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How I Potty Trained My Daughter (Or a Very Belated “Look Who’s Potty Trained Now!”)

~ theantelopediaries
The promised land.
The promised land.

Earlier this summer, I witnessed what I perceived as a miracle.  My daughter, who I had been attempting to potty train for seven months to no avail, started using the bathroom 100% of the time within three days.  In this post, I’m going to share what I learned in the hopes that it will be beneficial for other caregivers.

In early May, I wrote a post about my challenges with potty training.  Long story short, my daughter was fully potty trained two months before her second birthday.  This happened at a time when we embarked on buying our first home.  It took a lot of time to search for and buy a home.  She began to have accidents and eventually I put her back into a diaper because the appointments and research and paperwork and meetings and travel, not to mention renovation, took up a lot of our time.  It was six months later, in December 2014, before we had some breathing room.

I was ready to return to potty training thinking she would pick it up quite easily.  Quite the opposite, Polina would have nothing to do with the toilet.  She kicked and screamed, arched her back, did everything in her power not to use the potty.  Fortunately, for all of us, all of her number twos went into the toilet, but she peed through her underwear no matter how many times a day I changed it or talked to her about it.  She demanded to wear a diaper.  I didn’t understand it.  Why was a girl willing to use the potty in June be so averse to the potty 6 months later?  I was racking my brain trying to understand her.  Nothing seemed to work.  Potty training round 2 went on for seven months.

Separately from all of this, I decided to try out a parent-tot playgroup and happened to mention my dilemma to one of the teachers there.  To my surprise, she sent me the following three videos and offered me a 30 minute consultation.  To my greater surprise, it worked.  Here is what helped me:

1.  Figure out whether your child is ready.  Tempered with your desire to potty train is your child’s ability (which is separate from willingness) to potty train.  Figure out whether your child is able and willing, able but unwilling, unable but willing, or unable and unwilling.  If a child is not able, which could be because they are too young, haven’t physically matured to hold their bowels, or have a disability, then it can be punitive to force them to do something they will mostly likely not succeed in.

I knew my daughter was able.  She was fully potty trained for about a month before things went awry.  She would also immediately run up and tell us she made “messes” when she peed herself.  When I showed her the toilet, she would have nothing to do with it, but when I asked her “where does pee go?” she would point and say “in the potty.”  I also asked her, “Does pee go on the floor?” to which she replied a long “noo.”  Cognitively she knew where pee went, she just didn’t want to use the toilet.  Our habitual question and answer after every mess was turning into a game that only one of us found amusing.

Get a second opinion if need be, but invest time in determining whether your child is able to use the potty (or anything else you are trying to get your child to do).

2. You must be committed to potty training.  This concept seems simple enough but there is a deeper layer to it.  I thought my frustration and anxiety levels were symptoms of my commitment to potty training.  I was wrong.  Commitment means not caving in, as I had done,  when my daughter was having a tantrum on the floor.  It means being consistent and supporting her through the storm that is the tantrum.  If you’re squeamish, like I am, about hearing your child cry, you have to decide whether you want to walk through that tribulation or not.  Once you have determined that your child is able to use the potty, the question, as these next videos show, is not so much is your child ready for potty training but are you ready?

Polina had one tantrum once I implemented these suggestions.  I held my ground, and it was hard.  Previously I felt helpless sitting on the floor watching her have a tantrum so I would pick her up and take her away from the bathroom to make it stop.  After watching these videos, I kept my mind focused on the task at hand.  I didn’t fall into helplessness, but into resoluteness.  It didn’t take long for her to stop crying and we tried to use the potty again.  This time she went.

3. Take away the child toilet seat.  When the consultant advised me to do this, I was skeptical.  I didn’t think my daughter would like the feeling of her feet not touching the ground when she used the potty.  Or at least that’s how I would feel.  That’s why I bought her her own seat.  But the consultant said having another toilet provides a choice which can be stressful to a child.  If you live in a large house, too many bathrooms may be another stressor.  She suggested keeping it as simple as possible.

At this point, I was willing to try anything.  So I removed Polina’s potty from the bathroom.

