Welcome to Our Potty-Training Blog!

We hope this will be very short, but in case it's not, we hope you find it helpful -- or at least -- enjoyable. We have no idea what we're doing.

2010 4 July: DAY 0, Preparation (or, Independence Day?). (Jen)
For some time now (like 6 months), I've been thinking that Sophia was ready for potty-training. She watches me go potty and narrates the whole process, from pulling down the panties, to drying hands on the towel. When we do laundry, she asks where Sophia’s panties are, and she tries to put mine on her. And for the last 3 or 4 months, every once in a while when we take her diaper off to change her into a fresh one, she’ll say “Sophia go potty?” and we’ll tell her to “run, run!” She’ll sit on her potty and pee and exclaim “Sophia go pee-pee in the potty!” And then we all do a happy dance for her. She even takes her baby dolls to the potty, sits them inside of it, tells me they are doing pee-pees, and then cheers for them when she takes them out of the potty.

At Sophia's one-year-old check up, her nurse practitioner told me that it would be a good time to buy a potty for Sophia so that she could get used to it being around and feel comfortable sitting on it. We followed her advice, and several times we even brought her to the potty when we thought she was beginning to poop and she successfully pooped in the potty! She’s only 22 months old (in a few days), but I thought that we might as well follow Sophia’s lead and let her start wearing panties early. She seemed so ready for it! In fact, for the last couple weeks I’ve been telling Sophia that when she starts peeing in the potty instead of her diaper, she gets to wear panties, and then I ask her if she thinks she can always pee in the potty and she’s enthusiastic about her “okay!” Ben suggested that we make sure that we were ready before we dove in, and I read a bunch of articles online, asked friends and relatives for advice, and felt sure that we were ready.

So, on Friday night, we told her that we were going to go buy panties tomorrow. She talked herself to sleep, saying “panties! Yay! Sophia gets panties tomorrow! Yay, panties!” On Saturday, we went to a consignment shop and found 3 unused pairs of panties on sale for $2 each. The salesperson put them in a special bag just for Sophia to carry and Sophia was bursting with smiles and exclamations of “Panties! Sophia gets to wear panties!” as we walked back to the car. As we drove to the mall to get more panties, Sophia was singing all of her favorite songs, with the word “panties” inserted in place of other words. We ended up finding bags of panties at Zeller’s (kind of like a Canadian version of Target) for cheaper, like 9 pairs for $6. Sophia was much more interested in the “moving alligator” (escalator) than in the racks of panties, most of which were too big for her. So I dug through the messy racks and found 2 bags of Strawberry Shortcake panties in a size 2, a bag of Fruit of the Looms in a size XXS (2-4), and another bag in a size 4. She told everyone she saw in the store that she was going to ride the alligator. So we rode it. And then she started telling everyone that she was going to wear panties.

On the drive home, she was putting the panties on her head, her arms, her shoes… and telling me that she was wearing them. She was so excited. When we arrived at home, she showed them all to a very excited Papa, who explained to her that she couldn’t wear them until Monday because we needed to wash them all and let them dry. She pondered for about a minute and then took a pair to the bathroom, climbed up her steps to the sink, asked Ben to turn on the water, and started washing her panties in the sink. She told him she needed soap, washed them some more, and then told him that they were clean, so she could wear them. We were so happy for her and we were beaming with pride over how smart she is! Ben explained that they needed to dry first, so she rubbed them on the hand towel in the bathroom for a while and then declared that they were dry. Ben showed her how to wring the water out of them in the sink, and then hang them up on the back of her chair to dry. That seemed to satisfy her. And she switched to telling us that on Monday she would wear panties all day long.

On Sunday night, after putting her to sleep, Ben and I sat on the couch together with a laptop, researching and making a list of what we thought we’d do… lots of things (I may update this entry later with that list, just for laughs). We thought we were so ready. I couldn’t sleep the whole night because I was so excited.