Big Girl Panties

My little lamb has grown up so fast. Potty training had been going on for quite a while. I started to slowly introduce her to the potty around 18 months old. Some people seem to take a much harder nosed approach to potty training than I did. I really didn't want to discourage or rush her so we just started very slowly.

Very slowly got even slower when in the very very beginning of my pregnancy I was in a four-wheeling accident where I was thrown off the bike and hurt my wrist. My in-laws, of course, banned me from four-wheeling, but I already knew there would have to be no more of that until I'd had our next little lamb.

I did what I could to keep taking her to the potty despite the extreme pain in my wrist and urged my husband to sprint with her to the potty whenever he was around and I saw her make the poop face.

When she decided that she was ready to go whole hog on potty training it seemed to happen at once. She began taking off her diapers and occasionally would pee in the floor. This progressed to frequently telling me, "poop."

Now seems like a good time to let you all know the motivator we've been using in potty training, Anna's cookies. My father brought her some quite some time ago and she fell in love with them. He now sends us semi-regular shipments or brings copious amounts of them with him to make sure she has a stash of what we call, "grandpa cookies."

As soon as we saw we were getting someplace with potty training we told our little one that in the event she tells us that she needs to poop, we take her to the bathroom, and she actually poops - she could have three cookies. When she tells us, "poop", and only pees (she doesn't yet realize to tell us "pee-pee") she gets two cookies. When we take her ourselves and she pees or poops she gets one cookie.

This system generally works out really well. She did, of course, pick up that frequently after being in the bathroom she'd get cookies so occasionally she would say she needed to go, sit on the toilet for a bit, not do anything, and then tell you she should get a cookie. Sorry kiddo, that's not our deal.

Months before she decided she was "all in" on potty training I picked up some flannel to work on some training pants for her. She was really excited about the fabric I'd picked out. Big girl underpants seemed like a great motivator for potty training and the time was now upon me to finally make them.

First I found myself a tutorial - of course it came from Pintrest. I actually contacted the girl who wrote the tutorial asking if I sent her all of teh items needed to make these if she would make some at a discounted rate - her first response was that obviously it sounded like I could sew and she showed me the tutorial.

I accidentally bought the wrong sort of training pants as my base (they were plastic) so it took a while longer for me to get around to getting the correct ones. I was 30 weeks pregnant and panicking so I asked once more if she could help me but got no response.

Amazon had the second best price for a three pack of plain white Gerber training pants but sadly they were beat out by WalMart. Not in any real position to spend extra money I bought three packs of the underpants from WalMart.

Much like you will need to do with a lot of projects you need a template and this is one of those instances where you're going to need to create it yourself. In the source post for the info I was using she used wax paper, which I don't tend to keep around the house.

Trace the seams of the section of underpants that are reinforced.

Here is the template I ended up with.

Much like the original poster, I wanted to make certain I didn't mix up the front with the back of the template so I chose to label it.

Now use your template

to cut 4 layers of flannel and 1 layer of PUL.

The original poster said that the next step was to pin flannel in place inside the underpants

and sew them down. She used a zig zag stitch much like I like to do with this sort of thing. But it never said how many layers of your flannel to use. I did two layers of PUL inside and on the outside from bottom to top was PUL, flannel, and then flannel.

My first template, as you can see, ended up not really being dead on with the seams. Which proved to be a big deal after I sewed everything down.

If this happens to you just do what I did and force yourself to put on your own big kid pants, remove the wonky seams,

redo your template, and begin again.

Mine aren't 100% perfect but they still came out pretty well.

Now I just have to wait until the little lamb is really ready for these.