September 2009

So Sammy is potty trained, I suppose.  She doesn’t wear diapers while she is awake.  But she gets confused if she wears clothes. 

We used the naked method recommended by Principled Parentand it worked really well, but when we found out that she could not go to Montessori in a dress sans underwear, we realized that we’d better start practicing wearing clothes.  Surprisingly, she’s doing better with #1 than with #2.  In fact, in the past 3 days, not one poop has gone in the potty.  They’ve all gone in her clothes or on the floor.  I’m not sure what’s up with that, since she originally was much more comfortable using the potty for #2.  Right now I’m just trying to be patient and hope that she figures it out on her own, but I don’t know – maybe I need to do something about it.

We did get a Piddle Pad (also recommended by PP) for the car seat.  I wasn’t going to get one – I figured a towel would do – but when we were at WalMart buying school clothes for her, Sammy brought over a package and put it in the cart.  Lo and behold, it was a Piddle Pad, so we bought it!  Bright girl, that one.  Fortunately, she hasn’t had any accidents in the car yet, but I know it will happen the first time she dozes off in the car.

She did just fine at day care last week – not a single accident.  And there were no problems at Montessori today either, although it was just a 2 hour day.  What she is doing is letting out just enough urine so that she won’t leak or have an accident, but holding the rest.  I’m not sure why she is doing this, or what to do to help her realize that she can just let it all out at once.

She seems comfortable with all kinds of potties, but at home she prefers the little plastic buckets.  We got 2 of them from Ikea for a few bucks apiece.  Sammy actually uses the potty, wipes herself (if reminded), pours the pee into the big toilet, closes the lid, flushes, and washes her hands, all by herself.  She does need help using the soap, though.  We have one of those awful, huge pedestal sinks in the powder room and the soap is just too far away for her to reach. 

Anyway, I hope she doesn’t want to use the buckets for much longer.  It’s quite messy, and when she is using the potty 3-4 times an hour, I’m not inclined to mop up the floor or disinfect the potty every single time.  Do people actually do that?  I just mop up the worst of it with toilet paper and clean up at the end of the day.  And how in the world are you supposed to help a child wipe her butt, anyway?  There is no way you can get in there while she is standing up.  I have Sammy walk into the living room and lie down on a pad and raise her legs just like I did with diapers.  I was hoping that particular indignity was over for her, but I can’t figure out what else to do.

That reminds me – another purchase that was well worth it was Sammy’s own special Kandoo wipes and toddler soap.  She likes to have things that are just for her.

The new gear we have to haul around is our portable Potette potty, extra clothes, wipes, and towels.  The Potette can function as a stand alone potty like the bucket, except that it has a bag/liner that catches the product and can then be disposed of easily.  It can also be used as an attachment to put on top of toilet seats that are just too big.  Sammy doesn’t seem to like to use it that way.  If she uses a toilet, she prefers to just sit on it and hold herself up with her hands.  (We might not get any use out of those fancy toilet seats we bought a few months ago!)

Overall, the whole process hasn’t been all that bad.  I expected a lot more accidents than we’ve had.  One more piece of advice from PP that was particularly helpful was this:

I had to learn to trust my kid. When we first started potty training and we were in the outside world I would nervously ask him over and over if he had to go potty. Ben and I would make each other anxious and Charlie got upset by our bothering him. It also resulted in an accident out and about. From this we learned to relax and not push the issue. It’s OK to remind him after a significant amount of time has passed, but not be bothersome.

I do think that the parents’ attitude plays a huge role in how the process goes.  Too much anxiety is counterproductive.  A little trust goes a long way.  Being patient with accidents is critical.  Accidents will happen.  If you set your expectations it won’t bother you so much and you can keep the attitude of this being an exciting new thing your child can do.  Finally, taking the action of putting away the diapers, telling your child that they are not needed any more, and meaning it, is probably the most important part of the whole process.  That, and lots of Clorox wipes.

