she's a potty girl

We've been doing "potty time" since Cami was about 10 months old. Ikea has these cute little plastic potties that come in scrumptious colors (yes, I just used the word "scrumptious" when referring to a potty) and it was all I could do to keep myself from buying one in every color! You know, for every room in the house. I limited myself to two and decided on pink (for upstairs) and green (for downstairs.)

I was so anxious at first to just let her "play" with her new potty. I've heard it's good for them to be friends first. So she would put balls and blocks in it and dump them out. I figured I'd let them get to know eachother and then try her on it once it became part of the regular living room furniture. You know, in a few weeks or so.

Okay that lasted like a day. I HAD to see how cute she looked sitting on it! So off came the dipe and on went 2 little buns plopped right on the scrumptious lime green potty. And can I just say...

CUTE is not even the WORD!!!
And she was such a natural too. Just sat there and played with her ball, didn't even try and get down. Not that she could've...she wasn't even crawling at the time.

Truthfully, it probably felt pretty good airing out that poor little bottom that's wrapped up in her cloth dipes all day!

We try to have "naked time" once a day ("we" meaning just Cami :) where she just gets to be free on a blanket. If she goes pee pee then we communicate that to her by saying "Pee pee!" or "Psssssss." So she's learned to recognize when it's happening. We've done that since she was really little when she would "go" while we changed her dipe.

Well I think all that Elimination Communication (it's a real thing) paid off 'cause the next day when we sat her on her scrumptious pink potty upstairs in her room, we got a pleasant (yes, I just used that word when referring to...well, you can probably guess...) surprise.

I was sitting there with her saying "Go Pee Pee! Pssssss!!"


So she obeyed!!


...and then some!!


We had a scrumptious pink potty full of all kinds of pleasantries and you better believe we were CELEBRATING!! There was so much clapping and shouting and dancing going on in that room for the next 10 minutes! She knew she did something special so she joined in.

Well, she clapped, and stared at her poopy, and watched mommy and daddy go a bit crazy over some stinky smelly stuff.







No, we did not save any for the scrapbook.







Since then we've worked up to doing Potty Time 3 times a day. She's pretty regular with going after each meal. We usually read her books or build with blocks so it's a fun time.

We still celebrate after each successful event, but it's become pretty "business-as-usual" to her so she doesn't get as excited.

I don't know what all this means as far as a timeline for potty training out of dipes, etc. I'm not setting my expectations too high and I don't know when we'll take the next step with it. She isn't walking yet so it's not like I can tell her to "go to her potty." But she also can't jump right off the pottty bare-bottomed, so that's good. I'm just happy that she isn't afraid of the potty like I've heard how some kids can be. If at the least we eliminated that step then all this work is worth it.

And the best part about the whole EC (Elimination Communication) thing for us is that she is telling us when she needs to go (or IS going) by saying "Pee pee!" or "Poo poo!" Like in the grocery cart yesterday when she announced it to me. Fun.

So at least she knows it's something that needs to be communicated.



And as a bonus I think it somehow helps with her balancing skills!