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By Julie
At age 4 Ana is all but completely potty trained. She wears her big girl underwear proudly and goes to the bathroom without prompting. Most mornings her Pull-Ups are completely dry, but she needs a little extra encouragement to get to 100 percent, so we're introducing a game we first created back when Alex was her age.
Here are the rules: every morning Ana wakes up, if her Pull-Ups are dry, she can put a sticker on her calendar for that day. Every time she reaches 5 stickers, we draw a circle around the 5th sticker, and she can pick a prize out of a bucket of wrapped toys. Over the weekend Kevin and Alex went shopping for toys to be prizes. I wrapped them all individually and printed blank calendar pages, which were then pinned to the wall in the kids' room. When we explained the game to Ana, she was so excited she could hardly contain herself. She already has 2 stickers because her Pull-Ups were dry both yesterday and today. Now all she needs to do is stay dry for 3 more days and she gets to pick a prize. The other things I'm hoping to teach her with this game are to be more self aware ("If I want to be dry in the morning, I'd better go pee before bed."), to motivate herself ("Look! I only have one more sticker to go before I get another prize!"), and to get her into the habit of looking at a calendar regularly. That last goal sounds almost silly compared to the other two, but frankly I think it's just as important in the long run. Calendaring is the first step to learning how to manage one's time, and to be totally honest, it's something neither Kevin nor I learned until college. I figure I'm giving my kids a huge advantage in life by having them start doing this at age 4. Curiously, Ana asked if Alex would get to play the game too. I explained that he played this game when he was 4 (it's the reason he's got so many Thomas the Tank Engine  train cars) and now he's moved on to the allowance game. It's similar to the potty training game in that there's a certain number of days involved, and if he's a good kid for that number of days, he gets his allowance. We started him on this game at age 5, right after he graduated from the potty training game. If all goes well, Ana will start the allowance game at 5 as well.
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