One Year Later

We have been potty training for a year now. Holy cow. Is that possible without going completely insane??

Potty training has been the most painful part of parenting so far. It seems that our schedule and conversation all revolves around the act of elimination. "Do you need to go potty?" "We'd better go potty before we leave..." "Abby pooped on the potty today! Good for her!" And so on. I'll be glad when bathroom activities are in the background again.

I reread my first post on potty training from one year ago. January 11th, 2006. I sound so hopeful in this post. Carefree, really, imagining being diaper free in the near future, yet remaining a little melancholy about my children moving on to another stage in life.

Please, kids, move on to another stage.

I even asked for some guesses about when we'd be diaper-free during the daytime. I laughed at my father-in-law, who dared to imagine August 31st as the date. Look at us, January 27th, 2007, not diaper-free.

I even posted some updates on our potty progress. The tone of them gets more and more annoyed as time goes on.

A year later, Abby is back to the same stage she was at one year ago (dry much of the day, with about 2 accidents a day). In the past year, she has gone through stages of being completely potty trained, reverted back to never using the potty, and has slowly built back up to where we are now. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, though, because she has more interest in being a "big girl" now.

And the potty situation of January 2007 bears some good news (of course, posting this will ruin it all, but oh well). Ethan *might be* trained. Over the last three days, he has had 2 accidents (both of them while he was wearing Pull-Ups, not underwear). Today was accident-free. He tells us when he has to go, and he really goes when he says he will. He doesn't want to have accidents, and he's proud of himself for staying dry. He will go potty anywhere, and is excited to go #2 more than any other kid we've seen. Yippee!!

Tomorrow, with Ethan, we are trying an underwear-all-day experiment. No Pull-Up for church or breakfast, no Pull-Up if we go out shopping, etc. If we have success, Ethan gets to choose some new underwear as a reward ("Lightning McQueen, maybe, Mom??") I'm pretty confident that my son will get his new undies. Maybe his sister will jump on board that bandwagon, too. ;)