November 27, 2007 by Barbara.

Reid farted at supper one night last week and a funny, at least in retrospect, standoff ensued.

Daddy: You need to say, “Excuse me.”
Reid: [nothing]
Daddy: You need to say, “Excuse me,” when you toot.
Reid: I didn’t toot.
Daddy: Yes, you did. Now say, “Excuse me.”
Reid: I didn’t toot. [There was something in her voice that gave me pause.]
Mama: You have to say, “Excuse me,” when you fart.
Reid: ’scuse me [with the smallest wisp of teenage sullen] and then, to Ken, “Girls fart.” [Oh yeah, that was a flash of teenage attitude yet to come.]

To make this exchange even more blog-worthy, it occurred during the week of World Toilet Day (November 19th, if you missed it). The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation. The World Toilet Organization has many scary/interesting facts, including that 2.6 billion people do not have access to “improved sanitation” and the excreta of approximately 5.7 billion people is discharged directly into the environment – on the land and to the receiving water bodies. And my greatest preoccupation is what to recommend my mother-in-law get Reid for Christmas.

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December 28, 2006 by Barbara.

Of course, I have lots of Christmas stories but I have time for a quick, unrelated one. While at Grandma Joyce’s, Reid was starting to prefer using the toilet rather than a potty chair. On Tuesday night, when she insisted on using the toilet at our house, I asked her why. She told me, matter of factly, “My a big dirl now.” There you have it. She is a big girl now. My easy days of getting us both through a potty break quickly are over. The days of me dancing while waiting for Reid to finish have just begun. ;+)

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December 14, 2006 by Barbara.

I was looking at a new parenting site, www.babble.com, the other day and read a posting that defined things that change when you become a parent. One of the things mentioned was talking about poop. That is not the subject of this email but it was true none-the-less.  We have had a few potty issues lately. Reid increasingly wants to use the toilet instead of her potty chairs. This is problematic since I usually say, “Hey Reid, do you have to go potty?” on my way to the bathroom because *I* have to go. If she takes the toilet, I’m left dancing in the doorway or heading for another bathroom. I take back every snarky comment about new houses having as many bathrooms as bedrooms.

Last night when I got home I practically knocked Reid over on my way to the bathroom. I had enjoyed an extra large tea (a Venti Calm, I you speak Starbucks :+) on my way to get Reid from daycare and didn’t have time to wait for her to get her coat off and couldn imagine what I would do if she wanted to use the toilet.  I think I may have asked her if she had to go after supper but all of a sudden in Chapters, she looked at me with panic on her face and pee running down her legs. I grabbed her up and took her to the bathroom. Her pants were soaked, her socks were wet and I had to dump a bit of pee from her boots. Thankfully, we had the stroller and there was a too-small and somewhat wore-for-wear Dora pull-up in the pocket (Ken hassles me sometimes about all of the stuff that rides around with us but I was vindicated last night!) Unfortunately, there was no spare pair of pants and about the only thing Chapters doesn’t sell yet are toddler pants. I wrapped my coat around Reid’s legs and we went to check the carpet where she had been standing. I couldn’t find a spot and so I left to find Ken without saying anything. I’m hoping the pee was confined to the pants and boots and if it wasn’t, I hope they think it was something from Starbucks. As we walked quickly home - have I mentioned we are happily enjoying unseasonanly warm weather - Ken and I talked to Reid about needing to give us warning but we have to remind her to go when she is busy and we both know it.

This morning when I was waking her up she was having a restless dream involving toilet paper. I waited to wake her to be sure that she had, in fact, said “toilet paper” and she said it again. Hmm, what would the dream analysis bokks have to say about that?

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September 22, 2006 by Barbara.

I have an anti-review that I should probably share as we have a bookthat drives Ken nutty and I’m not as keen as I was at first. The book in question is “Where’s the poop?” by Julie Markes - www.JulieMarkes.com. The illustrations are beautiful. You see tigers, elephants, kangaroos, monkeys, penguins, etc. in their natural habits and each has a mother or father and a child animal. The parent asks the child if they pooped and the child always has and then the reader needs to find it. There are three flaps per page and the two “wrong” flaps have something interesting, like a bird under the mama elephant’s ear, but the poop is always in the lower right corner. It didn’t take long for Reid to figure out the pattern. It’s an okay book the first few times while you focus on the pictures and learn that penguin poop is pink but it looses it’s appeal. 

We also have “The Potty Book for Girls” by Alyssa Satin Capucilli - www.AlyssaSatinCapucilli.com - which is better since it doesn’t have the pointless, so-called search process and it covers the mechanics, accidents, and buying big girl panties. The illustrations are funny and Hannah (the star) is a spunky character. I’ve seen a “Potty Book for Boys” at Chapters but haven’t read it as Ken already seems to have his potty routine well-established.

I picked up “Potty Poems” by Lynne Gibbs - no websiite that I could find but she has written other books - as well. It’s good, too. The illustrations are boldly-coloured and the themes of the poems are good - keeping potty close by is a good idea and using a potty with a friend keeps you from being bored, etc. There are boys and girls in this one.  

There you have it, if you need to buy a potty book for someone, you have some reader-research.

And, yes, it is amazing the number of books written about potty training there were 170 entries listed (some duplicates) on www.Chapters.ca when I was searching for the name of the author of Potty Poems and it wasn’t even among them. I had to go home and look at the book. Is my generation obsessed with our kids? Seems like.

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September 7, 2006 by Barbara.

At 4:00 this morning Reid woke up. She was asking me “Daddy doing?” ie, what Daddy was doing (sleeping in the big beg), Aunty Amanda doing? (sleeping in her bed), Marsh aka Mars? (sleeping on the big bed), Leo?, Baby?, Winnie Pook? (we call Clio “Pook”) all sleeping but not Mama and not Reid. After determining that everyone was sleeping, Reid decided to say “Anh” which is her code for needing to use the potty. To be sure (and I because I was hoping to go back to sleep :+), I asked if she had to go pee. “Unh-huh bathroom,” she responded as thought I might insist she go in her diaper. Then she added, “Little potty Reid, big potty Mama.” Maybe she did know that I was really tired.

She was a chatty Cathy in the bathroom. I was starting to fall asleep when she finally agreed to go back to bed. She was still chatty but I was able to snooze and she eventually fell back asleep. I’m still glad that she is potty trained, though.

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