My journey of parenting

This month has been a big milestone on Ms. V’s potty training saga. She is potty trained and my joy is in leaps and bounds as we are on the verge of bidding good bye to that diapers. Nowadays she wears them only while sleeping and if we are going to be out of the house for a long time. The other day we went shopping without her diapers on and we had a liitle accident at the shop so we decided we will have diapers on while going out of the house for a while. However I am not sure if this is the right move. Experienced Moms please give me some hints. But for right now we are celebrating this big milestone. We know that we have many milestones ahead of her but for right now we are happy on achieving this great one.

I am on the seventh episode of the potty training saga of my daguther and  I am so happy and proud to write that she is almost potty trianed. Yes..she is getting there…..Finally I can say that she IS POTTY TRAINED.

As soon as we get home in the evening she is diaper free until she goes to bed. Yesterday evening, one of the most amazing thing happened….

She was playing, she just dropped all her toys…ran to the bathroom (me following after her) shot right through the door and to the Potty!! My happiness leapt in bounds …..it has been only few weeks and now she REALLY got the hang of it. What I was most happy an relieved about was, she now knows when she feels like going to the bathroom..that’s my smart girl!! This morning also she used potty….!! We are right on track with our May end goal of getting her out of diapers.

However, I am faced with a dilemma right now, about whether to use diapers on weekends when we are out of the house? any pointers?

Today, I read this article on Babycenter on child development and came across this

How your toddler’s growing: Your toddler is probably able to put on a piece or two of clothing by herself and name a few body parts. She may also be able to identify a color or a friend by name. As she grows more aware of what others are thinking and feeling, she’ll become more interested in interacting and playing with other children instead of just alongside them.

This triggerd me to jot down the twenty things that my daughter is able to do now and it’s such a joy to see her personality developing, see her becoming more independent.

1. She identifies all her friends by their name.
2. She picks what she wants to wear and currently she has a “thing” for dresses. She will not wear anything but dress.
3. She brushes her teeth by herself, though we assist her.
4. She counts from 1 to 10 in English and Spanish (spanish was a suprise since we don’t speak Spanish. She is learning it from school)
5. She puts on her shoes ( the easy ones like slippers and sandals) by herself.
6. She differentiates her favorite toy from other  toys and sometimes wants to hide them from other kids.
7. She repeats the nursery rhymes.
8. She dances and can copy the dance moves from TVshows.
9. She understands the story about Dora, Elmo as she watches them on TV. The oher day she cried seeing Elmo falling from a hill in the cartoon movie.
10. She talks on the phone.
11. She not only remembers her friends’ name but their parents’ too.
12. She shows you the way to her house once we reach our neighborhood.
13. She tells us the daily happenings at her daycare though only three four sentences is undersandable.
14. She scribbles only on paper and thank god she writes only on papers, this has been a great relief for us.
15.  She can eat by herself and drink from a cup or glass.
16. She gets happy when we have visitors in the house.She loves company of new people,giving her attention.
17. She cries when she does not get her way, but if left alone for few minutes chances are very high that she will cool down and forget that she was crying.
18. She puts her dirty clothes in the laundry basket when asked to.
19. She loves being outdoors.
20. She demands to hear stories before bed time every night.

It has been almost two weeks since I last updated the blog with the potty training updates that is going on in our household. Ms V has made a lot of progress. She has started to go “Pee-Pee” in the potty. I think she has not yet figured out how to tell when she wants to go potty but she will pee everytime I take her. The good news is that they have started potty training (occasionally) at the day care too.

Yesterday she had one accident and then again when I took her to the potty in next two hours she did go and got Dora stickers as the reward. I need to buy some Elmo temporary tattoos as she is asking for those as rewards.

Over the weekend one of my friends told me how stressful it will be , well at least to her when her daughter was potty trianed. She would get so stressed about her daughter having a pee-pee accident on couches, cars or in somebody else’s house…..well..I guess that is the part of the whole package. I know I will also go through that stress but hey things happen..and I will not sweat over it.

These days Miss V runs around diaperless in the house and the frequency of our diaper purchase is already going down. Yipee!!! I am so ready for that day.

