Potty Learning

There are many different opinions and techniques out there for getting your child potty trained.  I have two children and the approaches I used for each child couldn't be more different!

When L was born we lived in England.  I'd always believed before I had children that I would use cloth diapers mainly for environmental reasons.  When I first got to England and saw their appalling lack of recycling and care for the environment (sorry Brits but for someone coming from Vancouver Island that is how I felt) I decided that I would take the easy way out and go with disposables like everyone else.
I happily changed L's diapers until at 19 months I figured she was ready to start on the potty.  After much research I decided on the "cold turkey" approach.  This involved buying big girl panties, a potty and a potty book.  On the "potty" day we first read the book and then had a discussion about how she was a big girl and that she could now use the toilet like Mommy and Daddy.  There were no rewards or bribes, just a general understanding that this is what grown up people do.

L took to it pretty quick and after a week we pretty much had it down.  After a few months and the novelty had worn off we had a bit of a regression but in general it was pretty straight forward.

You can read about our experiences here.

Fast forward several years and we now have child number 2.  Since L I had done a lot of research on Montessori A to I and realised that cloth diapers were not only good for the environment but also aided potty learning as the child can feel when they are wet.
We were already living in Canada when LJ was born so I took the plunge I'd always promised I'd do and we cloth diapered.

When I started looking after Sweetpea LJ was 10 months.  She was already being put on the potty so I decided to try LJ.  He went on after meals and before and after naps.  He very quickly caught on to what he was supposed to do and we caught most of his poos.  Read about our adventures here.

I think the main reason we all stuck with this is because of the cloth diapers.  Yup it's way easier to clean poo out of a potty than a cloth diaper!
We continued on with this no pressure method of potty learning until LJ turned two and then I made the switch the underwear.  We've had some accidents but seriously a month later and he is telling us when he has to go and I'd say we are officially potty trained during the day.  Yay!

So the question is was either method better or easier?  I'd say nope.  Each one worked for our family at the time.  I think there is way too much hype and pressure about potty training just like there is for child rearing in general.
My advice would be to take whatever approach works for you and your child and to remember that it is a natural, organic process that will happen when the child is ready.

Baby J turns 1!

It's been almost a month now since Baby J actually turned one.  I'm just getting around to posting about it but better late than never.

For his birthday we had amazing weather and were able to have a beautiful BBQ outside on our deck with friends and family.  I made Baby J a Very Hungry Caterpillar Cake however he ate a healthy muffin for his Birthday dessert instead of the unhealthy cake!  Over the years I've realised that my kids don't even eat birthday cakes so if I have lots of other people round I just use icing and food colouring because I know others are not as picky and it's a darn site easier!

 

He got so many presents from friends and family he will be set for a long while now.  The gift I am most excited about is this Tag Toys ball tracker.  I have been wanting to get one of these for the littles and when a wonderful uncle gave Baby J some b-day money we put some in ourselves and splurged. 

It was so worth it.  He got it right away and both Baby J and Sweetpea love it.  It's quite wobbly and it's recommended to bolt it to the wall.  Instead what I've done is move it behind the pull up bar so it is stable and Baby J is able to balance on the bar while bending down to get the balls.

 

As far as development Baby J is now using a spoon on his own to eat his meals and we just introduced him to a fork.  I would highly recommend watermelon as a first fork food.  He caught on to it right away and LOVED it.  I think he enjoys the amount of force he can use to "stab" the food!  He went through tons of watermelon practising his new found skill and had a fit when we finally had to call it quits.  Both littles now have a fork food with their breakfast every morning.

 



 

I don't think it will be long now before Baby J is walking.  He took three steps last night and is starting to stand on his own. 

He is still our cheeky little jokester and is full of joy.  He has been giving a grunting sign to tell us when he needs to poop for about a month now and we make it about 90% of the time.  The thing is he also thinks it's a hilarious joke to look at us and do the pretend poop grunt and then give us the cheeky grin!

 

As I mentioned Baby J got many presents that both the littles have been using and I'm working on a post about what is on our shelves.

 

Since technically Baby J is no longer a baby I am here on out going to be referring to him as Little J!  Wow does that time fly by.  What an amazing year it's been getting to know this wonderful little person!

Baby J 9 1/2-10 months

Month 10 has been full of changes and major leaps in development for Baby J.  The major thing for him is that he is now on the move!  In one weekend he went from only being able to sit and reach for things on one knee to crawling, pulling up and cruising.

I was just starting to think that this pull up bar was not really worth the time and money making it when Baby J totally proved me wrong.  At around 9.5 months he started showing an interest in pulling up.  He was too short to reach the bar from sitting so I put the stuffed elephant below the bar for him to sit on.  It totally did the trick and he was able to pull up and have a soft place to land.  Now he can pull up on the bar no problem and he loves to do squats and cruise along it.

