Urine, urine, everywhere…
…and not a drop to…wait a minute.
Ollie has been potty trained for so long, that we often don’t even think to bring extra clothes with us. Therefore, it was a little disconcerting when Oliver started having accidents several times a day for a few days. I don’t think it is unusual to have the occasional minor set-back, but it just kept catching us off guard. We kept thinking, “Well, of course we don’t have to worry about him having another accident, he just had one.”
This is why, after he had a “small” accident, we decided to go to the mall anyway. However, we at least had the common sense to take him directly to the potty.
Sara went in with him and got him situated, sitting on the potty. You know how public toilets have that U-shaped toilet seat on them? Well, you see, Ollie’s not real good at aiming, and with him sitting on the potty facing forward, that missing section of toilet seat was *just enough* of a gap, that when he let fly, it came shooting right out of the toilet and onto the floor.
(Not the actual scene of the crime)
“Stop, Ollie, stop!” Sara cried, immediately doing the splits to avoid the growing pool on the floor. But stop he did not, and maybe couldn’t, because he obviously had a full bladder.
“What? What Mama? What is going on??” shouted Evie from where she was standing outside of the stall, unable to see what all the shouting was about. Slowly the urine pool turned into a urine lake. Once he was finally on empty, Sara had to deal with a freaked out Evie, mop up the mess on the floor, and then discover that Oliver had also gone all over the back of his pants. She was not having what you would call a good day.
Meanwhile, I had returned some clothes and was waiting obliviously out in the hallway, wondering what was taking them so long.
It was time to beat a hasty retreat from the mall. We had promised the kids that they could play in the little play area after they went to the potty, but we had to back out on that promise as I tried to hold a pee-soaked Oliver out away from my body and retreated in a half-walk, half-run to the car. Evie was not very appreciative of our dilemma, and was demanding to play (after all, *her* pants weren’t soaked in urine).
Afterwards, Oliver sheepishly confided in Sara, ”You said stop, but I didn’t stop.”
“Look at my bottom!”
Since we last spoke about Oliver’s potty training 3 months ago, things have been going very well.
He really never puts up a fuss about going to the potty, and he hasn’t had an accident in I don’t know how long. It doesn’t even occur to me to bring a change of clothes when we leave the house anymore. The only slight hitch is that he always makes us take him to the potty downstairs, but that is manageable I suppose. At least he always goes.
He can sometimes wear underpants for his nap, but it is very unpredictable. He can go for hours without going, so he aught to be able to last through his nap, but even if you have him go right before he goes to bed, he sometimes still goes. If you think he will, he won’t, but if you don’t think he will, he will.
However, the one nut we haven’t been able to crack is poo poo. He *always* goes in his diaper at night (or at least first thing in the morning). It has been very difficult to convince him to go in the potty. He has gone several times in the potty, but it hasn’t quite translated into any sort of desire to go with regularity. Even M&M’s and a prize bucket hasn’t helped.
However, lately he has started to notice when he has to go, by suddenly announcing, “Look at my bottom!”. And I have to admit that, even though I know this is what he always says, it still makes me nervous. I always have to look at his bottom. When you get such a pronouncement (or sometimes just an emphatic “I do not have to go poo poo!” out of nowhere), you grab him and run. And then he goes, just like that.
Of course, he still goes in his diaper at night anyway, but hey, it’s going in the right direction, right?
4 simple steps to successfully potty training your child
Well, it’s that time folks: potty training time.
Oliver had shown some vague interest in the potty some time ago, but we hadn’t really forced the issue. “When we get back from vacation,” we said, “we’ll really give it the ole college try.” (We didn’t actually say, “the ole college try”. Who talks like that?) (I do, that’s who, but in this case, I didn’t really say it.) (Okay, I actually said, “the full court press“, which isn’t much better)
The game of potty training goes like this:
- Step 1 – Get him to go on the potty at all costs. Pull out all the stops and do whatever it takes. This means as much bribery as you are physically able to manage.
- Step 2 – Overpraise and make as big of a deal as you can when he goes in the potty, even if it is by accident, so that he thinks he is exercising power over you by making you act like a fool at his whim. Also, the bribing.
