M&Ms and potty training

Let this be a warning to parents everywhere about the pros and cons of using M&Ms as a reward for going to the potty...

We started in earnest to potty train Carrie around the Christmas holidays. I had high hopes of it happening before Anna was born, but that was a bit more than I was willing to take on while Jerry was gone. So Christmas seemed like the perfect time since we would be home more than usual and could throw her in big girl undies and see what happened. And that's precisely what we did, basically. Put her in them and said "Okay kid, tell us when you need to go!" It took a few times, but honestly after a couple of days she really got the hang of it. The big thing was getting her to poop in the potty. She wasn't really having any of that, at least until I decided to do what I didn't really want to do and offer M&Ms as a reward for pooping in the potty. I didn't want to go down the path of giving food as a reward....but I also didn't want to continue buying two sets of diapers.

The M&M trick was an instant hit. Overnight she decided that pooping wasn't that bad. She would announce to us "I need to go poop and then I get 5 M&MS!" This was before her butt even hit the toilet. It got to the point she was obsessed with it and wouldn't let anyone else in the house go to the bathroom alone (and I am not kidding). We had a cheering section each time one of us had to go to the bathroom and she'd run into the kitchen afterwards and announce "You get 5 M&Ms Mommy!" Thanks, Carrie.

I told her teachers at school about this one day and they decided to implement this at school as well (only the kids would only get 1 M&M). So while we've slowly backed down on the M&Ms and are now not doing any, the school is still doing them.

Flash forward to the past few days of daily reports for Carrie. They indicate on the report whether or not she peed/pooped on the potty. The girl was pooping like FOUR times a day at school, but not at home. Then yesterday Miss Lizzy wrote this on her report:

"We've had to limit Carrie to one M&M a day because she's trying SO HARD to poop each time she goes to the bathroom :)" (and yes, the smiley face was on the report)

That's my overachiever. Kid's gonna blow her colon out because she's determined to get a freakin' M&M. I want to tell her that, with her mother's history in this arena, she'd better not be doing anything to screw with her GI tract. I fear the pull of the M&M is far stronger than that, though.