looks like a penguin.
You may be wondering, "How is elimination communication going for dustthouart lately?" Or you may be thinking "Ugh I hope she doesn't write about that weird hippie potty training thing again." Well I am here to satisfy all of you by placing it all behind spoiler tags--click only if you're interested!
[Spoiler (click to open)]We've hit a bit of a plateau as far as EC goes. That plateau is higher in some ways than where we've been before, but in significant other ways we have never been doing worse. So I have mixed feelings.
The promising/hopeful thing is that Pippa often signals by signing or saying "potty". Unfortunately she usually does this while eliminating. However, that does mean that we get her out of the dirty diaper faster, so that's a plus.
She also goes longer between wets, and wets less overnight, thus showing a maturing bladder capacity. (The one exception being the night after eating a bunch of watermelon. I actually had to change her diaper at midnight because it was absolutely soaked. She had a slice of watermelon with dinner tonight too, so I'll have to watch out for that. I had heard about the diuretic properties of watermelon before, but seeing it in action was indeed impressive.)
We are only having 1-2 catches per day now on average, with some days a complete miss. In terms of ratio of catches to misses, this is the worst it's been since she was only a few weeks old.
I can trace this back to one significant thing: her eyepatch and glasses. When we started doing them, our number of catches plummeted. This makes me very concerned.
1. Is she reacting in some way to a sense of violation, in that we are forcing her to wear the patch and the glasses? Is she trying to reassert bodily autonomy?
2. Is the glasses scenario causing me to become preoccupied with that and missing her signals?
3. Is it a coincidence and the problem is more that I've become lax in frequency of opportunities?
Mostly, I am just trying to be cool about it. I do think I need to offer her more opportunities throughout the day. To that end, I want to start keeping a potty in the living room. She is able to take off her own diaper and I expect within a few weeks she will have figured out how to pull down her pants. This means I will probably have to engage in a lot of "naked toddler chases" as BabyCenter puts it, but if she can learn to take down her pants and take off her diaper and sit on the potty independently, that's a huge leap forward. More to the point, I want her to think "When I pull down my pants or take off the diaper, that means I go on the potty". Which will hopefully limit her doing those activities to times she wants to go on the potty.
Alternatively, since she's getting so close in terms of signaling etc, part of me thinks I should seize the moment with the nice weather and sometime in August/September do a couple of days wearing regular underwear, and see if that's the breakthrough needed.
Supposedly a lot of people hit a rough period before graduating completely, so I'm not despairing or anything, just concerned that I may be messing something up.
---
We went to the aquarium today, just for a few hours. Wow, what a difference in how Pippa experienced the place since the last time we went there, which was only a few months ago.
First we went to see the penguins, which is the newest exhibit there. Pippa was so interested in them, and she interacted with one of the aquarium staff who showed her a model penguin egg and a real penguin feather. Then she walked all around seeing the belugas, dolphins, etc. Coolest was in the kids area by the touch tank. She hung back watching me touch the starfish, but then she got brave enough to come up and touch some too. Very very cute.
Not so cute was her spilling a half-full sippy cup of water all over my lap on SkyTrain on the way home. At least it didn't get on my iPad or on the pizza I was carrying home for us to eat. I just looked like I had wet myself.
Then before bed we read Goodnight Moon:
I'll be honest: the "Goodnight nobody" text on the blank page always creeps me out just a tad.
[Spoiler (click to open)]We've hit a bit of a plateau as far as EC goes. That plateau is higher in some ways than where we've been before, but in significant other ways we have never been doing worse. So I have mixed feelings.
The promising/hopeful thing is that Pippa often signals by signing or saying "potty". Unfortunately she usually does this while eliminating. However, that does mean that we get her out of the dirty diaper faster, so that's a plus.
She also goes longer between wets, and wets less overnight, thus showing a maturing bladder capacity. (The one exception being the night after eating a bunch of watermelon. I actually had to change her diaper at midnight because it was absolutely soaked. She had a slice of watermelon with dinner tonight too, so I'll have to watch out for that. I had heard about the diuretic properties of watermelon before, but seeing it in action was indeed impressive.)
We are only having 1-2 catches per day now on average, with some days a complete miss. In terms of ratio of catches to misses, this is the worst it's been since she was only a few weeks old.
I can trace this back to one significant thing: her eyepatch and glasses. When we started doing them, our number of catches plummeted. This makes me very concerned.
1. Is she reacting in some way to a sense of violation, in that we are forcing her to wear the patch and the glasses? Is she trying to reassert bodily autonomy?
2. Is the glasses scenario causing me to become preoccupied with that and missing her signals?
3. Is it a coincidence and the problem is more that I've become lax in frequency of opportunities?
Mostly, I am just trying to be cool about it. I do think I need to offer her more opportunities throughout the day. To that end, I want to start keeping a potty in the living room. She is able to take off her own diaper and I expect within a few weeks she will have figured out how to pull down her pants. This means I will probably have to engage in a lot of "naked toddler chases" as BabyCenter puts it, but if she can learn to take down her pants and take off her diaper and sit on the potty independently, that's a huge leap forward. More to the point, I want her to think "When I pull down my pants or take off the diaper, that means I go on the potty". Which will hopefully limit her doing those activities to times she wants to go on the potty.
Alternatively, since she's getting so close in terms of signaling etc, part of me thinks I should seize the moment with the nice weather and sometime in August/September do a couple of days wearing regular underwear, and see if that's the breakthrough needed.
Supposedly a lot of people hit a rough period before graduating completely, so I'm not despairing or anything, just concerned that I may be messing something up.
---
We went to the aquarium today, just for a few hours. Wow, what a difference in how Pippa experienced the place since the last time we went there, which was only a few months ago.
First we went to see the penguins, which is the newest exhibit there. Pippa was so interested in them, and she interacted with one of the aquarium staff who showed her a model penguin egg and a real penguin feather. Then she walked all around seeing the belugas, dolphins, etc. Coolest was in the kids area by the touch tank. She hung back watching me touch the starfish, but then she got brave enough to come up and touch some too. Very very cute.
Not so cute was her spilling a half-full sippy cup of water all over my lap on SkyTrain on the way home. At least it didn't get on my iPad or on the pizza I was carrying home for us to eat. I just looked like I had wet myself.
Then before bed we read Goodnight Moon:
I'll be honest: the "Goodnight nobody" text on the blank page always creeps me out just a tad.