- Step 3 – Somehow continue to drag out step 2 as long as possible by any means necessarily. This is the tricky part, because eventually, no matter how many bribes you give and how much you act like a fool, he will eventually grow tired of this “putting pee pee in the potty” game.
- Step 4 – If you manage to drag step 3 out long enough, you’ve now tricked him into going potty enough times that it is becoming a habit. Going to the potty is just what one does. You’re over the hump now and, even though there will be minor setbacks and accidents, you have successfully broken your child’s will and ground his resistance into dust. Congratulations!
It sounds so easy, doesn’t it? It’s not. Here’s the thing: you’re walking a very fine line. Around this time*, your child is looking for any reason to defy you. If they catch a whiff of the fact that this is not just a fun game you’re playing, and they actually wield immense power over you with the ability to crush your parenting hopes and dreams, they will use that power against you without a moment’s hesitation. This means no forcing. It always has to remain fun (for the kid, it will probably not be as much fun for you, and sometimes you’ll have to smile one of those I-swear-I’m-smiling-not-baring-my-teeth smiles). No shouting, no shaming, no holding down on the potty. You must outsmart your adversary, not use force.
*Side note, the sooner you potty train, the better. It might seem like it is easier to put it off until later, when your kid can better understand what’s going on, and you can reason with them. This is a fallacy. In reality, each day that goes by your child is going to be more willful and better able to defy you (both physically and mentally, as they better learn how to push your buttons). Best case scenario, you slide in right before the terrible twos hit. And for you parents with two year olds? Believe me, three is even worse. So unless you’re planning on waiting until they’re ten, you might as well start as soon as you think you can, before it gets any worse.
Okay, so enough with the philosophy, let’s get down to specifics. This is how it went with Oliver:
As with Evie, M&Ms were the perfect bribe. I swear kids will do anything for those little colored crack candies. We called them “pee pee chocolates” and he could have one if and only if he put his pee pees in the potty. He was really resisting going on the potty, and it seemed like a hopeless cause until the very first time he got a pee pee chocolate. Literally one time and he was hooked. In this case, we always gave Evie a pee pee chocolate as well, to avoid jealousy. Oliver didn’t seem to mind at all, he always made sure to get her, so she wouldn’t miss out. No one else is aloud to touch the pee pee chocolates, sometimes not even me.
Ollie: “Mama is in charge of the pee-pee chocolates.”
We did the usual overpraising, clapping and dancing, along with “hip-hip-hoorays” (in which I toss him up in the air and catch him three times), and singing the song we made up for Evie when she was potty training, which he loves. (“Pee pees in the potty, Ollie listened to his body!” congo-line style) He also enjoyed wearing his “big boy underwear” (or “big boy panties” as they get called as often as not in our house…this is what happens when you have an older sister).
Then came the hard part, where you need to come up with a constant stream of new ideas to keep him interested. The whole, “Nala wants to see you go pee pee” wore out very quickly. It just goes to show you, what motivates one child, doesn’t necessarily motivate another.
No, instead, what worked the best for him was to say, ”wouldn’t it be so funny if…”. He was really into the phrase at the time, so I came up with the idea of co-opting it for our purposes. ”Wouldn’t it be so funny if you put your pee pees in the potty?” ”Wouldn’t it be so funny if you went pee pee on the potty in the kitchen?” ”Wouldn’t it be so funny if you went pee pee on the white potty?” It was a stroke of genius, and it worked like a charm. Hey, whatever works. This is what got us started, and worked for quite some time.
Eventually, everything stopped being so funny and this technique finally stopped working. After a moment of panic, where he didn’t want to go and we didn’t have anything motivational, we came up with another brilliant idea: “Wouldn’t it be soo funny to go pee pee on some toilet paper”? Why yes, apparently it would. Ollie loves to “get it wet” as he terms it. Just put a piece of toilet paper in the potty and he’ll sit right down and go on it. I had eventually planned to turn this into a whole host of things it would be so funny to go pee pee on (the only other one I could think of was a Cheerio, but there must be other things I could think of if I had to), but it turns out they weren’t needed (Actually, the first time this technique was successful, it involved going pee pee on a handful of sand in the potty. It was so funny.). Even now, this is the best motivational tactic we have. Oliver usually rips off the toilet paper and puts it in the potty himself, before going.
