After months and months of coersion, bribery, begging, treats, stickers, messes, and the final conclusion that it wasn't about her, that I was failing as a mother because my almost 3 yr old was still in diapers...
We come downstairs, and I put Immi in her high-chair and I notice Amelie is stripping off her pj's and muttering something about the potty.
"Do you need to go on the potty?" I ask her.
"No, I jus' need to poop."
"Okay."
She runs in her diaper to the bathroom, grabs the seat, and starts arranging it til it fits on the toilet.
"You need a hand?" I ask.
"No, I do it."
"Okay."
She strips off her diaper, and tries to roll it like I do, but has some trouble figuring where the stick tabs are.
"Need some help?"
"I don' know how," she says.
So I show her how I roll it and let her stick the tabs down. Then she clambers, limbs askew, onto the toilet. This is a long and somewhat painful looking process.
"You need some help?"
"No, I doin' it."
So she's sitting there, buck naked.
"You want a book?"
Shaking her bed head, "No."
There is an awkward moment.
"Sooo, I'll just go get Imogen organized and then I'll come back?"
"Ok." Then "You orgize Immi."
And that was that.
5 comments:
YAY!!!! That is great!! (Is she still doing it by herself?)
that is quite a feat. yet another aspect of parenthood that i am terrified to death of (that would be both the diapers and the potty training).
i think what was so weird about this experience was that after everything I tried to do, she just randomly up and decides for herself. plus how matter-of-fact she was about it given that she has bluntly refused anything to do with it in the past. it IS terrifying. diapers didn't turn out to be so bad, until she hit the 2 yr mark, then we got some doozies. potty training is something that for some people is easy, depending on your kid. my kid is stubborn. plus i've taken it way too personally. her success is my success etc which is dumb. and i've let it determine my success or failure as a mother, which is also dumb. i despair sometimes and wonder if she'll be going off to high school with me reminding her to use the bathroom. i try to console myself with the fact that i don't remember it, so she probably won't either. it happens soon enough. just not soon enough for me.
Listen - our son is just now getting the potty thing down and he's going to be FOUR this December. You're a good distance from failure, indeed, if it's the potty metric you're using. When they're ready, they're ready. More and more we're figuring out that we have a LOT less to do with how our kids turn out than we thought we did. Having a lot of friends with grown kids (and who don't have revisionist memories of what it was like) has been pretty comforting.
And yeah . . . two year old poop is pretty much grown up poop. It's like changing a Shetland pony.
Thank you. That is, in fact, very reassuring.
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