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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Potty training update

I haven't written about potty training for a long time, at least that I remember. Things have been going relatively smoothly around here—Miriam still has the odd accident (usually when she's too busy or too stubborn to go potty) but she's in underwear 100% of the time. I wake her up to go potty at about 11:00 PM and then she's good for the rest of the night. She'd probably be able to sleep through the night (and stay dry) if it wasn't for the ice water she insists on getting before bedtime.

Both she and Rachel insist on sippy cups filled with ice water at bedtime. Miriam will drink the whole thing, no matter the size of the cup. We recently started giving her a 4 oz. cup instead of a full-sized cup and that has helped a lot because she's perfectly happy drinking a cup that size dry as she is finishing off a  larger cups. I don't know if she likes the slurping sound at the end or what. Now that she's drinking less at night, though, she's having far fewer accidents. And I shouldn't really complain—she's only ever wet the bed three times so far and she's been in underwear at night for...several weeks. I frankly can't remember when we made the switch, but I know it was soon after we converted her crib into a bed. A month, maybe?

It's kind of funny that she's doing so well, really, because she was so non-committed about going potty during the day even just a couple of months ago. I thought it was so odd because Rachel was in underwear full-time during the day by the time she was a year-and-a-half and we didn't start elimination communication with her until she was five months old. Miriam was started on the potty the day she came home from the hospital and by eighteen months she was still a little touch-and-go. She just didn't care enough, I guess. So it's weird that she's taken to night-time potty training so much better than Rachel ever did. Rachel wet the bed so many times and it was awful because we didn't have a drier! Rachel was still in diapers at night until after she was two, so I'm very pleased that Miriam isn't even two yet and I've already put all the diapers away.

In other toilet-training-related news Rachel has finally started wiping her own bum, hallelujah!

Yesterday I made her do it. She was terrified because she had been trying to learn several months ago but kept wiping forward instead of backward and kept getting everything messy and I told her that she could make herself really sick if she didn't do it properly and that if she was going to get fecal matter all over the bathroom I'd rather just do it myself...so she just stopped trying. I walked her through the whole process yesterday, though, and she did great.

Today she did it without me coaching her and left the bathroom mess-free.

I can't decide which milestone is more freeing—not having to wipe Rachel's bum or not having to wash Miriam's dirty diapers. I'm really bad at rating things. I mean, washing dirty diapers isn't fun but I only ever did it once, maybe twice, a week. Wiping bums is also not fun—I could never be a geriatric nurse—and it's more of a daily chore and is much more hands-on than tossing a bucket of soiled diapers in a washing machine.

Neither one of those activities really fall into the category of "favourite things to do" for me, so it's probably a toss up...

But how glad am I that Miriam's diaper stage and Rachel's bum wipe stage are over? Very glad.

1 comment:

  1. Yay! Both very awesome milestones. Gareth's like Miriam. Once he decided to stay dry at night, he very rarely wets the bed. But daytime is a whole 'nother matter. I have a feeling he's going to have some embarrassing moments in elementary school. I'm not sure what the deal is, but it's really annoying. He knows what he's supposed to do and just can't be bothered I guess. At least he only has wet accidents though, and never the other kind.

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