Potty Training and Becoming a Big Girl

Here is a haiku I wrote to commemorate the potty training experience:

Potty training sucks

It's so very frustrating

When will it be done?

I guess I don't have room to complain since, knock on wood, we're pretty much out of the woods by now, and that's exciting for me because I wasn't really planning on pushing it until Mira actually turned 3 and here we are already done. But there were a few weeks when I was ready to pull out my hair (especially the increasing number of gray ones that I'm sure are a result of this) and just give up and put her back in a diaper. But she finally decided she was ready, and compared to other moms I've talked to, we had it way easy here.

We kinda started with potty training last month but we weren't very consistent with it at first, just sitting her on the potty a few times a day and hoping for the best. I tried to make sitting on the potty something she wanted to do, so that was her time to get the iPad. She was starting to get the hang of going pee in the potty and we'd give her a sticker for her potty chart every time she had a success, then when she filled up a chart she got rewarded with new underwear with Princess Sophia on them. So then we started putting her in underwear and told her to keep Sophia dry. It worked occasionally. For the longest time we were sitting her on the potty every hour and a half to two hours just waiting for her to go, and half the time she wouldn't go until 5 minutes after we got her off the potty. So we'd make her clean up her mess and we'd try again but it was getting really old really fast. She definitely knew what the potty was for but she wasn't very good at recognizing on her own when it was time to go. It was so frustrating. And let's not even get into getting her to go poop in the potty - but I knew that would be an issue so we won't go there.

Finally what made everything click for her was some advice from a work colleague who has 4 kids. She suggested that when Mira is wearing underwear, check her every hour or so to see if she's dry. If she is, she gets rewarded then because that reinforces being dry. So we gave it a try and the next day she had it figured out! It's been quite awhile since she's had an accident. I was so nervous to try taking her out in public in underwear but she's got this. Now if she has to go she yells out, "Me pee! Me pee!" Or if I ask her if she has to use the potty the answer is usually yes - she doesn't always end up going but I'd rather take her and have her just wanting the attention than the other way around. She's usually dry in the mornings too, so we're pretty much potty trained! The diaper pail got thrown out last week. Almost 3 years exactly it's been a fixture in our bathroom but not anymore. Whew! The only part that's harder for me is that if she says she need to go potty, I have to drop everything and run her to the nearest bathroom (more so in public than when we're at home). In some ways, it was so much easier to just leave her in a wet diaper until an opportune time came about to change her. But it's still nice to not have diapers to worry about anymore - at the very least we'll save quite a bit of money!

The easiest way to learn is to teach.

Success!

Turning 3 is definitely the cutoff for really being a big girl. Besides learning to use the potty, Mira's crib will finally be switched to a toddler bed (this will happen in the next day or so) and - gulp - her binkie will go away for good. We started with taking the binkie away for naptime - which translates to Mira screaming in her room for an hour every afternoon. I think maybe once she's actually slept during naptime. I have to say that I've noticed that my temper is much shorter by the end of the day now that she's replaced naptime with screamtime. Not just listening to an hour of screaming every day and feeling like a crummy parent but now I don't get that break that I apparently was really needing. She honestly needs the extra sleep too but she hasn't figured that out yet, so we've compensated by moving bedtime up by half an hour. I'm honestly very anxious about when the binkie goes away at night. She's been so good about going to bed without a fuss for a long time and based on how naptime has gone, I'm not anticipating bedtime to go well for awhile. I know the binkie has to go sometime but I'm very much dreading this experience.

So long, sleep. Nice knowing you.

Mira is an active little girl (which is why we chose her birthday present the way we did - an entire post will be dedicated to this), and this is her new favorite game to play.

In other news, I did something I swore I never would do. I've talked a bit about the Advanced Modules available through my work, divided into Metabolic, Respiratory, Neurotrauma and Cardiovascular groups. It's a year-plus of classroom lectures, hands-on patient experiences, research, presentations, and other studying and paperwork that reminds me a lot of nursing school, except I get paid to do this learning. I swore when I got hired that I would never do the Cardiovascular module, mostly because of a traumatic experience I had during my senior capstone. But management beat me into it anyway and so - last week I successfully completed my oral examination and completed my training in the Cardiovascular Module. So much for sticking up for my convictions. But believe it or not, I actually really enjoy these patients. Go figure. And I get a lovely 2.5% pay raise for being slightly smarter! So yay me.

And since I need to brag about Mark too - here's a video of him showing off his skiing. This was at the bottom of a black diamond mogul run. Show off.

And some nice scenic views of the Canyons. Man, I love this place.

Mark is still not employed right now, but he's testing with a local department soon and he's put in for a few other positions and hopefully one of them will pan out. I love how he's not stressed now and I hope that doesn't change once he's working for a department that actually invests in its employees instead of trying to beat them down. We will continue to keep everyone posted but the aggravating truth about getting hired on in law enforcement is it takes about 5 million years to jump through all the hoops to get through to a job offer. Which is probably to the benefit of the public because you don't want to find out your police are selling crack out of their house or something but you still wish in this situation there was a fast-forward button somewhere.