With kids, you fix a drip and bust a leak

I wouldn’t have believed it if you had told me last weekend that the potty training was really going to work.  It seemed like all we had done was torturous, tear eliciting exercises.  Eliza didn’t want to sit on the potty.  She seemed to be clueless about when her bladder was empty.  The book didn’t address how to deal with the road bumps we hit.  And yet, I sit here writing to say that our big girl has not wet her pants, not even with a drop, since Tuesday.  Despite an awful virus causing a 104 degree fever, vomiting, coughing and a nasal drip on Wednesday, I managed to resist the very strong temptation to put her back in diapers.  And the girl, after not peeing all day, peed into a cup on the potty at the pediatrician’s office for me.  I wanted to cry I was so proud.  And though she’s still adapting to going #2 on the toilet, she’s accident-free in that area as well.  (Hey, it might take 45 minutes to get it out, but at least it’s ending up in the pot and not on the floor.)  I guess the one part of the process she does seem to still have difficulty with is putting her pants back on after going (as she seems to enjoy being half naked).

The thing I’m learning about parenting is that no training ever seems “finished.”  It’s exhausting for someone who loves the feeling of completing projects!  You just seem to go from one challenging phase to the next. With Zach, I’m so glad he’s nursing so much less frequently now.  But the introduction of solids presents a new set of feeding responsibilities and another checklist of items I have to remember to bring when I want to get out the door.  With Eliza, now that she knows how to pee on the potty, I don’t have to pack diapers in my bag for her, but I have to remember spare panties and pants.  And speaking of pants, I have to invest in ones that are completely elastic around the waist without buttons, snaps or zippers so she can easily pull them up and down until she gets really good at dressing herself.  I have to make sure I have contraptions on-hand such as toilet seat covers and a “car potty” so when nature calls, I can be prepared.  And praise God that I don’t have to clean up poop diapers anymore, but I still have to wipe her butt.

This leads me to my final poop thought, and then I promise to switch gears away from potty talk the next time I write.  The book we read for training (which I will now say I recommend) says that unless your child is confined to bed with diarrhea, you should not put diapers back on him.  So for all the mothers out there who have been through it – am I in for my own torturous, tear-eliciting exercise when she gets the runs?  (I just want to prepare myself mentally.)