Superhero Training Program

If I were trying to really impress Ben, I would give up this whole mom thing, and starting training to be a SUPERHERO.  Then, I could spend my days making cool sound effects and "booming" the bad guys.  Right now, Ben is living and breathing superheroes.  When he goes outside, he finds sticks and fights the bad guys.  When he is inside, he builds legos into ships to carry lego superheros to fight the bad guys. When we play under the covers in the morning (i.e., when mom is just trying to sleep for just a few more minutes), we fly in very claustrophobic rocket ships to go fight the bad guys.  Although Ben is improvising very well, our superhero collection is currently limited to a spiderman motorcycle, a couple well worn superhero T-shirts, a few books, and some spiderman pajamas.

Our neighbor on the other hand is swimming in superheros -- a whole big box full of superhero action figures -- which is why Ben wants to go over to their house at 6:30am every morning.  It's not to go so see his buddy; he wants to visit the toys.  

Which got me thinking.......

Maybe I should modify our potty training regimen in some way to incentivize Ben with Superhero action figures IF he would start using the toilet and keeping his pants dry.  Finally.   

We've been working on this toilet training thing for a while now.  Actually, a long while.  I just did a search on the blog and am a little shocked to see we started back at the end of May (see NAMREDIPS).  Clearly just being able to wear Spiderman underwear hasn't been enough of an incentive for Ben.  I didn't want to have to resort to any kind of reward system for the potty training, but then one of my friends reminded me that I used m&m's for Abby.  I know I used Hello Kitty stickers for Caroline.

So, I decided to offer Ben one superhero action figure (the ones we've been "visiting" at Target for a while) if he could go in the potty 15 times in 3 days.  Each successful visit gets a hand-drawn star; accidents mean a star is erased.  I went to target and plunked down $12 for one Iron Man figure and one Batman figure. 

Worth it? Probably. Although I don't know the long-term ramifications of this approach, Ben is now the proud owner of a very flexible Iron Man figure and is on Day 3 of bone dry superhero underwear (which, yes, he still insists on wearing backwards). 

Maybe this is really it for the daytime diapers?  Dare I hope???