Peeper's Potty Progress

Peeper's been in a pro-potty phase for the past couple of weeks, and while we're taking it slow and low-key, when I realized that I couldn't remember whether she'd gone once or twice that day, I thought it might be worth setting up some sort of tracking system.

She's getting a more complex chart for Christmas, with separate minicharts for different "deliverables" (to quote one of the Amazon reviews): "Uh oh, gotta go!" "Sit on the potty" "Go in the potty" and "Wipe, flush and wash hands," - or something like that.


We might wait a while before implementing it, though, because this one seems to be a bit of a stretch for her, as straight-forward as it is.


When she pee-pees in the potty, "we get to put a sticker on the chart" (as opposed to "she earns a sticker") and when (well, if) she poopies on the potty, "we get to put two stickers!" and this evening, I declared that telling us that she's just pee-peed or poopied (which she did) is also sticker-worthy, as will be letting us know that she needs to go, when that starts happening.

When we get a row full of stickers "we'll do something fun to celebrate" (as opposed to "she gets a reward" - we're going for a team effort, non-coersive sort of thing here) and when she fills up the whole page, "we'll do something really special to celebrate!"

I thought that she might not want to "give up" her stickers by putting them on the chart, so I declared that there would be "one for the chart and one for Peeper," but I quickly discovered that she likes putting them on the chart, and wants to put even the "one to play with" on there, so I'm not quite sure how to handle that.

I'm not sure she really gets the part about filling in the squares, and going across the row (there's a lot of guidance - and resticking - involved on my part) but on the other hand, the first time she stuck one herself, she put it in the final square on the first row. It's probably giving her a bit too much credit to think that she was trying to trick us into thinking it was full, but it was kind of funny.

So, point being, as of this evening, the first row is full! Okay, I will admit that at least three of these stickers were actually for Mama catching the second half of a pee-pee in the potty but, hey, that's close enough at this point.

So, I think that we're going to go out to lunch tomorrow, and there will be ice cream involved, and there might just be a potty song sung. Probably just by Mama and Mommy, because we really think we should save the waitress singing for when the whole page is filled.

Just kidding. Shrike won't let me ask them to sing a potty song. Potty party pooper.

We're a long, long, looooong way from big girl panties, but I think we've definitely taken a few baby steps down the path in that direction.