4.  Ask who will go first.  This by far was the tip that changed the dynamics between me and my daughter.  The consultant advised me to begin with scheduled potty times, about every hour or so.  She advised me to walk into the bathroom with my daughter, carrying her if needed, say it was time to go potty and ask who will go first?  If your child doesn’t want to go, tell them you will go first and lead by example.

I was surprised that this girl, who had arched her back at the sight of a bathroom, volunteered to go first the very first time I asked her.  These words changed the dynamic between me and my daughter from one of confrontation to one of collaboration.  There was only one time when it didn’t work and Polina had a tantrum.  But aside from that it worked incredibly well.

5. Say goodbye to the diaper and introduce training pants.  I must admit I hadn’t even considered training pants.  I had heard and read that they were the worst thing for potty training because they essentially allowed a child to continue to pee in their pants.  But again, I had tried everything I knew and was willing to give this a shot.

I was pleasantly pleased with the training pant.  (I bought the most “natural” kind I could find in the store.)  The feel of training pants is akin to putting on underwear, and there is something psychological about not being passive and having someone change you, but pulling on an “underpant” yourself.  I could tell by Polina’s behavior, expression, and words that she recognized a change was happening.

I talked to my daughter about saying goodbye to diapers and introduced the training pant, which I called the “underpant.”  (Polina has a book about animals in underpants, which she likes very much, so I thought it would be a good word to use to imitate some of her favorite animals.)  Polina liked repeating the word “underpant,” which I thought was a good sign.  She let me put it on.  I told her she couldn’t pee in her underpant the way she could in a diaper.  I reiterated that she needed to tell me when she needed to go.

These tips worked for me better than I could have predicted.  Polina had one tantrum in three days.  It was a dramatic turnaround, considering she was having a tantrum several times a day if we even stepped inside a bathroom .  Within three days of me implementing the above, she was fully potty trained.  She even napped in her underwear.  Within a week, she was waking up dry in the mornings too most of the time.  We reused her dry training pants until I realized, why not try underwear?  And she has been in underwear full time ever since.  There were two accidents this entire summer while she was sleeping.  Earlier this summer, she woke me up telling me she had to go to the bathroom.  She rarely does these days and often goes to the bathroom by herself.

Polina has no qualms using the bathroom, although that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have her preferences in other areas.  She still has her way with things I find annoying.  For me it’s a matter of give and take and picking your battles.  I knew potty training for me was a battle worth fighting for.  Conversely, I know a woman who hasn’t introduced the potty to her one-month-shy-of-three-year-old.  She’s waiting for him to be interested.  We are shaped by our own upbringing and our relationship with our child.  The choice I made isn’t necessarily the choice you should make.

Was it these methods alone, or the culmination of my efforts over the past seven months, or the memory of using the toilet that caught up with my daughter and made potty training successful this time around?  It’s hard for me to say.  All I can say is that these tips helped me and they came at time when I was personally out of ideas and methods.  If you’re struggling with potty training, don’t be afraid to ask for help.  If I hadn’t mentioned my dilemma (because it was at the forefront of my mind most days), I wouldn’t have gotten this advice that worked for us.

Best wishes to you on your journey.

 

Laboring on Labor Day

~ theantelopediaries
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Dashboard of our U-Haul.

Sometimes when things don’t go as planned, I have an absurd conversation in my head.

“So, how did you spend your Labor Day weekend?”

“Barbecuing.”

“Relaxing and watching TV.”

“Went to the state fair.  How about you?”

“We replaced our old water heater, which was leaking, and we hauled three quarters of a ton to the dump.”

It wasn’t how we thought we’d spend our Labor Day, but it worked out for the best.  We ended up getting a lot of work done.

Our water heater began leaking this past week.  My husband walked into the garage and found a puddle.  He had to sidestep it to ensure he wouldn’t get electrocuted because the water was coming out of a chamber with wires.  The silver lining was that we had a three day weekend to deal with the matter.

I began researching hot water heaters.  I am compulsive about finding the best deal.  My philosophy is not to skimp on the important stuff.  There is an old saying that goes something like: “I’m not so rich as to buy cheap stuff.”  Sometimes when you buy cheap stuff, you end up paying more for repairs or replacement.  (Like our washing machine that we bought at a recycling outlet last year that broke on Monday for the third time.)  So while my husband was happy to buy the cheapest possible 50 gallon hot water heater, I needed to perform due diligence.

