My Turn

This has been the phrase I hear the most now days. My little 2.5 year old teenager is moving on in her bid for independence by voicing the fact that everything is "my turn." It's her turn to open up doors, close those same said doors, turning on and off faucets, buckling her self into her car seat, and a myriad of other tasks.

What is nice about this is that we've channeled some of this want of independence into helping around the house such as doing dishes. Since she has always loved playing in the water and wants to be the one getting the soap for her hands and cleaning the table with the sponge after dinner, I figured why not put the three together and get my dishes washed. I admit I still help to get all the gunk off the dishes but I get her to rinse and dump (repeatedly by her standards) and then it goes in the dishwasher.

She also likes to put clothes down the laundry chute and this is quite helpful until all the clean clothes start going down the chute along with shoes and other miscellaneous objects such as books, toys, and other toiletry items. If you're missing something...ask us...it might be down our laundry chute.

Well on some other good news, potty training has been going pretty darn well. If you would've asked me this almost three months ago, you would've found me in tears saying this was impossible and that I hope before she goes to college that she would've figured the whole peeing in the toilet thing out. Well, I truly believe what I read in a book which was, when they're ready, they're ready and not before.

If you read our old Blog (chrisandterijo.blogspot.com) from when we were in England, we somewhat started the potty training journey back then but it didn't really take off per se as we had first thought and hoped. Granted we were not consistent in our attempts either. We've always talked about it, encouraged it, and tried to get her to move towards this goal since she was just a little over two. It wasn't until we started her in pre-school here, that they really encouraged it and in all honesty, I figured, since she was going to be with them the majority of the day, they could be the ones to deal with the frustration I felt back at the end of May.

I also agree with the many mom's who've written on various mom blogs and posts that pull-ups are just another diaper. Now we try to just use them at night and for long trips and stick to underwear otherwise. Yes, we've had a few accidents as expected and we're still expecting more but hoping for none. She's usually dry in the mornings and we get her to come down and use the potty.

In fact, she's doing really well at asking us to use the potty. We do still ask her every 20 minutes or so and after every hour or so, making her sit. The problem with this is that I forget to ask assuming that she's going to ask me and that's where one of our accidents came in this week and our poor couch got drenched. She has also discovered that using the "I have to go potty tactic" works in getting her out of things such as taking naps at such appointed times. She even tried using it last week to get out of sitting on the naughty step and I refused to listen. Unfortunately, that back-fired as she really did have to go and then I had to clean up the naughty step along with Makenna.

One thing you DO NOT DO is say, "would you like to go on the potty?" I'm trying to instill this into Chris as it gives Makenna the option of saying "No." Instead say, "let's go sit on the potty." She can still say no and she does, but it's more of a statement than a question.

Yesterday she actually even asked to go poopy on the potty. We were so excited and elated. This was technically the fifth time we got her to go on the potty - the first being by accident months ago when she sat to pee. Then we caught her twice as she was about to go in her underwear and got her on and they got her once at pre-school. Well yesterday was the first day she actually asked to use the potty for this purpose so we felt as though we were really gaining ground and then today.....she made a complete mess in her pants. When this happened to Chris a few weeks back I scolded him for throwing out her underwear instead of just dumping it in the toilet and rinsing it out. When it happened today to me....I could see why he did that and I followed suit...underwear and all went in the garbage.

So as happy as we are that she's gaining all this independence and learning to use the potty it's still very hard to see her grow up and get bigger. I miss the little cooing baby who was learning how to reach and grab for things while on her tummy and how to roll over and crawl. I'm glad for video cameras which can remind me how far she's come and gives me a chance to re-live the moments when she was small.