Potty Training

This post has started and stopped, been written and deleted, forgotten and found again... Might as well post it now before any more time passes!

Just over a month ago we officially started on the business of potty training Ruby. We'd had the seat out for months, let her sit on it before baths and bed, talked it up, but hadn't really started anything official.

To be perfectly honest, I did not anticipate the drawn out ordeal this has become. I trained Eli in a few days with minimal accidents for a few weeks after. (Night training is another story, but that's not a concern of mine at all right now.) Maddux was trained in a day, I swear, with no more than two or three accidents ever, including nighttime. I thought this would be a no-brainer, especially because Ruby is such a modeler and picks up on routines and whatnot so quickly.

Well friends, it has not gone as planned and this mama is at a loss. We will have great days, days where she doesn't have any accidents and always goes when we take potty breaks. And then we will have days where she has two accidents before 10AM. And these days will polarize how I feel about it all so harshly: I will be so hopeful that this is the start of a new era when she has a good day, and then when she has a less than good one, I feel like she'll never get it.

In the beginning, she was a camel. Even though I was giving her water like crazy all morning, Ruby would hold her bladder from 8AM until 2PM...crazy! That lasted for a few weeks, which made creating successes difficult, but we focused on the staying dry part and talked it up a lot. That seems to be out the window now, so it's anyone's guess as to what her body can do at this point. The main hangup has been her telling us she has to go. At a friend's house the first week, she told me three times as she was running to the potty, and she actually went once. I was SOO excited. But since then, she's only told us and actually gone maybe twice. Most days she won't tell us at all. (Her successes come when she goes during our scheduled visits.)

So we are in underwear most of the time. The rare exception is gymnastics (I'm not in there with her and I can't put that on the instructor) and the occasional instance when a young sitter or friend who is doing me a huge favor is watching her. She WILL get it. But in the meantime, I just may lose my mind for spending so much time in the bathroom and so much energy on trying to predict when she needs to go.