Potty thoughts

The potty is back out. Sans stickers; Maia kept prying them up, and anyway that reward system is over. If we give Chloë stickers, we'll put her chart back up for them.

I told Chloë recently that we're starting to run out of diapers, and when we do we'll be switching her to Pull-Ups. (Actually Easy-Ups, the Pampers brand. They have Dora.) She seemed okay with it at the time, though she's asked every once in a while since whether we still have diapers. We're going to run out today. I also asked her whether we should bring the potty out, and she said yes, and even reminded me when I forgot to do it that night--though I don't think she's sat down on it yet. (Maia has. She gets a big grin whenever we help her on it. Then she stands up and tries to stick both feet in the hole.)

The only roadblock in the potty training path has been this reluctance to do without her diaper. She's got control; she doesn't like being messy; she's totally verbal. (Good gods is she verbal.) She recently had to pee in her diaper without a change at the grocery store, and she wasn't happy about it--to the point of not sitting down at the pharmacy, which she usually likes to do, because "I have a wet diaper." We drove out of town about half an hour last week to take family pictures, and on the way back Chloë announced she had to pee. "Well, we're not going to stop to find you a bathroom just to go in your diaper," I told her. "So you can just pee now in your chair, or you can wait until we get to the restaurant for dinner."

"How long will it be?" she asked. I said, "Several minutes," and she said, "I'll wait." And she did--fifteen minutes or more, until we arrived at Chili's and got into the bathroom and I closed the stall door. She now usually says "I have to pee," as soon as she gets up in the morning. She's been waking up dry from naps and usually in the morning (though she also had her first nighttime leak recently, due to her habit of taking a sippy of water with her to bed). The other morning she told me, "I kept the pee in my body all night!" Basically, she is potty trained...just without the potty part.

So the key--the only--question is, how do we get her away from her diaper and onto the potty? Mom suggests that maybe in the summer, when it's sweaty and hot, she'll be happier about removing the diaper. We're also going to try another end run, if it gets to that, by telling her that when she's three she has to wear underwear, period. But I hope we're not in Easy-Ups until then; they're expensive.

She told me this morning, "I used to wear Pull-Ups. But then it dripped ("dwipped"), so then I needed my diaper." I'm not sure if this is significant. In our last potty-training attempt, when she sat on the potty she always said, "The pee won't get into the potty," seeking confirmation. (She does that all the time. It's funny. "I can play train tracks after breakfast," she says anxiously, or "I can put my sockses on my bed. It's okay." The other night it was, "I'll need my sparkly shoes on for going outside to blow bubbles." Very sneaky, since what she really wanted was to be told we could go out and blow bubbles.) She hadn't seemed unduly upset the couple of times she had accidents when trying out underwear, but maybe they upset her more than I thought.

At any rate, her concern seems to be with leaks. Some advice we've read suggests that toddlers often think that pee is part of their bodies and they're anxious about losing it, but I'm not sure whether that's the case here or whether she just didn't like the yuckiness of the pee going everywhere. There's also an obvious need for the comfort of the familiar diaper. I wish we'd been able to get this done before Maia was born; I wonder if jealousy of Maia's baby status is part of the issue. But we've got what we've got. So she'll switch to Easy-Ups today, worries about leaks notwithstanding, and we'll see how it goes.