Baby J loves to use his walker waggon.  Although Sweetpea is not really interested in it anymore since she started walking she all of a sudden wants to use it when Baby J uses it.  Here they were working together pushing it which was so cute but most times she will push the other end and bowl Baby J over!  She better do it while she can because soon Baby J will be as strong as her!

Although he is moving now and can get to whatever he wants, Baby J has still maintained his focus.  He will move over to the item he wants and then spend time interacting with it.  These two materials that I originally put out for Sweetpea he loves to do.  He is definitely in a sensitive period for putting things into containers and small openings. 

I was surprised that after a demonstration and some experimentation he is able to now easliy put the stars into this slot.  He is also now able to put the rectancluar prism into the imbacure box.

We are still working with feeding himself at the table and most times I am able to put the food onto the spoon and he will take it out of the bowl.  He is starting to put the spoon back into the bowl but this happens about 50% of the time.  He is pretty excitable and we usually end up with the spoon on the floor several times throughout a meal.  If I find that he can't handle the bowl on his table I will remove it and just hand him the spoon for a few minutes and then let him try again.  This seems to work.  I will leave his glass on the table and offer it to him by asking him if he would like a drink and then putting it in front of him.  He will lift it and take a drink and sometimes return it to the table gently.  Sometimes though he will smash it down onto the table with gusto like he's just finished a shot of Tequila and he's all proud of himself!

 

Baby J is a super potty pooper!  Since starting him on the potty at 9 months he's done about 5 poos in his diapers which is pretty amazing!  At this point I'm not concerned with catching the pees and anything he does I consider a bonus.  He has definitely made the connection though which before having done this I never would have believed a baby of that age capable of doing.  It just blows my mind how much infants are really capable of doing if we just give them the right environment to do it in!!

 

Baby J continues to delight us with his extreme excitement and joy for everything!

Potty Party

 

It's a potty party over here at the moment!!

Sweetpea has been using the potty for several months now.  The great thing is that she is very regular and if she goes on the potty after breakfast and lunch there is usually a "result".  She is really good and will not try to get off.  I put a basket of small animals out for her to entertain herself.  She loves to transfer them between containers.

I decided to try Baby J on the potty at 9 months.  He had been watching Sweetpea for a month and was super excited to get his own potty.  The first time I put him on after his bottle.  I asked him if he could do a poo and then made a grunting noise.  L joined in.  He caught on right away and low and behold he produced a poo!  It's been like that ever since.  He totally knows the potty is for pooing and does one almost every time.  I honestly didn't know one little person could produce so much poo!!

 

Baby J and Sweetpea are great on the potties together and super cute! They love to play with the animals and hand them back and forth.  A lot of the time I will sit with them and make the noises of the animals and name them.  They both make the roar sound of the tiger and they know that the shark bites their knees with a chomp, chomp, chomp.  A rather annoying trend which has come up lately is dropping the animals into the potty while sitting on it.  I'm not too impressed with that one when I look down to see one poo, one pee and one badger in the potty!

 

 

 

I have the potties by the wall on the other side of their activity area.  I find this easier than the bathroom because I can see them from the kitchen as well as the living room and it is easy to put them on after their meals.  I usually will put Baby J on after his milk and meals and also after a nap.  I also do the same for Sweetpea.

 

At the moment neither of them make any sign that they have to go and Sweetpea does not move to the potty if she has to go.  It really is a "catching game" at the moment but I know that at some point they will make the connection on their own.

I think a MAJOR motivating factor in early pottying is cloth diapering.  It is soooo much easier emptying a potty of poo than cleaning it off a diaper!!

 

So far I am loving the potty party and long may it continue!

 

On a side note Sweetpea's potty is a Beco Potty which is a completely compostable potty.  You just plant it in the garden when you are done with it and it will completely biodegrade.  How cool is that!!!

Last 21 month post (Practical life)

At the beginning I was all gung ho with the practical life monthly update posts. I still am but don't have as much to tell as I listed most of the things L does in the first couple of posts. This has been a hard month for me for a number of reasons so it feels like I've let some practical life things slip. Sometimes I just think it's not worth the energy if she isn't into it. One of those things is clearing her table. She still sets it but as there is not incentive to clear it she just wants to get on with other things(don't we all!).

Some things that she has been doing are:

Practising putting lids on and off of jars. She's had this activity for months and always comes back to it. She loves getting the treasures out and always remembers which jar they go back into.
As I mentioned in a previous post she's also been cutting some of her own food. I'm hoping to get around to showing her how to spread soon as well.
We are also working on getting her own toilet paper and pulling up her own pants which is difficult because they keep getting stuck on her bum!

