Advice on Training Pants: Gerber, Kushies, Bummi, or Imse Vimse?

I CD my kids too, and thought about spending some $ on trianing pants for my son around that age. They can be nearly as expensive as cloth diapers, and given that you will (hopefully) only use them for a month or less, that seemed silly to me. IMHO if you're using them for longer than this, your child is still not ready or you aren't reinforcing the good habit well enough.

Instead I decided on the following approach -- which worked great and was cheap. I went to Target and got some of the Gerber training pants WITHOUT the waterproof cover. (they're cheap enough that you could get the ones with the cover for this too, but read on). We use Motherease Airflow covers on our dipes, so I just threw a cover over the trainers. Or if we were in the house, he could just wear the trainers with no pants over them, so it was obvious when he had an accident.

Anyway, he took about 2 weeks to be potty trained, and then something "clicked" in his brain and he didn't have accidents any more. We still put a cover on when going out of the house (b/c he would get distracted and forget to go) for another couple weeks, but we were able to just remove the covers and then he could wear the trainers as "big boy underpants" for a full year before outgrowing them. Anyway, my point is, by not having the waterproof cover as part of them, they were sufficiently "grown up" that he was thrilled to wear them. We didn't let him have any until we had a better-than-50% "hit rate" with the potty, though.

I CD'ed my son too. When it came time for training, and he was telling me he when he needed to potty, I just went straight for cute underpants and told him Elmo or Thomas don't want to be wet. :) It seemed to work very quickly, so we totally skipped the "Training Pants" phase and saved the money. We kept him in a diaper over night about a week, but noticed he was holding it at night and didn't need that very long either.

Good luck!
T.
www.ReadandGrow.com

I didn't use cloth diapers for my first 3, tried but I couldn't afford the service and the laundry wouldn;t let me wash them there. However, like the other posters have said, training pants can be expensive. When my kids showed they were ready, I used underpants during the day and pullups at night. There were a few misses but not horrible and they didn't like feeling wet. I plan to do the same when my little one is ready.

As a Cloth diaper user, I did research too. I ended up just buying some Gerber training pants (with no covers). I did order a few mother-ease covers for when we go out. I wouldn't waste the money on the others. Tempting, but I think totally unnecessary.

Underwear and inexpensive plastic Gerber covers (not the lined ones) over it. Cheap, easy, effective. Try it first - I think I paid less than $1 per plastic cover. I had some of those quilted training pants, but didn't like them at all. You need more of them during training because they have to be laundered (and take forever to dry), while the plastic pants just require a quick rinse. (and the underwear, you will use for a year or two.)