I think we have now moved into the final stage, because he now no longer even questions sitting on the potty. When we say it’s time to go, he goes.
It should be noted that a kid this age is not going to fully get everything at once. The first step is to teach him what to do with a potty. We still have to put him on the potty every hour to avoid accidents. If he has to go, he just goes. He doesn’t understand about holding it, not even with wearing big boy underwear and getting a dried cherry if he keeps them dry. However, now that we’ve accomplished step 1, it’s pretty clear that he’s starting to get the other parts too, even without us telling him. Several times now he’s told us that he had to go before he went. Yesterday, he went all day with no accidents, and even went poo poo in the potty for the first time. He’s also kept his diaper dry for his nap several times. So he’s certainly getting it.
One final thing, I had mused about the commonly held wisdom that boys are harder to potty train than girls. I think I can say that we did not find that to be true. At the beginning it seemed that way, since Evie had been interested in the potty before potty training and Oliver had not. However, Evie was potty trained by about 22 months, and Oliver will be by about 24 months. In other words, it is within the margin of error. Oliver looks like he will take a little bit longer to be completely trained, but it was MUCH less stressful than with Evie (though I think this is mostly due to us being much better at it the second time around, and keeping it fun). Also, it’s quite possible he could have gone two months earlier if he had been wearing cloth diapers and we hadn’t had to schedule it around our vacation.
So that’s it. KEEP IT FUN and you too can successfully enjoy leaving the house with half as much stuff and constantly begging to use the bathroom in strange places!
The most important part of potty training: your cat
(Notice the colon in the title there, I’m not talking about potty training your cat)
Sara pointed out that Evie was potty trained by the time she was Oliver’s age. Potty training Oliver started well, then immediately went downhill. Absolutely no luck with that one. It had gotten so bad, we decided to lay off for awhile, to try to avoid putting pressure on him.
One day I remembered a trick that we had used very successfully with Evie: use the cat. Nala likes to “listen” to hear pee pee go in the potty. At first, Oliver was very excited about this. ”Nala listen! Nala listen!” he’d say. I thought, “The cat potty trained our children,” and prepared to write this blog post. However, Oliver’s ardeur has since re-cooled (although I did one time get him to go poo poo by having his toy fish listen instead).
Le sigh.
Everybody says that boys harder to train. Is this true? It seems silly to me, and the differences between Evie and Ollie seem to be just regular differences in their personalities, rather than gender differences. Evie was just more interested in the potty. Also, Oliver was using the potty back before we had to quit on cloth diapers, but Evie always had cloth diapers. The theory goes that it is easier to potty train with cloth diapers, because they feel more uncomfortable when they are wet. So maybe that’s the difference. But then again, here we have a boy who is a little behind where the girl was at, so maybe I’m just trying to justify it. I don’t know.
Like I said, we are not putting the full court press on him at the moment, but when we do we will certainly try putting him back in cloth diapers for a little bit. It will be a race to see which happens first: he learns to go on the potty, or his diaper rash / eczema gets so bad that we feel too awful to keep him in cloth diapers. Hopefully the former, rather than the latter.
Anyway, long story short, so far Ollie is a no go on the potty, but if you are potty training you should definitely consider how best to use the family cat to your advantage.
19 months is too young to potty train, right?
Oliver went on the potty SIX TIMES today!!
The Week of Pee
Evie has been potty trained for well over a year now, but still wearing a diaper at night. She quit wearing diapers for her nap a long time ago, but every morning her overnight diaper was soaked. Every once in a while she would have a dry diaper or two. For the longest time we told her that, if she had dry diapers for 7 nights in a row, she could switch to panties overnight. She was excited at the prospect, but it was never quite enough motivation to go for it. She also got to pick a prize from the prize bucket for dry diapers. Every now and again we would give a little push to try and get rid of the diapers (for example, having her go potty a 2nd time after her bath), but we weren’t really that concerned with it. We thought she could do it, but if she didn’t want to, we were fine with that.
