Frakk - many thanks for the offer of the diddymos, I would normally bite your hand off at the offer, but my parents have said they'll buy me a shiny new one.
I'm not sure if I'm the person to give potty training advice as it has taken ds seemingly ages to train. I've read about different methods and they all seem to contradict each other, some say success can be attributed to the child's desire to potty train, others say it's a maturity thing.
I let ds run around without pants and put him on the potty every 30 mins. For the first few days there were lots of accidents, but I looked for the positive and saw each success as a step forward,rather than each miss as a failure. It was very hit and miss to start with, but I never used pull ups, either pants or nothing around the house, so when he started to identify the urge he took himself to the potty.
It seemed that every thing I read it mentioned that go cold turkey and they will be dry within a week. I'm not convinced about that, every now and then ds still has accidents and we started training probably nearly six months ago. He just gets too involved in what he is doing.
Ds wouldn't poo in his potty for probably the first month, he mostly poo'd in his nappy in the morning when he got up. He didn't poo that early before so we knew he had some sort of awareness of pooing because he was consciously doing it before his nappy was taken off. We got there eventually by explaining about pushing a poo out in the potty then flushing it away to poo land!
So, after much blethering, I would say being consistent and keep plugging away at it was what worked for us. You have to remember that you are having to completely retrain them and the way they think about pooing and weeing. Because we put nappies on them they don't even have to think about it. Maybe a good analogy would be someone telling you to use your cutlery in the wrong hands. The way you hold your cutlery is something that is a complete habit and something you no longer even think about, so if you had to change the hands you use your knife and fork in you would have quite a few 'accidents' until you completely retrained your brain and habit.
Being dry when asleep is something totally different. Being able to do it is to do with a hormone that the body produces and for some children it's later than others. I don't know much about it, but it's a hormone that stops the body making urine when asleep.