potty training

I'm not sure I'm ready for this.  I'm not even 100% sure that Abs is ready for this either - but there's a fine line between waiting for her to be ready and ignoring it because I'm lazy.  I think she's about 85% ready, so we've decided to do some preliminary potty training.  

I'm not expecting her to be trained in a week.  In fact, I don't have any expectations.  I just want to introduce her to the concept more so that I can be a better judge of her readiness, y'know?  

So, since we had a 3 day weekend at home, I figured I'd start things off right.  We went to Target last week and bought her some "big girl underwears"  She was very excited about them.  She wanted the Mickey Mouse ones, but they were for boys, so she settled for Minnie.  We talked about them and we talked about potty training all week.  We got potty books.  I downloaded potty apps on my phone.  We were prepared. 

As an aside - can I just say that I find 99% of potty training materials (books, songs, videos, apps) to be...what's the word...abrasive?  No, that's not the word.  There's this line of having to spell things out for toddlers to understand and maintaining some sense of class about it that I find is often ignored.  This is more of my problem than the material.  I guess I just prefer not to sing and dance to bathroom topics.

So, anyway, on Saturday morning, we skipped the diaper and I let Abs run around in her shirt and panties and we...waited.  I put her on her little potty every so often to no avail.  But, it was good to talk about it and encourage her.  I spent most of the morning feeling slightly anxious and like I was watching her like a hawk.  In a word, it was tiring. 

big girl

The funniest thing was that Abby got a little cold.  Our house is old and when it's in the single digits outside, it can be cool in the house.  But, I didn't want to put Abs in pants, so she took it on herself to get warm.  She went and put on her hat, mittens, and boots and played all morning like that.  Hilarious.

tangent: Dear Abby, you will hate me one day for posting this picture, but just know this: there were others that were much more embarrassing that I could have posted.  And really, it's very very cute and makes me laugh at the memory of our Saturday morning.  I hope you see the humor in it and don't hate me for too long. 

I'm thinking this is going in her senior yearbook.

Anyway.  We tried all morning.  No luck.  Then, Abs gets up and goes down the hall and I starts *screaming*  I ran to her to find that she'd, of course, had an accident.  That had never happened to her before and it really did scare her.  The worst part?  She was still wearing her boots - which were now...kinda soaked.  She had tears streaming down her face and kept screaming "My Boooooots! Oh no!  My boots are wet!  Abby made mess!"

I felt so bad for her.  Really, I did.  I cleaned her up and sat her back down on the potty.  This may have been a mistake.  Because, she was terrified to get off again.  She kept saying "No, Abby made mess!"  Y'all, I swear, I didn't so much as wrinkle my forehead at her.  I was all positive and "it's ok" and trying to diminish the trauma best I could - but the girl does not like messes and was being rather hard on herself. SIGH.

Eventually, I got her off and we went about the rest of the day.  We had one mini accident later too, but we turned that one into more of a positive.  I mean, accidents happen and there is no way around them when starting on this journey.  They have to happen to learn from.  But...that's hard to explain to the toddler population.

Abby does love her sticker chart.  It's not fancy - but she's excited about it, and that's what matters. She gets a big sparkly sticker for a successful attempt, and she gets small stickers for just trying at all.  She totally gets it.  We actually have 3 stickers on our chart now, but I took this picture earlier in the day.

So, I dunno.  Part of me thinks this would be a lot easier if I could just stay at home with her and concentrate on this "project" all day long.  But, I'm not home with her.  And we spent a lot of our time running errands in the evenings (and I'm not ready to leave the diapers at home for trips yet).  So, I feel like I have these little small windows of opportunities to get training in, and that it is too inconsistent to make real progress.

But, then I remind myself, I'm just introducing concepts to her - she'll let me know when she's more and more ready.  Child-led, that's the key, right?  In the meantime, we'll keep a good stock of stickers...and paper towels, handy.

Wish us luck!