Then, something happened that clued us in.
When she started back at daycare, she got a diaper at nap time. She hasn’t had a diaper for her nap in probably 6 months, and she never has an accident. However, when they put a diaper on her, she wet it. Ah ha! Having the diaper on made her feel like she didn’t really need to worry about it, almost like giving her permission.
So we decided to just go for it. No diaper at night, and if she wet the bed, she wet the bed. We’d try it for a week, if it worked it worked, if it didn’t, it didn’t. We even bought extra sheets in preparation.
It only took 2 nights.
After the second night of wet sheets she was done going overnight. She’s had one accident overnight since then, but that’s it. There’s nothing like quitting cold turkey! I have to say, it was WELL worth those two nights of extra laundry!
Potty Update
I realized I hadn’t really had a good post to close out the potty training.
Evie is just the super most awesome in the world. She is doing so great. We had our rough patches, but we pushed through them. We still have some power struggles now and again, especially if we try to force her to go, but if we just leave her alone about it, she takes care of everything.
She hardly has any accidents, maybe one a week at most. She doesn’t wear a diaper during her nap and her overnight diaper is dry most nights. She has been going poo poo in the potty for weeks now. We discovered the magic formula for that was to put her on the potty, tell her to hold on tight, run and find Nala, toss her in the bathroom, go out and shut the door. Usually she was going before the door was even closed. The privacy part is very important, even though I am always a little nervous about leaving her perched precariously on the edge of the toilet.
She also knows that going poo poo means she gets to pick out a prize from the prize bucket, which is mostly stickers and toys from cereal boxes. Believe me, it doesn’t take much, one of her favorite prizes was a thing of travel size Kleenexes. Another good reward is singing the “potty song” which is a nice little conga that goes, “Pee pee in the potty! We listened to our body!” Sara is quite proud of the second line. 
Evie has always enjoyed going out of the house more than in the house, so taking her to new places isn’t really a problem. In fact, the problem was that she enjoyed strange potties a little too much and would insist on going over and over again at every stop. I think the thing that fixed that was only allowing her to wash her hands if she actually went potty. She thinks that washing her hands is pretty exciting, and she especially likes to see what color soap a particular place has. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has every bathroom in the city memorized and categorized by soap color. Using this as a “reward” seems to have calmed it down to 1 or 2 trips instead of 4 or 5.
Evie is something of a clothes horse, so it should have come as no surprise when she started wanting to change her underwear about 10 times a day. It can be pretty frustrating, but we quickly learned to let her change whenever she wanted or else she would pee in them just so she could change them. This has been lessening lately though, and she has some days where she stays in the same pair all day.
She has even started going by herself now, I mean completely by herself, up until the part when she calls you in to show off her handy work. So I think we can say she is officially potty trained! Well, I would have said it a while ago, but it’s not official until it is on the blog.
In summary, hard work, persistence and out smarting your enemy, those are the keys to potty training!
Did you miss me?
Of course you didn’t, because you didn’t know I was gone.
It’s been a long week and a half or so. Evie and Sara were in MI all last week until Thursday when we met for camping. Always when Sara is going to be gone I think to myself, “I am going to have sooo much time to do whatever I want!” and then I end up being busier than I normally am trying to get all the stuff done I’m supposed to get done while they are gone. So I was actually staying up late every night trying to finish everything I needed to do and didn’t get a lot of free time.
I ain’t complain’ though, because Sara had it much worse. Evie has taken it into her head to have some real tantrums, screaming, kicking, the whole nine. I remember a particular phone call in which I could hear Evie in the background yelling gems like, “It is nice to bite mommy!” Most of these tantrums involve the potty in one way or another. She is very willful and doesn’t like being told what to do, therefore, every little thing becomes a battle of wills. I understand this is pretty typical of her age, so once we are through it, we’re hoping it will go dormant again until she is a teenager.