My daughter has decided that she wants to be called, not Samantha, not Sam, but Sammy.  So Sammy it is!

I started asking her the question, “What would you like to be called: Sam, Sammy, or Samantha?” a few weeks ago.  I tried to ask it at totally random moments, and I altered the order of the 3 versions of her name, since she still tends to choose the last item in a series when she has no real preference.  Every single time, she answered definitively, SAMMY.

I figured that now is a great time for her to decide on a preferred version of her name, since she is starting preschool on Monday.  She has to wear a name tag for the first three days, so we made sure it read, “Sammy.”  We also informed her teacher last night at the open house.

Sammy is the form of her name that we’ve used the least, but we tend to use it occasionally when cuddling or goofing around – very positive associations.  Also, it’s the one that sounds the most like MOMMY and DADDY, which I suspect is the primary reason she chose it.

I’m not crazy about calling her Sammy, and I have a feeling we’re going to have to go through another adjustment period at some point (12, 13 years old, maybe?) when she decides that Sammy is a baby-name, and wants to be called one of the other versions.  But so be it. 

We’ve also named our little embryo.  Actually, we named the potential potential a couple of months ago, when it was still just a hope.  We call it SS.  Sam’s Sibling.  Oh, excuse me – I mean, Sammy’s Sibling.

Be sure to read Day 1 and Day 2 if you haven’t already.

Day 3 was, shockingly, even more difficult than either of the previous days.  I guess Sam’s goal today was to hold her poo instead of her pee like she did yesterday.  She made little nuggets all day long.  I mean, she probably went poo 15-20 times, and each time it caused her horrible pain.  I mean, screaming in agony, begging me not to touch it kind of pain.  She has awful diaper rash, which makes no sense to me, but every time she let out a little bit, it stung, and then I had to wipe her.  So 15 times today, I had to hold my daughter down on the ground and pry her legs open and cause her great pain.

It was just awful.  I’m a total wreck.

Because she was holding it in, she really didn’t make it to the potty much.  She’d be doing something, then scream in pain because a little thing came out, and then she’d sit on the potty but she would not let anything more come out.  In the morning, however, before it got too bad, she did go pee and poo once each, so I guess that’s something.  And two other times she made more substantial poops, plus, of course, the stuff that was in her overnight diaper and her nap diaper.  I’ve never dealt with so much poo in one day, not even when she was an infant.  We must have made up 3 new poo songs today.

This evening, we took her out for ice cream after dinner but it wasn’t a really good test of the potty training because she ate her ice cream and then a bit of poo came out and she screamed in agony again.  She sat on the portable potty in the back of the SUV, which was a first.  She really didn’t seem to have a problem with the potty so much as she just did not want to poo.  I wish I knew if this was caused by the potty training somehow, or if it’s just a terrible coincidence, but it’s very disheartening and it made me want to quit, even after all the progress of the last two days.  But I didn’t.

She’s supposed to go to day care tomorrow, but I can’t send her in this condition.  I’m hoping the diaper rash (or whatever it is) clears up tomorrow so I can send her on Wednesday.  She’ll have to wear clothes and be around all the other kids, and she’ll have to ask the teacher to go to the potty.  I think she can do it.  She might have an accident, but I’m pretty sure she has the idea and just needs to keep practicing. 

Overall, I like this potty training method.  I wish I had tried it a year ago when she first showed signs of being ready, but I just didn’t think I had to really do anything.  For some reason, I thought it would just happen, just like all the other things she learned to do like walking and talking.  That might be true for some children, but probably not many.  But I guess, in a way, we didn’t really do much with this method either.  We showed her how to use the potty a long time ago, and now, all we did was take away the diapers and clothes and let her figure out how to deal with it.  We gave her a few stickers for fun, but she didn’t really care about that.  More rewards would have been meaningless.  We did a pee-pee dance, but she didn’t really need that either.  She knew what to do and she did it.  We just had to remove her crutch and stick with it.