Our leaky hot water heater.
Draining our old leaking hot water heater.

I convinced my husband on a Whirlpool which has an EnergySmart mode that monitors your water use patterns to maximize efficiency and reduce standby heat loss.  I figured the $150 difference would more than pay for itself in terms of energy consumption and it bought us three extra years of warranty on parts and another year on labor.  And, something fortuitous happened, without which my husband may not have come on board.  When I called my previous landlord, a plumber by trade, for his recommendation for a hot water heater, he told me he had something in his wallet that he has been carrying since we left.  It’s a refund for some of our deposit, which we didn’t get back when we left.  Thank you cosmos.

Problem was that we didn’t have a truck.  When I was an apartment dweller, I didn’t understand why there were so many people driving SUVs and trucks.  Now, as a homeowner and parent, I get it.  It seems every couple months we need a truck, probably because we bought a fixer upper home.  We figured if we needed to rent a truck for the day, we might as well use it to clear the debris from the blackberry bushes that have been sitting in our backyard and tear down the old fence.  There was enough to make several trips to the dump.

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Blackberry bushes waiting for the right opportunity to be hauled away.  A section of our old fence stands in the corner.

And thus, a simple hot water heater replacement turned into several big projects.

We woke up to rain on Saturday morning.  This meant that the bushes and fencing would weigh more and we would be charged more at the dump.  We tried not to let this deter us.  Pete used a chainsaw to cut the old fence and then began chainsawing the bottoms of the remaining blackberry bushes.  This went A LOT faster than me cutting them by hand, as I had been doing when I had time.  He was done with everything in less than an hour.  I raked the blackberry bushes onto tarps and prepared everything for Sunday when we would rent the truck.

We made three trips to the dump on Sunday and disposed of almost three quarters of a ton of debris.  That’s 1,500 pounds of fencing and bushes.  I can’t believe that we lifted that much.  It didn’t feel like that much, although it wasn’t always easy.

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Old fencing and yard waste.

“Our house is starting to look like someone lives here,” my husband said after we had cleared all the debris.

Polina behaved well.  She was content watching cartoons on DVD while we worked.  My only regret is that when she came out and wanted to dance with me like Cinderella, a character she reincarnates frequently throughout the day, I told her I couldn’t because I was working.  I regret not giving her the minute it would have taken to dance with her, because I really wasn’t giving her any time during that day.  Lesson learned.

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Loading blackberry bushes into a U-Haul.  It took two trips to get rid of them all.

After making the final trip to the dump at 4 pm, Pete began working on installing our new hot water heater, but why stop there?  He decided to install a pressure relief valve as well, which meant sawing at an existing pipe.  He worked well into the night getting the right attachment and fixing a leak from the pipe.  In a rare instance, for him, of self-deprecating humor, Pete said our previous landlord would have laughed if he had seen him working.  I told him if he replaced as many water heaters as our landlord he probably would have done things differently too.  Lessons learned.

I’m proud of the fact that things went as smoothly as they did with a three year old.  Proud, not grateful, because I think we as a family have matured, largely because circumstances forced us to.  I can recall times when we had less on our plate and we weren’t able to hold it together without bickering or someone crying.

Polina was being a good sport.  She even got to ride in the front seat of the truck on the way to the dump.  It was the first time she got to sit in a forward facing seat in the front of a vehicle.  She was taking it all in stride.

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Riding shotgun.

 

Taking it in stride.
Taking it in stride.

We dedicated Monday to Polina, since Sunday was all about us (working, that is).  We went to our new place for Indian buffet and then went to a nearby park that Polina loves because of the “big swing,” which she repeats often while we’re eating, lest we forget to take her there.  We were at the playground for a long time, not our usual rushed selves.  Polina for the first time hung on a monkey bar and swung by herself like some of the older kids.  She had a big grin on her face.  We came home and after a two hour nap, she asked to go to the park again.

“I want to go to the park right now.” she said politely, but authoritatively.  That is one of her longest sentences, if not her longest sentence thus far.