Many of the problems are exacerbated by being on vacation. First off, she doesn’t have her usual routine going on around her. Second off, she is getting less sleep since her sleep schedule is off and her naps are often shortened because of stuff that we’re doing. Third, she is having a really good time and doesn’t want to do the things she needs to do (like sleep). Finally, when we are busy trying to do things she has more power to disrupt our life and she knows it. And she does not use this power for good. All of this lead Sara to proclaim it the “worst week she’s ever had as a parent” and seriously think about canceling the vacation altogether.
All that unpleasantness aside, there have also been some bright spots on the potty training front. She doesn’t really have a lot of accidents and she is starting to stay dry through naps and even through the night sometimes, despite her diaper. One night she even got Sara to take her to the potty in the middle of the night so she could go.
The actual camping went really well. We were going to tent camp, but the prospect of a wet weekend caused us to upgrade to a cabin and I think it was a wise choice. We were basically unaffected by the rain. One of the highlights of the trip was going to a u-pick strawberry and cherry farm and picking our brains out. Each strawberry was better than the last and I probably ate a pound of cherries. We may have overdone it a little bit on the strawberries; I don’t know how we can eat them all before they go bad. We’re doing what we can though and even as I write this I am eating fresh strawberries!
Evie also had a great time. When we got home she stayed in the car for about 15 minutes hysterically crying for us to get back in the car (right now!) and drive back to the camp site. She has also been asking to do some of the things we did while camping, such as “see the doggies” or “go swimming”.
So that’s about it, back home safe and sound, at least until the next vacation. I don’t have any quotes for you today, although I’m sure she said plenty of hilarious stuff over the long weekend.
The Zoo
On Saturday, we met a friend from college and went to the zoo. Going into it, Evie had some pretty high expectations: she wanted a lion to “roar at her” and to have a monkey “give her a stick”. 50% of those expectations were met.
The highlight of the trip for Evie was riding on the carousel, seeing the monkeys, and seeing a llama “pee-pee and poo-poo outside”. She was a little frightened on her first trip on the carousel, but by the 3rd rotation or so, she was loving it. “More music!” she demanded when the ride was stopping. She wanted to go right back on as soon as it stopped, but we did some other stuff and then came back. As we were nearing the carousel she was straining ahead so hard and bouncing with excitement, I was afraid she would hurt herself! As for the monkeys, I knew she was enjoying them at the time, but I didn’t realize how much until she was recounting to us what she had seen and every other thing was “More monkeys!” Like, “Monkeys, a lion, more monkeys, a carousel, more monkeys, etc.” As for Sara and I, we were just thrilled that a gorilla was sitting just a few feet away obviously enjoying a big piece of broccoli. Looks like we have a good tool to use to get her to eat her broccoli!
Now, the highlight of the zoo for me was the lion exhibit. Normally the lions just sit around doing nothing. You could easily replace them with a fake lion or at least an animatronic one and nobody would even notice. Well, not this time! As we watched, the male lion picked a fight with a female lion including rolling around on the ground and roaring. It was AWESOME! And Evie didn’t seem to care much, even though roaring was something she specifically wanted to see. She was more interested in sitting on a bench. I guess she’s not old enough to realize that seeing lions fighting isn’t something you see everyday. The tiger was pretty rad too as he ran and jumped all around and trying to fish his toy out of the water. On a whole, way more active than I have ever seen these big cats.
As far as the potty training, it has been going great. We were pretty worried about the zoo, since we would be gone from the house for so long, but she had NO accidents. This even included us running from the monkey house and searching for a bathroom, and she held it the entire time. We were very impressed.
Since then, however, we seemed to suffer a setback. She just doesn’t want to go on the potty. She knows she has to go, she asks to go, but when she gets there and sees the potty, she changes her mind. This is repeated over and over because she knows she has to go, so she keeps asking to go. After a while of not going, she will have an accident. She really can’t help it, she just has to go so bad. I’m not sure what happened to cause this backlash of her not wanting to sit on the potty and therefore I don’t really know what to do about it. I’m hoping we can just get through until we pass this phase and then it will get better. Any suggestions?
