Potty training take two

Restart your engines, ladies and gentlemen: potty training is back on the table. Chloë has been all about her "Elmo's Potty Time" show (which she calls "Elmo Potty" and we try to call "Potty Elmo" to avoid saying things like "Yes, after breakfast we can watch Elmo potty") but declined to actually do anything with her potty, which has been sitting lonely and forlorn in our bathroom for months. We've been talking up the virtues of underwear and being like Elmo and no more diapers and being a big girl for a while now, but she's always refused when we ask if she'd like to try the potty, even though it's pretty evident she's ready to start toilet training. With Maia still pretty new in our lives, we decided we were going to give her until her birthday before we started getting serious about getting her on the potty.

Lately the Potty Elmo craze has died down and she's started asking after her other shows. But the other night, we tag-teamed her in her bedroom, talking about her potty and her diapers and Elmo and big-girlness until I kind of expected her to say "ENOUGH ALREADY," but instead she agreed that maybe she would like to sit on the potty. Especially when I threw in a sticker. Our agreement currently stands thus: every time she sits on the potty, she can have a sticker to put on the potty's lid. If she actually does anything in the potty, she gets an extra-special glittery moon sticker (moons are still very, very big with her--we made some cheese crackers the other day and she was insistent that they had to be moon-shaped--and seem appropriate in this case anyway).

No extra-special glittery moon stickers have yet been awarded, but there's a steadily growing collection of other stickers on the lid of the potty. She's very keen on these. She'll say "Koë need sticker now," instead of "Koë sit on potty." After deciding she's done and carefully placing her sticker, sometimes she'll ask to sit right back down on the potty. We've taken to telling her that she doesn't get a second sticker for these second tries, and she sits anyway, so that's something, but this sticker idea may turn out not to have been so brilliant as I'd hoped.

We know it's going to take a while for anything to happen. When I noticed her grunting a few times over the weekend, I asked if she was pooping, and she said yes, but when I suggested we go up to the potty she was firmly against it. "Koë need diaper on," she insisted. I got the impression last night, in fact, that she thinks the idea is to go in her diaper and then sit on the potty, so we'll have to be sure to put her on the potty at times other than when she thinks of it. I think this is what they call a work in progress.