The worst thing about this method is that it is so boring.  You really need two people to trade off watching the child, especially on the first day, when there is a lot of dribbling.  But you can’t really do anything else – you’re just sitting there watching.  It’s mind numbing.  The messes are no fun, but I much prefer to have a lot of them in a short period of time than to have them occur unexpectedly for a long time.  We kept the cleaning products out and set our expectations, so that was not a big deal. 

I think the only major hurdle left is testing whether Sam can wear clothes and remember to use the potty, or if she’ll forget she’s not wearing a diaper.  Oh, then later, of course, there is the nighttime issue, but I won’t expect that to happen for a long, long time. 

I’ll write an update on our progress in a week or so, but this concludes the formal discussion of poo for a while, ok?

Be sure to read Day 1 if you haven’t already.

Day 2 was much more challenging than Day 1.  In short, Sam learned how to hold her pee long enough to make it from waking up until nap and from nap until bedtime.  I’ve never heard of such a thing!

Today, Sam barely even dribbled.  She just held it all day long.  We did the exact same routine as yesterday, keeping her naked and setting the timer and watching her like a hawk.  She sat on the potty a hundred times but we got nothing more than a drip until about 8pm.  I had spent about an hour doing wild and physical play with her.  (When my dog plays like that he always has to pee, so I thought it might work with Sam too.)  I took her to the potty a few times during all this, but nothing was forthcoming.  She drank sippy cup after sippy cup of water and milk, but it all seemed to go into some kind of giant tank she has in that body.  She definitely didn’t get my bladder.

Finally, in the middle of playing “jump on mommy” she stopped, grabbed her crotch, and ran to the bathroom on her own.  I looked at Adam across the room and whispered, “This is it.  She’s going to go.  I’d bet on it.”  And I was right!  She finally made a big pee.  But it was the only one for the whole day.  She played for another hour with no need to let it out.  I’ve decided that Sam’s new theme song is “Control” by Janet Jackson, which we just happened to hear on the radio tonight.  “Control…now I’m all grown up.”

There were other strange happenings on Day 2.  Last night, Adam and I watched a movie and forgot to turn on the baby monitor and when we went upstairs, we heard Sam crying.  I could tell something was wrong, so I raced into her room and she told me that her ear hurt.  We gave her some Ibuprofen and I held her for about a half hour then she went back to sleep.  This morning there was no mention of a pain in her ear.  Was she making it up?  I’m not sure.

Then, there is the mysterious fact that, although Sammy went all day without a diaper yesterday, she developed a terrible diaper rash last night.  It could be all the extra juice, or the fact that she was constantly dribbling all over herself and we didn’t use the baby wipes, but just toilet paper.  Or maybe it was the stress of it all.  But it was an inconvenient thing to happen because it made all of her excretions very painful.  I’ve been telling her for ages that when she starts using the potty she’ll have less diaper rash, so it made me feel like a liar and I was really concerned that it would be traumatic.  But after a successful Number 1 and Number 2, I think she’s ok.

Another strange thing was that Sam took a 2.5 hour nap.  This is Ol’ Reliable we’re talking about here.  She’s a one hour napper, and when she sleeps longer than 1.5 hours, I start to worry.  We actually had to wake her up after 2.5 hours.  Was she exhausted?  Or was she just maximizing her diaper time?

Anyway, it was a difficult day.  Being me, I was stressed out all day because Sam wasn’t using the potty.  But, wait!  She didn’t make any messes all day and when she finally needed to go, she went to the potty on her own.  Isn’t that the definition of being potty trained?  She just had to do it her own way.  This girl is going to be one difficult teenager.

So we decided to buckle down and get this potty training thing done.  I’ve forgotten who recommended this, but we’re following this “potty training in three days” method outlined here.  Today was Day 1.