Potty Training
Let me just start by saying WHAT a weekend. I had no idea that potty training was so exhausting!
A lot of parenting books talk about potty training when your child is “ready”. These days a lot of kids don’t potty train until they are 3 or even 4. Obviously every kid is different, but it was very clear that Evie was ready, even though she’s not even 2. We bought a potty ages ago and encouraged her to sit on it whenever she wanted to. She went a few times by coincidence right away, but it had been a long time since she has done anything. Mostly she just sits and has us read books to her. However, she recently went on the potty intentionally, so that was one indicator. She also began telling us when she went or was going poo poo in her diaper so we could change her right away, which was another pretty clear sign. So, we decided not to make any plans for the long weekend and just see how it went.
We approached it the same way we’ve approached every aspect of parenting; like hardcore researchers. Sara read everything she could find on the subject including webpages, discussion groups, books from the library, etc. She can tell you the pros and cons of any potty video, type of potty seat, books about potties as well as the various methods of potty training. After reading extensively, she gives me maybe the top 5 or 6 books and webpages and then I read those. This system works well for us because I think there are all kinds of viewpoints on this stuff, some of them conflicting, and I think you need to have all the information available so that you can pick and choose what makes sense for you and your family. If you just pick one method and stick with it, you never know A) if there is a better system out there and B) if it is going poorly, you have nothing else to try, no plan B.
So, Sara was home with her on Thursday, but the plan was that I would start it on Friday so that we would have one of us (me) that was with her continuously the entire time, Friday through Monday, for consistency’s sake. So we began talking it up to her, saying things like, “On Friday, we won’t be wearing diapers anymore!” and “On Friday you can wear your new Elmo underwear!” etc. However, all the talk must have sunk in because on Thursday evening she demanded to go on the potty. I guess we were right about her being ready, because she had 4 pee pees and 1 poo poo vs. only 1 accident! Most of our success was due to Evie’s instant love of M&Ms which were reward enough to make her do *anything* including pee pee on command. When we went to bed on Thursday we were really riding high! We never expected so much success and we just couldn’t believe how easy everything had gone.
Never count your chickens before they’re hatched.
On Friday, we began in earnest the plan we had worked out. Evie would wear her “big girl” Elmo underwear all day except for her nap. In addition to lots of praise and excitement, Evie could pick prize from the prize bucket every time she went on the potty. Concurrently, we would set a timer for 15 minutes. If she was dry when the timer went off, she could have an M&M. If not, no biggie, but she would have to wait another 15 minutes for an M&M. I thought this last piece was especially brilliant because, yes you want her to go in the potty, but you also want to teach her about keeping herself dry and holding it in.
The plan looked great on paper, but it quickly went south. She wouldn’t sit on the potty for anything. You read these different methods for potty training and people say, “Oh I sit her on the potty every 20 minutes until he goes.” Sounds good, but this is not an infant, if she doesn’t want to sit somewhere she ain’t sitting. It’s like trying to hold a weasel in a sweater. And because she wouldn’t sit, the whole reward system we worked out was nullified. I wasn’t going to force her down on the potty with her screaming bloody murder because I didn’t want to give her toilet issues or something. (Side note, do you think there was ever a point in history when it was common for people to yell, “Bloody murder! Bloody murder!” The phrase has to come from somewhere.) The 15 minute timer went okay except that she wanted those M&Ms so bad that she would demand them before the timer was up. When I didn’t give them to her, she would have an absolute tantrum. There was also an incident where the timer went off and when I got the bowl down she snatched two M&Ms and stuffed them in her mouth instead of just one. I made her give one back and that was the fit to end all fits. So, by the time Sara got home we had many screaming fits and about 6 consecutive accidents on the floor, vs. zero pee pees in the potty. I was not only worn out from fighting with her all day (and the fact that she gets up at 5:30 every morning) but also, it takes a surprising amount of energy to shadow her all day long and watch for signs that she has to go. Evie was worn out too. The only part that could be considered a success about the whole day is that none of her accidents were on the carpet!
