Lilah turns two!

Dear Lilah,

Two years old already!  It's been an amazing two years.  You are such a sweet, spunky, smart, talkative, adorable little girl.  It's so much fun being your mama!

In the past few months you have become quite the chatterbox.  You have been speaking in complete sentences for quite a while now and will often copy everything we say.

You are so completely adorable right now that the other day I was asking your daddy if we could stop time and keep you at this age for a while longer.  It also seems like we are on the cusp of more challenging behavior, which I wouldn't mind putting off a little longer.

You are potty trained!  I guess I can say that.  You still have accidents sometimes, but you're doing fairly well and there doesn't seem to be a reason to turn back now.

The truth is, it is now over a year after your second birthday* and I just realized that I never finished this post.  I've pretty much taken a year off from blogging.  And so, as it goes, I have little recollection of what your sweet little self was like when you turned two.  I think I'll just wrap it up with some pics of your fun cupcakes from your 2nd birthday party, and get to work on your 3-year post before I forget that too!

I love you, my little lady.

Love always,

Mama

*In case of confusion, I back-dated the post so it would be easier to find. :-)

potty training #2

That's right...potty training.  Feel free to not read this post if it doesn't interest you.  I don't think I ever blogged about potty training Caleb.  I have some good stories for sure, but none I really would want to share with whoever finds themselves on my blog.  Anyway, I'm doing it this time because it was a blog post that led me to try potty training Lilah the way that I did.  We'd been thinking about doing it for a while.  In fact, we'd introduced the potty to Lilah months ago and she was already using it sporadically.  She seemed ready, and we decided to take the leap.  So we bought undies, planned a potty party, and on November 9th (about a month before her 2nd birthday), we let the potty training begin!  I decided to try out a method that a friend of mine had used (and blogged about here).  She got the idea from another blog, but the general method seems to have originated with a book written in 1979.  I didn't end up doing everything that I'd read about, but I followed the general idea.

The night before, I made the final preparations for our potty party.  Lots of undies, snacks to make her thirsty, drinks she doesn't usually get to drink, new doll, potty books from the library, fun new soap in the bathroom, m&m's and stickers for going potty.

We woke up in the morning ready to go!  Jason and Caleb had planned to be out of the house the whole day so that Lilah and I could focus solely on our potty party.  Caleb was so excited that when he woke up, he made this:

One of my favorite moments of the day.

But onto the potty party.  I tried to keep it upbeat and fun.  Lilah loved all the snacks and the fact that I'd give her more whenever she wanted.  

We stayed on the wood floors for easier clean-up of accidents.

We went to the potty periodically (not every 15 minutes...that would have driven us both crazy).  The morning went surprisingly well.  No accidents!  Then we had lunch and I put her down for a nap (in her undies, although I didn't have high hopes that she'd keep them dry).  She woke up wet, but we got her into dry undies and headed back to our potty party. 

The afternoon was harder.  She was starting to get more resistant to the whole thing.  We were both a little tired of just hanging out in (one part of) the house.  Despite this, she continued to stay dry!  Until just after dinner time.  She hadn't eaten much for dinner, of course, since she'd been snacking all day.  But she was sitting there at the table.  All of a sudden she said something like, "I don't want to go to the potty," and promptly peed in her chair.  And that, right there, was a preview of what was to come on day 2.

I had read that day 2 could be rough.  I also felt that, while day 1 in some ways had gone great, I hadn't had much opportunity to teach her the importance of peeing in the potty versus her undies.  And I wondered whether our day devoted to potty training had really accomplished much.  I wondered if she would she have still stayed dry all day except for one accident at the very end if we had just treated it like a normal day.  Anyway, day 2 did not go so well.  She was resisting the potty and had accidents throughout the day.  But it seemed to me like she was just asserting her independence.  It wasn't so much that she had accidents because she wasn't recognizing her need to go, it was more that she was just choosing to go in her undies.  Defiance.  Somehow the woman who wrote the blog post that my friend references had no experience with this.  She potty trained four kids using this method and not one of them was not excited all along about going to the potty.  Seriously?  The excitement wore off pretty quickly for Lilah.  Of course, as I mentioned before, she had already been using the potty for some time.  So that could have taken away from the excitement factor I guess.

Day 3 we headed out of the house to run errands and she did better.  I think she was tired of being in the house and focusing so much on potty training.  As the week continued, there were encouraging moments when she actually told me that she had to go, and discouraging moments when she had multiple accidents a day.  But now that we are one month in, I can say that the accidents are relatively rare, and, for the most part, we've figured out what works.  I wouldn't call our experience "Potty Training in One Day," but I'd call it a success!