Pete continued to do house projects while I went with Polina to a nearby park.  She was so happy.  She is happy with the simple things in life, like swinging, or climbing a rock wall, or running.  She teaches us what is important and how to be happy, even when things don’t go our way.

Lesson learned.

Finding the Perfect in the Imperfect

~ theantelopediaries

water-lily-221685_1280

Wednesday morning for the nth time it was the middle of the week and I hadn’t made it off our property. Monday I spent several hours cleaning the house.  Our house needed it.  It started with me getting a toilet brush and cleaning the first toilet.  There I did.  The rest was easy.  Getting started was the hardest part.  The rest was momentum.

I worked hard,.  Polina watched and found things to do while interacting with me.  I noticed how much better I was handling work with her needs.  Before long it was nap time, then dinner time, so we didn’t make it out.

On Tuesday I called so-called “tree experts” to diagnose an evergreen in my yard that had lost all its needles.  It was that way when we bought the house a year ago, but now I noticed that the tree next to it was also losing its needles.  I began to worry the tree might be infected.  One expert suggested it might be due to a bark beetle infestation.  I panicked that I may lose the rest of my trees due to bark beetles.  I spent the morning worrying, emailing and calling.  The sound of a chainsaw revving outside made me nervous.  During Polina’s nap, I talked to my neighbor next door, as she had mentioned a company she had worked with in the past.  On the way back, I decided to be bold and talk to the chainsaw operator guy.  Turns out he wasn’t an arborist but has been in the “tree service” business for 27 years.

“They don’t climb trees and I didn’t read the books,” he said.

Fortunately for me, he went across the driveway and examined my tree.  He slapped it with his hand.  It sounded hollow.  He concluded that it has been dead for a while.  As for the tree next to it not having as many needles, he said this happens when trees overlap and needles don’t get enough sunlight.  All in all I felt a lot better that it wasn’t necessarily the bark beetle.  I felt even better when he gave me an estimate, which was less than I expected.  I was grateful.

A good day, but we hadn’t made it off our property.

Wednesday morning, I was set on going out.  I learned from past experience that the *right* way to do it is to get an earlier start.  Unfortunately, that morning, Polina woke me up at 6 am and continued to wake me for two hours.  Fortunately it was time for Peter to wake up, so he took over, letting me “sleep-in” for an hour.

When he left, I got ready.  I had to make a speedy exit or our trip would fall to close to Polina’s nap time.  I ate leftover dinner for breakfast.  I left the pile of dishes from the night before in the sink.  I’m learning how to throw perfection out the window.  I don’t like it, but I have to.

When we got to a park I had been wanting to visit for a while, Polina was asleep.  Another case of meaning well, but bad timing.  Parking was $7.  Seven dollars to park in a county park?  I parked near the entrance to wait for Polina to wake up.  I realized once again I forgot to bring something to read.  Why didn’t I put that book in the car I wanted to read? 

Fortunately I had the radio.  Unfortunately, a park ranger alerted me to his existence and after a brief chat about the park I offered him $7.  Driving to the day use parking lot, Polina woke up, and when we got out of the car, we weren’t on our property for the first time in four days.

While Polina decided to run around barefoot in the playground, I was cold.  I had on a sweatshirt but no reserve coat in the car (although I did bring a rain jacket for Polina.  Check.  I did something right.)

I didn’t think I could stand being in the cold and tried not to be sad about wasting $7, which, if you get paid for your work, may not be a lot of money.  But I don’t get paid for my work.

So I’m standing in the cold in the playground by the lake and I look up.  There is a clearing in the clouds.  Maybe if I wait long enough, the sun will peak out.  The best thing we had going for us is that the place was empty except for a few park rangers.  We had the place to ourselves, and there was “the sound of silence.”  I decide to make the most of our trip.  We went down to the water, picked blackberries by the shore, walked on the dock and talked with a lone fisherman.  Sometime during all this, the sun came out, and when I looked up, the clouds were gone.  Polina and I ended up spending five hours in the park walking on a nature trail, picking and playing with branches and leaves, discovering water lilies, pretending to be fishing with sticks in puddles, seeing the fish the fisherman caught and released, practicing walking on rocks, and playing on the playground.

