Yeah, I Emailed a Picture of Poop...

Something happened today that I thought would never happen- Alli pooped on the potty. I was so excited and proud of her that I almost cried. I even took a picture of her and her poop and emailed it to my husband at work. I feel kind of lame that things such as my kids toilet habits excite me, my how I have changed from pre-kid life.

The best part is that she did it all herself. I was upstairs putting laundry away and she yelled that she pooped. I ran downstairs because I figured she pooped on the floor (wouldn't be the first time) and to my surprise she was on the toilet. I had given up on pushing her to use the potty- I just put underwear on her everyday and dealt with whatever happened whether it be giving her jellybeans for peeing on the potty or whipping out the paper towels and cleaning pee off of the floor.

Now when it is Jilly's turn to be potty trained I am going to take the hands off approach and let her figure it out. It really just is not worth the power struggles, like the ones I had with my son and then the ones I had with Alli before I gave up and said whatever. If only I could go back in time and give myself this advice, it would have saved me many headaches.

More Potty Talk...

photo credit

I jumped back on the potty training bandwagon last week and it is going surprisingly well.

My daughter, whom I affectionately call Alli Poo Poo, is going to be three in June and up until recently I thought she would be wearing diapers when she graduates from high school (maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing as it would most likely keep boys far away from her). One day I said screw it, I'm going to stop being lazy and put some darn underwear on her- if she pees all over the floor then I'll just have to clean it up.

Well, she has been doing really well with only minimal floor peeing. We went to the zoo on Tuesday and she insisted on wearing underwear. I was very nervous about the situation but she did not have one accident; I do have to say though that waiting in line for the restroom with a four year old boy, a two year old girl and a baby is not exactly fun and getting everyone plus a stroller into a bathroom stall requires a certain finesse that I do not posses.

Pooping is not going so well, as in she just lets it rip in her underwear. The rule in this house is if the poop is super messy the underwear gets thrown away and if it's not then mommy will wash the underwear. Every time Alli poops the first thing she says to me is don't throw my underwear away to which I reply stop pooping in your underwear and you won't have to worry about them getting thrown away (yes this makes sense to us adults but to a two year old I may as well be speaking gibberish). I did make a new deal with her today because I'm sick of dealing with poopy underwear- I told her that if she tells me when she has to poop that I'll put a diaper on her to poop in. I figure maybe when she tells me she has to poop that I can try to convince her to go on the toilet with bribes of candy and toys and if not then at least she'll do it in a diaper that I don't have to clean.

The worst thing about potty training Alli is that I know I'll have to go through the whole shebang again with Jilly Billy. I'm hoping that since she's the third child she'll just teach herself but that's not how it really works, is it?