To Wee Or Not To Wee

The only problem with all this undie-wearing business is the wedgies . . .

And so we come to the most interesting of toddler milestones (if your definition of 'interesting' includes potential disaster, frequent embarrassment and involves poo in places other than a loo) . . . . toilet training.

Once again, because of the seven year age gap between my children, I have blocked out forgotten what we did when it came to toilet training Jack. I seem to remember there was The Day Of The Ten Wet Underpants which led to the The Month Of Pretending It Will Go Away. But inevitably, he got toilet trained and, at nearly ten years of age, seems to be managing quite well (apart from the apparently hilarious pastime of farting in confined spaces).

Francesca was very keen to start sitting on the toilet last year before her second birthday because she wanted to copy her little friend Piper who is six months older. There was plenty of enthusiastic toilet-sitting but zero actual wee action. Nevertheless, we set up a potty in the corner and, because it was summer and her preferred outfit was a pair of gumboots only, she would take herself off to the potty periodically without the complication of, y'know, clothing to unbutton, unclasp, unzip, pull down.

Her first actual wee on the potty was met by thunderous applause from the whole family and of course, standing ovations were compulsory for every wee on the potty for quite some time thereafter.

However, in the manner of many busy working women who barely have the energy for rotating the cap off a wine bottle (how on earth did we cope with the whole corkscrew business!?), taking a toddler out with only a thin layer of cotton between her unpredictable bottom and the many flooring surfaces of the outside world was all too hard. I decided we would go commando at home and wear nappies whilst out and about.

This is what I like to call the Magical Toilet Training Breakthrough Formula (as opposed to the Lazy Parent Hit & Miss Approach). When the number of times the toddler successfully does a wee on the toilet, exceeds the number of accidents, they are ready to face the outside world.

And so it came to pass. Toilet training - tick. And thank God for that.

Francesca has been in Big Girl Undies for two months. I feel it's now safe to block out the memory of another milestone and continue coping with day to day life, including the unscrewing of wine caps which will now be deserving of my full focus.

Next stop? Big Girl Bed. But that bus won't be coming along for quite some time. I'm not ready to allow a 2 year old full access to the entire house at all hours. That would require more wine than I am currently capable of unscrewing.

I'd love to hear your 'wee' stories. Are you in the middle of toilet training? Been there done that? Or just in the process of screwing up the courage? Share!

Postscript 29 April:
Now I need some advice too. Number ones on the toilet? No problems. But doing number twos is apparently very very scary and the one time we did it, we cried the whole way through. One could be forgiven for thinking that releasing that poo into the toilet was the equivalent of handing over one's first born son to King Herod! I've heard this is common but I've also heard of four year olds who 'hang on' till they get a nappy on and, oh Lord, save me from a constipated child who can build an entire virtual city in Minecraft but can't take a crap on a toilet. Tips and tricks required please.

The Wedgie - it's all about wearing it with attitude. There's a lesson in that for all of us I think . . .

Empathy Trumps Ego . . . (sometimes)

Last Tuesday morning as I was emerging from the crazy, nonsensical land of the 5am dreamscape (you know the kind of dream I mean . . . where you're the curiously ugly ten year old love child of Don & Megan Draper living in a cave in the middle of Manhattan and eating pistachios through a straw), when I heard a muffled expletive. At first I thought I had dreamed it (perhaps Don ran out of whiskey & cigarettes) but then I heard the kitchen door open and realised it must be Ryan.

Ryan is our 22 year old rower and is often up at dawn's crack to scull the waterways of Sydney's harbour, so the fact he was awake at that time wasn't unusual. But something was amiss. I entered the kitchen to find him bleeding from the knee and shoulder. He'd missed a step in the dark on his way to the car, taken a tumble and shoulder-charged the tyre of the car whilst his knee made love to the pebble-crete path.

Later in the day, Francesca became fascinated with Ryan's injuries, with the following exchange occurring at least twenty seven times before bed time:

Francesca: "Ryry?"
Ryan: "Yes Francesca?"
F: "What happened?"
R: "I fell over"
F: "Hurt your knee?"
R: "Yes I hurt my knee"
F: "On tyre?"
R: "Yes on the tyre of the car"
F: "In dark?"
R: "Yes, in the dark"
F: "Oh"
Pause
F: "Okay?" as she pats Ryan on the leg
R: "Yes, I'm okay"

Pause for ten seconds.

F: "Ryry, what happened?"
R: "I fell over"
F: "Hurt knee?"
etc., and so on and so forth.

