Breathless anticipation

It's very hard to be three years old sometimes, to have the ability to anticipate things but not have a real sense of time yet.

I made two mistakes when putting K to bed the other night. The first was to bring up the trip to visit my mother she and I are taking sometime in the next six weeks (place tickets haven't been bought yet, so the exact timing is still to be determined). The second was when K brought up the princess dress like the one a preschool classmate has that she desperately wants, I didn't put her off with something vague but instead suggested that her grandmother might buy it for her birthday.

The next morning, I went into her room to discover a duffel bag out on the floor with several shirts inside, clearly packed for our imminent trip. And the day was pretty much evenly divided between asking if it was her birthday and asking when we were going to the airport. It's very hard to deal with a preschooler who has no real concept of months yet. The best we can do for the moment is get across "Not now."

For the trip, we'll probably make up a calendar where we can cross off the days, and hopefully that will give her something more concrete to see how the time will pass. Her birthday, over four months from now, seems a bit far away for that tactic. I had actually been planning to start making her some princess dresses in the not too distant future but haven't had the time to sit down and sew, so I bought a cheap dress today and have offered it up as a potty training bribe, in exchange for dry pants for the rest of the week. We shall see how successful that tactic actually is. Bribery has never once been an effective technique for us because, heh, K isn't very good with delayed gratification. She didn't want one sticker on the sticker chart, she wanted to be able to artistically arrange multiple stickers on the page without being constrained by little boxes. It only managed to turn every potty session into a completely different power struggle than the typical one.

I'm rather thankful that the baby is still abstract enough in her mind that having to wait until June isn't too hard on her. Finding out that it's a baby brother and getting to see better pictures definitely caused her to have a big leap forward in interest, but my tactic of buying her a doll to be a practice baby brother managed to head off any disappointed about the baby not appearing right away (I had wanted to get an anatomically correct doll, but she insisted on a pink one. However, according to her it's still a boy doll, it's just a baby brother that wears pink. Way to fight gender roles, my dear). But all of her play lately has shifted from mommies and babies to big sisters and little brothers, and she's suddenly wanted to have our books on where babies come from read to her a lot. It's clearly processing through her busy little brain, but I'm just as glad that it's not real enough for her yet for her to start asking when her little brother is arriving every five minutes too.

Potty talk

Probably not of interest to non-parents.

K has been stuck at the same place in potty training since last summer. She's quite reliable with pee if she's not wearing anything on her butt. As a result, as long as we stay home all the time, she can go without diapers without much of a problem. She's even stayed dry all night a couple times.

The problem, of course, is that she can't go commando when we leave the house or when she's at daycare. I had originally bought some cloth training pants for her to wear at daycare, but the cheap Gerber versions did nothing to contain the wetness after a single accident (which is the whole point of training pants - not as thick as diapers, but thick enough to catch an accident so you don't have to change pants as well as underwear), and after a week or two of arriving every day to pick her up and finding her in disposable pullups, I gave in and started buying them to send to daycare, and to use when we left the house.*

Yes, yes, I know pullups are lousy for actually accomplishing toilet training, but the point wasn't to encourage her to use the toilet, it was to prevent having to change her pants three times a day at daycare.

But they're a crutch, and I've decided we need to go cold turkey. So I explained to K this week that we weren't buying any more pullups to use at home. I bought some for them to keep at daycare, but I don't care how many pairs of wet pants we go through, we're not using them at home. I think the only way we're ever going to achieve dryness when we leave the house is to push her a bit.

So far today, the tally is three pairs of wet pants, but while playing pantsless this evening, she marched right over to her potty and pooped in it, which is a big step forward. So all we need to do is figure out how to help her remember to use the potty when she's wearing pants. Nagging produces resistance and incentive plans have never helped. Ultimately, it needs to come from her. Hopefully she'll just figure it out with enough practice.



*K loves the different designs on the various brands of pullups, so I tend to vary what brand I buy, and get both boys' and girls' designs. I'm a little fascinated by the gender encoding - Disney Princesses and Cars on Huggies are pretty much par for the course, and Dora and Diego on Pampers make sense. Toys R Us brand has dinosaurs for boys and hearts and flowers for girls, which made me gag a little. They couldn't even put something more interesting like cats or butterflies on the girls' pullups?

But it's Target brand that really mystifies me. They have pirates for boys, and you would think the girls equivalent would be princesses (which I would love, because K loves princesses and Huggies are hella expensive). But instead, they're... lesbians. No, really. Two different designs of two girls holding hands or enjoying ice cream together, with hearts in the background. Theoretically, the design is meant to be "best friends," but I would only believe it if it was said with a knowing wink.

Because I'm sure you're as enthralled with my child's bladder as I am

K has been flirting with the toilet for the past several weeks. She's never shown much interest with sitting on her potty, but I got one with a lift-out lid that could be used as a toilet seat insert while the base could be inverted to use as a stool, and she just loves sitting on the toilet. And I love the idea of not having to clean out a potty on a regular basis, so hey - kismet!

But with life's general chaos, we hadn't been pushing it much - we sit her on the toilet if she asked and occasionally asked her if she wanted to sit on it (usually no if it wasn't her idea). The other week, we woke up and heard her in the bathroom, and discovered that she had put the toilet seat on by herself, stripped naked and sat on the toilet all on her own. The only success we've had before today was when she was dancing around the bathroom naked and started to pee, and I quickly grabbed her and put her on the toilet to finish.

It's clear she gets what the toilet is for. She'll sit on the toilet and sing about pee*, and when B had discovered her on the toilet, she said "Poop!" There wasn't any mind you, but she knew where it went. She always wants her own toilet paper when I'm using the toilet and either wipes herself (outside her clothes), or tries to help me wipe myself (I typically decline her kind offer). Then she throws it in the toilet and waves bye-bye to the pee as it gets flushed.

Today, however, she had her first success. I suppose with the amount of toilet sitting she's been doing, it was mathematically likely that she was going to pee while sitting on it at some point. Everyone was very proud of her anyway, and she had the bonus of a grandmother here to admire her great accomplishments the way only a grandmother can.

I'm still not going to push much though. We're moving in the next month and taking a plane ride at Christmas, and all of that is going to be easier if we don't have to worry about getting a small child to the toilet on time. Also, the new house will have a toilet on each floor which will be much easier than our current house where I would have to hustle her upstairs every time she needed the toilet.

But still, our first potty success! Another milestone for the baby book.

*The lyrics usually go "Pee, pee, pee, pee, pee..." Stephen Sondheim she's not.