She also puts her shoes away. Sensitive period for order anyone? : )

Some potty anecdotes: (don't worry not too gross!)

For Christmas we got L a doll that came with a small potty and sink thinking it would come in really handy when potty training. It turns out we didn't use it for that purpose but now that she is potty trained she loves to have all of her dolls and babies sit on the potty and then flush it (it makes a really satisfying flushing sound). A few weeks ago I was in another room and L was playing "potty" with her dolls. I could hear her saying "now doll do a pee", "now L do a pee" but didn't think much of it until she came to me with the tiny doll potty full of pee!! She was so proud of herself and of course there was pee everywhere. One of those times when you don't know whether to laugh hysterically or cry. Anyway we had a conversation about where L does her pees and where dolls do their pees and haven't had a repeat thank goodness!

It seems like since she's been potty trained L's favorite pastime is having all of her dolls, animals and everything else go to the bathroom. Everything that is dirty seems to have poo on it and if she is convinced that any of her clothes have poo or pee on them (which they don't) there is no way she will wear them until they are washed.

Yesterday when I was out I got L a package of 12 little tropical frogs. She was having a blast playing with them and I wasn't paying much attention when I heard "go pee". Turns out all of the frogs were having a turn doing a pee on her caterpillar pattern block frame and then getting pretend toilet paper to wipe and wash their hands!!! Don't ask my why that was their toilet. Too funny!

Summing up 20 month practical life

Wow I can't believe another month has gone by. This is my last 20 month post so I'll do a brief summing up of where L is at with practical life activities.
We didn't get as much accomplished as I'd hoped but we are making progress in a lot of areas.

• Potty training-accomplished. I'd say she's fully potty trained(except when sleeping). She'll only have the occasional accident now if she's really excited or distracted
• Pulling her own pants down. Depending on what she's wearing. Sometimes she'll go to the bathroom and I won't even know until she comes to me when she's done. She still needs help pulling them up and washing hands etc. Today she'd even emptied her own potty before I got there. YIKES!
• Getting dressed and undressed. Well she's tried a few times to put her top and pants on but is not really interested. She's able to take all of the bottoms off and sometimes her top with help. She can take her shoes off but is not interested in putting them on at the moment.
• Sets table no problem but doesn't like to clear it any more hmmmm... we usually clear most and get her to take one thing. Also doesn't like to wipe it any more. Only occasionally, also needs to be reminded to push her chair in most of the time.
• Still puts clean dishes etc. away
• Victory on the water department. No more messing about. Pours and drinks water with no problems
• Helps with putting shopping away, laundry, watering, weeding, putting dirty clothes in basket, rubbish in the bin

Now for goals I set last month:

• L has no interest in helping to fold the clothes or put them away will try again this month
• Only has a small interest in dressing herself
• She's also done some dusting as I've put in a previous post

We also got around to washing the windows. She loved this of course, although because she needs two hands to use the spray bottle her aim is a little off most of the time. I'm just using water until she has more control in case she sprays herself in the eye!

Lots of helping with the baking. I decided to use L's little table for all of her food preparation because I think it's a lot safer than her standing on a chair. I just get everything I need prepared ahead of time now and then just put them out as she needs them. The other night she made pita pizzas for the whole family!

To be honest I haven't even thought of goals for next month yet! I guess we'll just keep on with the clothes thing and I'll try and include her more in food preparation. I would really appreciate any suggestions for other practical life activities anyone has done with their children at this age. It's definitely more work getting L to do all of these things for herself and takes a lot of patience but when I see her getting out her own things for her meal all by herself it certainly makes it all worth while! : )

Perseverence and what we've been up to...

Towards the end of L's 19th month we tried a couple of new things. The first one was of course potty training. I'm happy to report that it has gone extremely well and I would say that she is fully "trained". She will either go to the bathroom when she needs to or if we're out she will tell me "I have to go pee". Can't ask for more than that. I'm still helping her pull her pants down but we're working on her doing it on her own. At the moment I'm just more anxious for the pee to go into the potty!
The other thing was having L pour her own water and drink out of a glass. It was not that she wasn't capable of doing these things before it was that she would mess about with the water and drive me nuts. Well we've made a lot of progress on this and she now very rarely bothers with the water other than to drink or pour it into her glass. We do still get the occasional fork or spoon in there though but I just take it away.

Some other things we've been up to are:

Locks and keys. L loves to try and open my car door so I bought her this little lock. It's a bit hard so I also bought her a bike lock that was on sale. With this one I've just tied them both to a string and threaded it through a lid so nothing gets lost.

We love the mystery bag!

