Potty hard or go home

Alternate titles were also: I like to potty all the time; It's a potty party up in here.
I finally have two kids out of diapers (sort of) and I still really can't believe it! I thought we would never get Jackson potty trained, even though we started in March and two months felt like for friggin' ever.
I say sort of because he still wears a diaper/pull-up for nap time and also has not figured out the whole number two on the pot thing. (For example, he decided the playground on Mother's Day would be a good time to poop. I found him standing very still on the play structure, leaning up against a wall, which is his code for I'm s*&tting my pants.)
Like a lot of things in life, I've realized that you can't get your kid potty trained by half-assing it. You've got to go big or go home.
Believe me, there was attempted half-assery on my part. The thought of being stranded at home with a child in undies until he got it figured out sounded terrible, so we first tried training pants (a.k.a. pull-ups) and quickly went down in flames.
I'd read blog post after blog post saying that training pants don't work and you really have to just suck it up and either let them pee in their pants or run around naked for a few days, but let's face it, I really didn't want to deal with the mess and was convinced it would be different for us.
Oh, how I was wrong.
Since training pants are essentially glorified diapers, he treated them like diapers and did his biz in them like it was business as usual, and I started to panic a bit.
I should back up a bit and say that we sort of have a deadline to get our little hambino potty trained because he's signed up for preschool in the fall and they have a requirement that all students be potty trained.
The panic was setting in because I was convinced that he just was not ready to use the potty and would have to wait a whole year to start school.
That's when we decided to go with a little tough love, and it worked like a charm!
During the pull-up debacle, we put together a little jar of trinkets that Jackson could choose from each time he went on the potty. That worked for awhile until we decided to ban pull-ups while we were home and go strictly with underwear.
He was not happy with that and for the first week he pitched a serious fit every morning when I would put underwear on him.
Once we got the said undies on him, he wouldn't tell us when he needed to go, he would just wet his pants, and when we tried to get him to sit on the potty he would freak out.
So I resorted to bribery with one of his favorite things: flavored sparkling water.
Yes, I got my kid to go potty by bribing him with sparkling water.
After doing that for a few days he finally started telling us when it was potty time and for the most part, the rest was history.
We started buckling down on the potty training thing about three weeks ago, and I could not be prouder of him for reaching this milestone.