This exchange continued on for days, in almost exactly the same order. The most fascinating part of the whole affair seemed to be the bit about it happening in the dark. Sometimes we'd turn the tables and ask Francesca "What happened to Ryan?" and she would answer "Fell over", then add melodramatically "In the dark!!"

Oh it seems so boring written down like this but honestly it provided hours of amusement for us last week. What can I say, we are thrill seekers who love to live on the edge. And none of the good TV shows have started yet. We take our entertainment where we can get it. We're also cheap. No fancy Foxtel for us. We'd rather spend our money on booze and pills and pokies.

JOKING! We only spend big on booze.

The thing I really loved about the whole Ryan-falling-in-dark episode, however, was that it showed how much our little girl is growing up. The ego in a two year old is always firmly present - the self-absorbed pop princess diva is still in residence, ordering room service, leaving lipstick stains on the pillows and yelling at housekeeping - but the empathy gene is getting a look in.

Suddenly the plastic newborn doll whose head she was previously using as a step ladder to reach inside the cutlery drawer, is her special baby. She takes Baby to bed, cuddles her, feeds her and washes her. Baby often does a poo and needs her nappy changed with the assistance of MANY wet wipes. Baby also seems to be rather grizzly and in need of cuddles with her mama cooing "It's okay, it's okay" over and over. It's such a joy to watch.

Just don't try to separate the girl from her biscuit or you will discover that the toddler version of Nicky Minaj is alive and well and dishing out death stares in Collaroy.

The Tortoise Has Great Hair

When Jack ran his first 50m sprint in the school athletics competition at age five, he slowed down just near the end of the race to wave at us in the stands. Was he the fastest runner? No. But you've never seen a more gorgeous smile, nor a kid who could rock a yellow polo shirt, baggy maroon shorts and sticky-up bed-hair quite like our Jack that day. And if there was a competition for the best 'saunter to the finish line', that blue ribbon would have gone STRAIGHT to the pool room!


Now it seems our little Francesca, in all her roly poly wonder, has inherited the family 'tortoise' syndrome. Despite meeting all other milestones on or before time, including pincer grip, first year molars, the ability to spot a Cheerio on the floor from 50 paces and the skill of exceptional adorableness, by 12 months she had still failed to crawl, let alone walk. Which was a problem, mainly because she was getting too damn heavy to carry around everywhere.


I started to get a bit concerned about this when she turned 10 months old and was still sitting on her comfortable, nappy-cushioned bottom, while all the other babies in mother's group crawled or walked around her, or used her variously as a scratching post, a mounting post or as a poledancing pole. She would just sit there, busting a few yoga moves such as Sitting With Octopus Arms and Sitting Pretty.


Enter Janet, the baby physio, who diagnosed Francesca with slightly low muscle tone. Now, despite the lovely Janet emphasising the word 'slightly' and telling me not to worry and that Francesca would be crawling very soon and was perfect in every other possible way, I still went home and Googled 'low muscle tone'.


Because I am an idiot.


And yes people, there is such a thing as too much information. Too much unnecessarily scary information designed to send parents into a sinister future vortex where your baby's movement and speech will be affected forever so they will never walk, run or be able to tell people that the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain. If you have a baby that isn't reaching their gross motor milestones, just do yourself a favour and NEVER GOOGLE 'LOW MUSCLE TONE'. That is all.


So Janet sent us off with lots of homework, our favourite being to strap Francesca's thighs together with matching sweatbands (and you know you want to see THAT picture)!

The idea behind this innovative exercise was to force her knees to stay together so that when she knelt up or tried to get on all fours, her legs wouldn't splay out like a frog. It also adds a degree of modesty don't you think? We may reintroduce the concept when she turns 16. Do sweatbands come in metal? With locks?


I digress.


The other problem seemed to be that our little princess had an aversion to kneeling on floorboards. Because they're so hard and hurty-hurty on a gal's delicate little knees don't y'know. So we got some of those ugly foam tiles and tried to encourage her to kneel up to grab toys from an elevated height. It was working really well until she decided that it was much more fun to eat foam than kneel on it.


Then she discovered that it was ever so much easier to shuffle around on one's bottom. We'd flip her on all fours and she'd flip right back over on her bottom. And so we have a bottom shuffler (with the unexpected but delightful bonus of having our floors bottom-swept daily).


There were tears, oh yes, there were tears as we worked our way through Janet's list of baby physio exercises. At one stage I may or may not have told our tiny, innocent baby daughter who was doing the best she could to HARDEN THE HECK UP.


So did she get there?


Watch and find out . . .


Music "I Feel The Earth Move" courtesy of Carole King