She's two!

Does it count that your child is potty trained if there are only 3 places on the planet where she will go potty: Our house, Mrs. J's house and church? And it involved mommy going into Mrs. J's house and convincing her to go there. Her standard response is to take one look at the toilet and exclaim, "No. E'ah have potty chair at home." I say, "You said you had to go potty, you can go potty here." Her response, "No want it. E'ah go home." Eva's still having exactly 1 accident a day. After spending the weekend with her, I realized that both accidents she had on Sat & Sun could have been prevented had I done something different. This has forced me to come to the conclusion that potty training is as much about training the parent as it is training the child. I was at church last night, and David stayed home with Eva. He had bought himself some mints earlier in the day and Eva wanted some. Well, since we use candy as her reward for using the potty chair, we don't dare undermine our system by giving her candy without potty. She really wanted some of Baba's candy so she made David go upstairs with her five times during a 1 hour television program that he wanted to watch. She worked really hard to get our her few drops of pea so she could have some more of Baba's candy. This morning she told me that, "Baba have mints in pocket." I told her that yes, he did have some mints. She looked up at me and said, "E'ah go potty." After telling her "Okay, let's go," she asked me, "Where Baba's mints?" I told her that Baba had them at work, at which point she stopped dead in her tracks on the way to the bathroom and informed me, "E'ah no need go potty." She certainly thinks she's got a sure thing going on.

I forgot to talk about something I found really funny last week. Eva really loved her cousins visiting her, and since they've gone back home insists that we call them on regular intervals and leave messages along the lines of "Hi cousins. Call E'ah. Bye Bye." So mid week, last week, the cousins and her finally connected, and the resulting conversation was hilarious. A conversation between a 7, 6, 5, 3 and 2 year old involves a lot of yelling, exclaiming, reapeating of statements and absolutely NO listening. There was a lot of cross talking and over talking and changing of topics... I laughed so hard it brought tears to my eyes. Eva, of course, found the whole thing very serious and could not understand why I was laughing.

We had a picnic at Church yesterday, and Eva enjoyed herself immensely. She helped herself to the watermelon, walked one of the dogs (a little pipsqueak of a dog) and sat on all the men's laps. We brought her potty chair along with us. However, I hardly got to see her, she was so busy socializing. There has definitely been a change in her lately. Maybe it's moving to the big girl bed, or maybe becoming potty trained, but she has been acting decidedly more grown up. She is so busy! And, she is funny and cute and the life of our home.