Norah's Double Standard

Potty Training Report.

Yes. It's that time again. Now it's Norah's turn. Let me just say that I am REALLY looking forward to the day when I no longer have to mess with diapers. They have become such a mainstay of my life for the past FIVE YEARS that, honestly, I'm not sure how I'm going to process them going away.

I mean, I'm super happy about it. Not only will we save a gob of money every month, we'll also free up a cubby hole in our entertainment center where we've been storing diaper stuff for half a decade for . . . well, the kids' clothes probably because I am too lazy to take their clothes upstairs after each washing and have to go back upstairs two or three times a day whenever they need different clothes. It's one of my great failings, but there you have it. There's also a chance that we'll put entertainment related stuff in there. Who knows. Doors will open and we will have options.

But, on the other hand, it's also been a pretty major part of my household duties up to this point. I will lose one of my major bargaining chips in the family. I won't be able to say "But I've had to change thirty diapers this week, YOU do _____ (whatever I want to get out of doing)." And then there will be the sense of loss, the sense of something missing from my life. Even bad things have a way of becoming part of what's normal, and, when it's gone, its absence is felt.

Diapers signify babies, and not having to change them anymore is undeniable proof that we don't have babies anymore, we have big kids. Our sweet little baboos are getting big! Sometimes, it's all too much to take . . . .

Naw. I'm joking. I can't wait for them to be in school.  They're driving me crazy. And I will NEVER miss diapers or changing them. Sure watching them get old so fast is a bit tough. Most notably I am affected by how quickly they move from one favorite thing to the next. It's kind of depressing, really. Just when I'm getting the hang of Gabe loving Power Rangers or Star Wars or Norah loving her little people and animals (she was pretty obsessed with all things small for awhile there) or Polly Pockets, they couldn't care less about those things anymore and I'm left wondering how long it will be before I, too, am obsolete. It's a little sad.

But god I won't miss the diaper changing. Now I just need to get through a year or so of butt wiping and finally, dear god, I will only have my own waste disposal to worry about. It will be a blessed, glorious day.

Anyway, I should probably also address the whole boy vs. girl potty training truism--that girls are easier than boys to potty train. Honestly, I don't know. Gabe was awful, there's no denying that. It took forever (almost a year from the time we started trying to coax a toilet visit out of him until he finally was doing it on his own reliably enough that he didn't need to wear a pull-up to bed). And there were, of course, many disaster stories with him (refer back to that year long period of awful here on the blog). But I'm wondering if how bad we thought it went was just a product of how hypersensitive we were to him NEEDING to potty train and not really knowing what to expect from the process. Now, obviously, since we've been through it, we're just sort of letting it happen with Norah.

And it is just sort of happening now. Finally. The thing is, it's taken very nearly as long as it did with Gabe. We started her on the road to using the toilet last fall. We've been shifting her between pull-ups and diapers pretty much that whole time and trying, entirely in vain, to get her to use the toilet whenever she's had a pull-up on.

There haven't been many disasters.  Just one, really--last Friday, she had a pull-up on for nap time. When she came down, she said she needed to potty, so she went into the bathroom to use her little training toilet. She demanded that she could pull her pants down on her own, so I left her to it. About a minute later she called out, "I've got poop on my finger." Uh oh, I thought. So I went in and, sure enough, she had poop on her finger. And another finger. And pretty much all of her fingers. And her hand. And her leg. And her back. And her pants. And all over her training toilet. And on the floor. And in the trash can.  Apparently she had pooped during her nap. And despite that she poops just about every nap time now (ruining almost all of them), for some reason I didn't think to check her pants before she pulled them off. And when she pulled them off, poop pretty much went everywhere. To her credit, she tried to cover up the mess by cleaning it up as best she could, putting the pull-up and one of the big piles of poop in the trash. The rest of it, however, was everywhere.

But somewhere in the last four days or so, Norah has begun to take this potty training thing seriously. She's been good about getting in there when she needs to go (and we've been asking her every hour or so to make sure she hasn't forgotten). Today, though, I haven't even had to ask. The timer on the stove hasn't been able to go off to remind me to ask her (because I need these kinds of reminders to keep something at the front of my mind--but I've addressed the seriously addled state of my brain before, so no need to beat that dead horse). She keeps coming up, about once an hour, and tells me she needs to pee. So we do. There hasn't been any poop yet, and I'm putting her in a pull-up for nap time, just to make sure her bed doesn't end up smeared with it.

Pretty major progress. And on the timeline, Norah is a few months ahead of where Gabe was at this age (it was July or August before Gabe really got the hang of it, after he turned 3, and it's still a month before Norah's 3rd birthday). That point alone would seem to suggest that girls are better at potty training than boys are. But I think there are also extenuating circumstances to consider. Gabe was the oldest, thus there were no older kids coaxing him on or being "big kids" for him to want to impress. He also didn't have any big kids to watch going regularly so he had a clear idea of what was expected. I think having an older sibling more than anything made the training process easier.

But we'll see. If Norah doesn't have an extended bout of unreliability like Gabe did--where he was, for instance, pooping while standing in the middle of the library--then I'll be willing to declare girls easier to train than boys. Secretly, I hope it's not true because, let's face it, girls don't need to be better than boys at anything else. They've already got pretty much every advantage in those formative years.

Oh, right. The title. Double standard. Kind of forgot about that.

Really, it's not the least bit worthy of a title for a post, but for some reason it's what I ran with.

Yesterday, Norah was sitting on the toilet in the bathroom and she kept insisting that I go away and give her privacy. Being not-quite 3, she failed to see the irony in this as, time and again, we ask her to leave us alone while we're in the bathroom and she, instead, insists that she should watch us closely (usually trying to stare between our legs into the toilet to watch as it happens, mortifying as that sounds) or do a dance for us. So, to demonstrate how annoying that can be when a nice bowel movement is all we want to have, I refused to leave her alone. And I did a dance for her while she went to the bathroom. She was not the least bit impressed. But, considering how I dance, I can't really blame her, I suppose.