Yesterday, I had the most memorable time spent with my daughter.I spent the entire morning with her, just her and me. There was no hurry to brush the teeth nor to get dressed as it was a Sunday. So, we got up and after a cup of milk for her and a cup of tea for me we started the day by coloring some books. She loves to color as she refers to them any thing that writes as “colors”  I noticed that  now she is able to draw almost a circle which she could barely do about couple of weeks ago. Then, we spent the rest of the morning playing with the Play Doh and her little squeals of excitement and laughter as I sculpted bags, drums etc from the Play doh is still ringing in my ears.

It was on;.e of the happiest moment in my life and I realized that time and attention is right now the biggest investment that I can give to my daughter, to help her to grow up to be a happy child.

Apply Naked and $75 method works! I am so glad that I read about this method. Last evening little Miss V used potty for number 1 and number 2 as well !! YEAH!! She did and we are all so excited. I realized that if we take her to the potty and ask her to sit, she would not so this is what I did… I told her “don’t forget to use the potty if you want to go okay” to this she just replied “okay” . Yes, to our great suprise when we were least expecting it she headed for the potty whenver she felt like. Once she pee-ed she pointed at it and said “water water” . I had to explain to her and it called for  a clebration. So, I feel finally the most daunting task of potty training is working on her!!!

I think allowing her to run around the house with only the underwear really worked and I feel the potty training book “No diapers for me” has also contributed towards this training. How much I wish that she could be trained all day but unfortunately we cannot since she goes to the day care. Hopefully, just the evening training will finally get her out of the diapers by the end of this month. I am so excited!!

The potty training saga still lives on in our household….Little miss V has made some progress since last time I blogged about it. But  have noticed that she thinks that potty is only for poop. The amazing part is once she poops she will not sit on the potty even for a second. She stands up and says “diaper change” that’s a relief at least she knows it’s yucky! However she has not realized that potty can be used for peeing as well. Another challenge that we have with miss V is her telling us when she wants to poop or pee. We have to keep a close watch on her and once she looks like she is about to poop/pee we have to rush her to the potty. As for peeing, she  holds it for a long time, when she is not wearing diapers. She held it for 3 hours until bedtime last night and finally we had to put a diaper on her.

I think our main challenge is CONSISTENCY . They have not started potty training her at the day care yet, so CONSISTENCY is the real challenge.  So, here is something what I am thinking of doing while she is at home.

• Keep giving her something to drink frequently
• Take her to the potty in every 30 minutes
• Apply Naked and $75 method.

I have set a goal of  having her diaper free by end of May.We will see how it goes.

Besides potty training we are trying to teach our little girl the joy of sharing. Her vocabulary is full of “My, my “  like any other kids of her age these day. While we know that this is just  a “phase” of her growing up, we sometimes get restless to wait and see when she will grow out of this. But, today I was very happy to hear that our little bundle of joy spread the joy of sharing with her friends in her day care..She shared her candies with all her  friends in her class. Usually, she used to shove the candies down her mouth as we approached the school but today she actually SHARED it with her friends!! It is indeed an elating feeling to hear about this and credit goes to “daddy D” as well for talking to her about sharing as they drove to the day care. Way to go dad and daughter team!!!

We have again started with the potty training of our toddler girl. We started around the same time about a monh ago but discontinued for a while since she would scream and wail everytime we tried to train her. This made me think that she is not ready for potty training yet. So now after almost a month we started the journey again and it’s getting a lot easier this time around.

On weekends, nowadays  she does not wear diapers when she is in the house. We try to take her to the potty in almost every hour and so far we have been successful couple of times. Last weekend, She did a great job hitting the potty as soon as she woke up.We gave her stickers of elmo and cookie monster as rewards and my! her face did lit up with happiness on receiving those stickers.

So, I think the time to bidgood bye to the dipers is not far away and it would be such a big budget booster for us!

Day two was not successful either. Tried with pull ups but that did not work, either. However, it was interesting to find out that she will pee or poop only when she has the diaper on. At one point, she was holding off when she was in the potty and she let it out as soon as she was away from the potty, so here is the next plan of action…

We will take her to the potty in every 10 minutes with her diapers on, just to get her to the habit of going to the potty or asking for it when she gets the urge. We will see if this trick works, hopefully it will