There was a post on The Wonder Years a while back about scooping ducks out of a bowl of water. I bought these ping pong balls for L to try but she was too smart and took the easy way out and just picked them up with her hand and put them in the scoop! So I tried this activity instead and she seemed to grasp what I wanted her to do. We now do the scooping in the bath tub which is much more challenging and fun.

Yesterday I decided to put these geometric shapes into a bag and get L to take them out and match them. She already knows the cube and cylinder(which she calls a sillylid) from playing with the blocks. I introduced the ping pong balls as spheres which she didn't like because obviously they're really balls mom! and I started calling the triangles triangle prisms and then felt silly so we're just calling them triangles for now. Anyway she matched them no problem so I then took a turn and pulled out a cylinder and asked if she could find one. She was able to find it and the sphere no problem and didn't have too much problem finding the others either so we'll keep trying it this way from now on.

A Great Day!

Today was one of those days which my friend over at Aayla Do! Montessori describes as a Happy Happy day. One of those days when everything falls into place and your kid is mostly agreeable. I think it helped that L didn't get up until 8:30 this morning (yippee!!) and the weather is great here.
We started off with dusting L's Montessori shelves. One of the things on my 20 month to do list. We started by taking all the activities off the shelf and then doing a good dust. We then moved on to the rest of the house until she lost interest.
The potty training is also going well. Today we went swimming in the outdoor pool at our Leisure Centre. It was fantastic until I asked L if she had to go pee. The answer was yes so we made a quick dash to the change room where I had to get the potty out of the locker then take off her armbands and then her bathing suit!! All the while thinking she wasn't going to make it. Finally we got into the bathroom and onto the potty and it was a false alarm!! Ahhh. Oh well at least it has taught me to put her in her two piece bathing suit from now on.

In the afternoon we both had a lot of energy (probably because she was being so agreeable) so we practiced jumping over the line. L had great fun with that as she's really into jumping at the moment. We also tried to walk the line which was really thin.

I then put some music on and she had another session of "rhythmic gymnastics" or ribbon dancing. This is so much fun and I highly recommend it!

Summing up 19 month practical life

This is my last 19 month post so I thought I'd just sum up all of the things L can now do so I can look back on them as each month passes.

• Using the potty. Yeah only a few accidents in the last week and she will go to the bathroom by herself a lot of the time.
• learning to pull her underwear down on her own
• brushes own teeth and washes hands (needs help with the taps)
• puts her dirty clothes in the washing basket
• puts the laundry into the washing machine
• finds rubbish and puts it in the bin
• waters the plants
• sweeps with broom, dust pan and brush (doesn't quite understand the whole concept yet)
• eats all snacks and meals (except diner) at her table
• sets and clears her own table (with some reminding)
• pours own water from a jug and drinks from a glass (still messing about with the water)
• pushes her chair in (needs reminding most of the time)
• wipes table and chairs with sponge (not all the time)
• puts her own clean dishes away in the cupboard

Wow when I look at it all written out it seems like a lot. I'm proud of my little munchkin!

Some things I would like to work on next month are:

• helping to put her clean clothes away
• helping to match the socks (I've tried this before and she's not at all interested)
• cleaning the window in the living room
• starting to dress herself ( she can partially put on her pants and underwear and sometimes her shoes if she feels like it)
• dusting (she does like to do this but of course I also have to actually dust to show her how to do it which may be a problem!)

If anyone has any other suggestions of things they've done with their 20 month olds I would love to hear them. I'd also love to hear any stories on how they've overcome the challenge of a toddler's "will" : )

When it rains it pours...

Well it's been a week of potty training and what a week it's been. The old saying "when it rains it pours" could be applied in many different contexts. First of all I never knew a small child could have so much liquid inside them!!! Let's just say day one and seven pees in the first hour(none in the potty).Thankfully that trend did not continue.
Secondly, of course one always hopes for a quiet week when beginning something so important but instead of rain we seemed to be in the path of a meteor shower. All distractions decided to come at once in the form of major family concerns back home, problems with my husband's visa application, family colds and especially one very sick little girl. But we're soldiering on and all in all things haven't been too bad on that front. I just have to remind myself that washing a few extra loads of clothes has got to be cheaper than buying nappies.

I've realised a few things that can really help:

1. Make sure you drink lots of water. This way you will be constantly in the bathroom and you can bring them along too. Much less chance of accidents.

2. Try to pay as much attention as possible. This was a really hard one for us this week with everything that has been going on.

3. Don't take no for an answer! I think this is the most important one and I've learned it hard way.

I do have a really cute potty picture that I wanted to post but I think I'll save L the future humiliation.

And when the going gets real tough I just have to remember this...