Jinxed

I have clearly been too vocal about how well things were going. Right after my last post, Maya woke up with a terrible case of diarrhea. Honestly! I can’t believe it. Not only that, Morgan had been sleeping up to 8 hours a night and she went back down to 3 hour stretches last night. Maya who had been getting up at 6am slept until 8:30, but the baby woke up at 6:30–Murphy’s Law!

Maya’s newest stomach problems decided to begin at the exact time that her friend arrived for a play date, and right when the baby woke up screaming with gas pains. Maya’s anxiety over having “splat poo” as she calls it has been reborn, only much more intense this time, as she screamed hysterically that she wanted me to “make it stop” in between accidents because she couldn’t make it to the toilet on time, poor kid!

My gracious friend departed pretty quickly and I don’t blame her.  She’s 38 weeks pregnant and came with her little boy who is the same age as Maya. The morning was supposed to be a relaxing relief for her, instead she was holding my baby while I ran around helping Maya with her hysteria and clean-up. What a scene! Thank you, Universe, I am officially humbled… please forgive my hubris.

wiley child

We thought the transition to a “big girl” bed was going really well. It’s been almost two months and Maya never really gets out of her bed without calling for us to come first. Even though she can, she’s been conditioned by the crib routine where she couldn’t get out on her own. Well, recently (like 2 days ago) she figured out that she CAN get out on her own and since our baby monitor broke, I have encouraged her to come and find me in the morning when she wakes up, so that she’s not calling out for me while I’m sound asleep and not able to hear her.

This was going well. She went to bed in the evenings, and for the past few days only got out of bed in the morning after a 12-hour long sleep, at which point she’d come into my room and tell me what a good sleep she’d had.

That was until today.

You see, she’s been really avoiding nap times and bed times, coming up with all sorts of classic stalling techniques, you know the appeal for water, one more pee on the potty, needing to read just one more book, one more song, and the list goes on. Today, she came up with a new tactic. After her books and songs and multiple potty trips (during which she squeezed out just one more drop each time!), I said enough was enough and told her to go to sleep and left the room (as I always do). She seemed compliant and waited about 5 minutes before she got up, opened her bedroom door and from the top of the stairs declared, “Mom, I had a good sleep”.

The little monkey was trying to trick me into believing that she had had her nap in those 5 minutes. I think she thought herself to be quite brilliant for coming up with this fabulous plan for completely skipping her nap.

I held back my laughter, put on my serious face and firmly told her she had to actually sleep before she was allowed to get out of bed. I then gently carried her back and tucked her in, amid screams and tears and repeated declarations that she had already had her nap. A part of me wonders if she thought that was the nap, those 5 minutes… but more likely than not we have a very creative little manipulator on our hands.

How’d she get so good at this so quickly?!

and so it begins

It’s official–we’ve started potty training. Maya’s only 19 months old, and I’m not all crazy with desire for her to be toilet trained at an early age. But there are a couple of reasons why we’re starting now. The first and most important reason is that she’s showing signs of readiness. One big sign I noticed is that whenever she has a poop in her diaper she immediately tells me and says, “mommy  change it, please?”. She obviously doesn’t want to sit in it for very long and is aware that it’s happening-yay! Another reason why I want to start now is that I’m a teacher and I am only going to be at home with her for another 6 weeks before I go back to work full-time and she begins daycare again, and then it will be much harder for me to follow through with this kind of thing at my end. Working life means I don’t get a lot of time with Maya during the week, and it’s not really effective to just potty train on weekends.

So, for starters, I did a lot of reading about approaches to potty training and we bought some supplies, namely a child-sized potty and a fold up child’s seat that sits on top of our regular toilet. See below:

Yesterday, at the advice of one of the websites I read, I took Maya’s diaper off for several hours in the afternoon and I let her run around diaper-free. I don’t really want a mess in the house so we played outside with the little potty close at hand. I repeatedly sat Maya on her potty and she didn’t actually “go” in it, nor did she go anywhere outside. Then, we came inside, I put a diaper on her and she immediately asked for the potty, so I took her diaper back off and hopefully sat her on the toilet only to realize that the diaper in my hand was very heavy… she had held it all that time and then let it go the moment I put the diaper on her! Kind of annoying, but also good because it showed me that she could control her bladder a bit.

Today is day #2. At her request, I sat Maya on the potty for a long time in the morning. She played with toilet paper and made herself quite comfortable, but nothing happened. Then, I thought of one strategy I had read about: I took one of Maya’s toys and sat it on the little potty and said that it was going “pee pee” and then of course I reduced myself to the humiliating point of making “pee pee” sound effects. Meanwhile, Maya was sitting on the big potty and she started to go “pee pee” after seeing the toy that was pretending to do so. This was very very exciting! I shouted, “hooray” and made a really big deal about how great it was. She was quite pleased with herself and has since then used the potty a second time today! I know it’s the beginning of a very long haul here. Nevertheless, I’m excited that we’ve already had some success. Hopefully, it continues without too many accidents. Next up: we’re getting big girl underwear!