Some sort of success

What's that you say? You want to know how the potty training is going? You're dying to hear all about it in eensy weensy detail? Oh, okay then.

When last I mentioned this, we were on Day 1. We're now at Day 10 and still going strong. By which I don't mean that we've already freecycled the last pack of Pampers, but just that we really are doing this, and Mabel is happy that she's mostly a big girl who wears underpants now.

She still hasn't really got the hang of telling me when she needs to go, which is why one of the cushion covers for the good sofa is currently drying in the sun on the deck (machine washable FTW), but I'm hoping it will come. (Or else she'll settle into a predictable pattern of just going and doing it, as Monkey has finally done. (Seriously. I'm not sure he ever listens to his body or stops to hear what it's screaming at him, but so long as he visits the bathroom three times a day  - never more! - and sits down to see what he can produce at least one of those times, it all works out. He's always surprised, though, to find that he did have a poo after all.))

After the first two days, the novelty of sitting on the relocated-to-the-kitchen potty wore off and I had to invoke the power of bribery. If she sits down and produces the goods, she gets a chocolate chip. It's amazing how this turns a squirming, refusing child into a model of enthusiasm. I think it's a mark of second-child-parenting that the notion of bribery doesn't really sting the way it used to - oh, the ethical dilemmas I used to produce for myself wondering if it was allowable to offer Monkey a chocolate milk in return for being good at Target - even though he had my number from the start and always insisted on stopping at the in-store Starbucks franchise first, not last.  But we all know that bribery for potty training is totally kosher, so long as you're not giving them a whole chocolate muffin at a time. (Why did chocolate muffins come to mind? Certainly not because I just ate two of them with my cup of tea. Absolutely not. But if I had, they'd have been home-made ones, which would make them practically health food.)

So now she wears a pull-up at night, and if I manage to remind her often enough, she can stay dry, or mostly dry, all day. At naptime I put a waterproof crib pad under her just in case, and so far she's been dry on waking every time. I think we can probably abandon the nighttime pull-ups pretty soon, once I have the energy to get her to sit on the potty as soon as she gets up instead of an hour later when it's getting-dressed time.

Whatever about their sleeping habits (abysmal), their eating habits (shocking), and other facets of potty training (Monkey), I will say this for my kids: they're both lucky enough to be dry sleepers from a reasonably early point. It's not something you can train - nobody has control over their bladder while asleep - and some kids wear something absorbent to bed till they're seven. It just seems that for my two, that particular switch was tripped early on, and they don't wet the bed. And since they never just sit around in bed awake - once they're up, at least one parent is up too - I don't have to worry on that end. Small mercies.

I know we're a long way from out of the woods yet with Mabel - there are regressions a-plenty to come yet, I'm sure - but it's a good start. When Monkey was three and one month and I finally decided that since he wasn't showing any "signs" of readiness we would just go cold turkey, I said to myself, "We have a month before we go away for the summer; surely he'll be trained by then." That was not the case. Not by a long shot. But here I am saying the same thing with Mabel: "She'll be all done by the time we go away in July," and while I'm perfectly prepared to eat my words with a nice chianti and some fava beans if necessary, I think it might just work this time.

And you know, it does afford a certain sense of accomplishment. It's not that I've really done anything - she's the one who has to decide what she's doing where, after all - but I have effected a change. The way things go with this girl, I think that's something to celebrate.