Now the interesting thing is that, once Sara came home Evie had a couple of successful potty runs. This was quite perplexing, not to mention deeply depressing in terms of my parenting skills! We’ve rehashed the disastrous Friday a couple of times and we have a number of theories. First off, there are a lot of things she will do for Sara that she just won’t do for me. She is a definite mama’s girl. Second off, it could be that Friday was just an adjustment period and it had to happen like that no matter who was home with her; it just happened to be me. Third, many of the things we tried that day we ended up ditching going forward, such as the timer and M&Ms. It just seemed to cause trouble and not really gain us much. So it could be that the techniques we tried on Friday didn’t work well for her. In other words, it was a learning day for us as much as for her. Or Fourth, maybe I just wasn’t very good at it. Who knows.
Not that it mattered very much, because on Saturday we turned it all around. I’d say she went in the potty about 30 times vs. about 3 accidents (really only 1 that went on the floor). Maybe it was because Sara was there, maybe it wasn’t, but I was just so happy that it didn’t turn out like Friday that I didn’t care! It was a huge rousing success, even if she was going the teeny tiniest amounts about every 45 minutes.
Like I said, we dropped the timer and M&Ms and we focused more on, “What is your body telling you?” We still had to follow her around and watch her like a hawk and throw in a couple of, “are you still dry?”‘s now and again. Also, we sort of let her take the lead on what kind of reward she wanted the next time she went. Sometimes it was an M&M, sometimes it was a sticker, sometimes it was to water the plants. Whatever works! It seemed more motivating to her when she got to pick.
Sunday went even better. We still had a lot of success, but she was going every couple of hours instead of every 45 minutes. We even made a couple of ventures out of the house, to the garden and the close park, and she was okay. Sara wanted to try her nap without a diaper, but that didn’t go so well, so we’ll stick with the diaper for her nap for a while. I think she went something like 26 hours in between accidents.
Today we ventured even further out of the house. She had an accident at the garden, but she went 3 times on the regular potty at the museum! We were pretty worried about that, but it actually worked out okay. She was really excited about it and is looking forward to more potties to try.
::Whew:: This is a long post, but believe me, the actual experience seemed longer still. I have to say though, it went relatively smoothly and it could have been a lot, lot worse. I’m knocking on wood, but I think at this point we have this one in the bag!
Evie Update Monday
“What color is Evie’s hair?”
“Blonde”
“What color is mommy’s hair?”
“Grey!”*
*Disclaimer, Sara is forcing me to write in here that she does not actually have any grey hair.
And P.S., it’s my blog and I can write grey with an ‘e’ on it like a filthy redcoat if I want to! Take that world!
Over the weekend we got our garden all set up. We bought our plants from the gardens of Gethsemane – no joke, that was the name. It’s not as good as the garden of eat’n’, but I was still chuckling over it for a long time. It took Sara and I about 3 hours in the garden and another hour or so on the back porch, but everything looks beautiful. Looks like we’re going to have even more stuff than last year, as every square inch of our garden is accounted for, including plans for what goes in when certain things are done.
Evie went on the potty for what I think can be counted as the first time. She has gone a few times before, when she was younger, but I think this was the first time where she did it consciously, knowing what she was doing and why. That’s a big step. We’re not really potty training her per say, but we do let her sit on it whenever she wants to. Usually she will sit forever, but never go. So hopefully she will start to do this more and more and then we can try to potty train her for real. It certainly would be nice to be able to leave the house without all the diapers, etc.!
Sara found an article that says morning sickness increases the chance your child will have a high IQ. She thinks that people are just saying that as a consolation prize for the people who have a rough time with morning sickness, but anecdotally I will say that Sara had really, really bad morning sickness and Evie is really, really smart. You be the judge.
Since I began with a funny story about Sara, I feel I should end the same way; bookend-like. The other night I was sleeping blissfully when Sara forcefully pressed her arm against mine and yelled triumphantly, “They’re finally together!” I woke up rather confused and looked at her, but she wasn’t awake. I guess I’ll always wonder what the heck she was dreaming about.
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