currently running around yelling popcorn, actually. So he’s not potty trained yet, but he’s making progress and I (and his dad) are so thankful.