The process actually started last night, when I told Samantha that we were getting rid of all the diapers and pull-ups, and that she would only wear them while sleeping from now on.  I told her that she could be “naked girl” all weekend, and that both mommy and daddy were going to stay home with her all weekend.  That was exciting!

This morning, we took off the last diaper and told her that all her pee and poo had to go in the potty now.  We reminded her where her potties were and we put a shirt on her, but nothing on the bottom.  We’ve done all of this before, so it was nothing new for her.  What was new was that we took all the diapers and supplies up to her room and put them away in a drawer.  I think this had a big impact.

She made a poo in the potty mid-morning, which was great.  We gave her all the juice she wanted, and after a while, she started dribbling pee down her leg.  She knows how to hold it, so she wasn’t going to make a big puddle.  So she’d sit on the potty and put a few drops of pee in it, and we’d cheer and give her a sticker, but we knew she was still holding it.  We set a timer for 30 minutes and when it went off, it was time to try the potty again.  We did that all morning and she was only slightly resistant to sitting on the potty.  After a few tries, she was resigned to it – she knew that the timer meant she had to at least try. 

By nap time, however, she still had not done more than dribble a little pee.  I put her diaper on for nap and when she woke up, of course it was full.

We continued in the afternoon the same way.  We went outside and hung out in the front yard for a while.  I had her try the potty before we went out, then we put a long dress on, with nothing underneath.  We brought the potty out and she needed to sit on it a dozen times in the hour we were out there, but still, just dribbles.  At one point she started begging for a diaper.  She really needed to go.  We gave her more liquids.

Then at six, the dam burst.  She dribbled, we took her to the potty, and she sat down and made a big, real pee.  This was a first!  We got so excited that we offered her some leftover birthday cake.  I didn’t want to start the reward thing again after the problems we had before with rewards, so we told her that the cake was a celebration, not a reward, and that we would not be giving her any more cake for peeing.  She was fine with that.  About 3 minutes later, she did another huge pee.  Then 5 minutes later, another.  I stopped counting after a while, but I’d guess she did about 7 large pees in the potty between 6 and 8pm.  She also made one more poo.  Most of the time, the need to pee was signaled by a dribble down the leg, but once she said, MOMMY PEE PEE PEE PEE PEE!  And another time she just went on her own.

I’d say Day 1 was a great success!  I think this is going to work.  Stay tuned…

Today is the day we’re celebrating Sam’s birthday.  We continued our tradition of surprising her with helium balloons first thing in the morning.  The past 2 years we’ve put them in her room and tied up the strings but this year we put them in the hall outside her room and left them loose.  When she came out of her room she said, MOMMY! COME IN MY ROOM, COME IN MY ROOM!  I went to her and realized that she was so sleepy that she didn’t know what she was seeing.  The hall just seemed full of hanging strings.  I told her they were her birthday balloons and she said, RUN THROUGH THERE REAL FAST, and she ran through all the strings to our bedroom.  Only after that did she realize that these were balloons and she started squealing with delight. 

After breakfast we opened presents.  Sam’s big present this year was a real bike with training wheels.  We skipped over the trike thing since Sam already had a kind of scooter.  The bike is a bit challenging for her, but her friend next door has one and Sam really wants to ride with her.  She also got a porcelain tea set, some clothes, magnetic letters, a threading game, books, necklaces, headbands, and more.  And there’s more coming from the other set of grandparents this afternoon.  How did we let this happen?

After her nap, we’re going to a park where they have a train ride, a carousel, a playground, and mini-golf, which we might try.  Sam’s friend from next door is coming, along with her brother and mom.  I would say that this girl, who I’ll call C., really is Sam’s first friend.  She’s 6 months older and the 2 of them get along very well.  Sam is always asking about her and wants to do everything with her.  It’s so wonderful to have such great neighbors.

Then we’ll come back for cake and call it a day.  I hope to get pictures up by the end of the weekend.  Hope you all have a great holiday!