During our drive home, it started to drizzle, then rain, then downpour.  When I took our exit off the highway I saw a giant rainbow.  We made it home and Polina went to sleep easily because it was a full day.

A cold day turned into a warm one.  What I thought was a wash turned into a 5 hour adventure.  It didn’t start off perfectly, but it ended perfectly.

Now if I can only get the dishes done in the morning…..

 

 

 

Top 5 Reasons Why I Haven’t Blogged Recently

~ theantelopediaries ~ 2 Comments

worried-girl-413690_1280

Well, it has been over a month since my last post, and to be truthful the last week or so I’ve been wondering how low I can go.  You know, the feeling you get when you’re already in the mud and you want to wallow in it.  I write because my insides want it, so why don’t I?  I could write reasons, but I’m afraid they’ll be excuses.  Now I realize they really are reasons.

So here are the top five reasons why I haven’t posted in almost a month.

  1.  I don’t get enough sleep.  “Blah blah blah don’t we all.”  Well, I’ve been spoiled since quitting the “labor force.”  I used to blog in the evenings after Polina went to sleep around 8:30.  More recently, perhaps because of the longer days, she has been going to sleep at 10.  10!  I’ll be honest- that’s crazy for me.  I need time to unwind and by then I’m falling asleep myself.  So either I fight through the somnolence and wake up groggy and resentful the next morning or… I go to sleep.  I tried both options, most recently the latter and even IT backfired on me.  In the middle of the night, Polina’s calls for me turn to loud cries if I don’t go to her, so I go to console her and fall asleep next to her myself.  I tend to turn in my sleep, which wakes her up, so she wakes me up, so I have to console her again before trying to go back to sleep myself (which doesn’t come as easily as it used to).  Of course I need to turn again or I wake up lying uncomfortably, so Polina wakes up and on it goes.  Long story short, I’m awakened numerous times at  night, as is Polina, which makes both of us a bit short-tempered during the day.  This sleeping arrangement isn’t working for me, but we have no other option until Polina’s room is ready, and right now we’re in the sanding phase.  My husband is kind enough to supervise Polina in the morning as he gets ready for work so I can get some shut eye.  I would function a lot worse without it.
  2. Polina doesn’t nap consistently at the same time.  To be honest, she was never a consistent napper, but more recently, sometimes she would barely nap.  In the winter, this meant she would go to sleep earlier.  In the summer, it often hasn’t worked that way.  Longer work hours, less time to myself.  Needless to say, it has been difficult.
  3. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the crap I have to learn.  Posting something online isn’t too difficult, but fiddling with appearance or learning about seo and other stuff that would help get your blog out there is time-consuming, at least for me, because I tend to be thorough.  In the end, I realized that I write because my soul feels better after I do.  Any audience I get is more for my ego than my soul.
  4. My husband is not supportive of me blogging when there is so much to do.  First, dinner has to be ready when he gets home.  I’m getting a lot better at it, but I didn’t enter this relationship knowing how to cook.  It takes time to find recipes, get ingredients (let me tell you, sometimes you just want to go to the store by yourself) and then follow directions for cooking with a toddler that also wants your attention.  My hat goes off to people that can do it consistently.  I realized that I only need to cook four meals a week and the rest of the days can be leftovers.  This week I got all my meals made.  I’m getting better at it, but sometimes it is a challenge.  Second, we have a house that has projects involving sanding, painting, cutting and moving.  I told my husband I can’t keep an eye on Polina for many of these projects, so that means we take turns working on weekends.  Blogging, for him, is not a priority.
  5. Lethargy has set in.  I’ve blamed my husband and child, now let me blame myself.  The last few weeks I have been wallowing in the mud that is lethargy.  When I was younger, I could stay up till 2 am working.  I can’t do that anymore.  Bitterness sets in for a number of reasons when I think about the past, things I perceive as unfair, so I don’t want to push myself and lethargy sets in.  Eventually I reach a nadir and that propels me to get off my butt and move, like right now.  Polina is napping and instead of doing dishes, cleaning the bathrooms, or picking toys off the floor, I am blogging with gratitude in my heart.