All Grown Up

How many times during the lives of each of our kids (and this blog) do you think I will write a post with this title?


But that's how it seems - I think Catherine grew up several years in the last couple weeks. (caution: underpants are involved in some of the story below).

Catherine decided it is time she learned her letters. She traces them very well and has started making some on her own. She always starts at the bottom right corner of a page and works her way backwards.

She also decided showers are better than baths. She will only take a bath in order to entertain Mary. Otherwise, it's showers for her.

And she has apparently potty trained herself in the last seven days. This is how potty training has gone for us. Many many many months ago, we figured Catherine was physically and mentally capable of using a toilet (she was nearly changing her own diaper at that point) so we stocked up on potty books and potty charts and potty treats and pull-ups. And Catherine pretty much wanted nothing to do with it. She would get excited for a couple minutes or a couple hours and do what she could to snag stickers and jelly beans, but most of the time if you asked her what she wanted to wear she would prefer a diaper over a pull-up, and underpants were pretty much no motivation.

This went on for a while. It turns out we might have been stressing her out to the point of her losing her hair (this is not 100% certain, but I have to say, it seems an inherent risk of being the oldest. We really do learn stuff along the way that we didn't know with the first one. My apologies to oldest children everywhere.).

So a few months ago I dropped it altogether and let her do what she wanted: wear diapers.

Then a couple weeks ago Catherine started asking me to change her diaper constantly - I think every time it was wet. So I casually hinted that there was a way to keep her diaper dry if she didn't like it being wet, to which she responded, "Mom, I don't want to talk about that right now." I can take a hint. I let it go.

Then a week ago I went to give her a dry diaper when she woke up and she threw a big fit because she "wanted to practice with underpants." So I suggested we get out a stack of pull-ups and practice keeping those dry first and she would have nothing of it. She wanted underpants. We were going to be home all day, so I said sure, wear underpants.

She went through seven outfits that day.

But every time we were stripping off wet clothes she asked if she could try again, and I smiled and did my very best to remove all audible irritation from my voice (because doing extra laundry and cleaning up puddles is not my favorite thing to have scheduled) and said "of course you can try again!". By the end of the day, she made it to the potty once.

The next day she made it to the potty a few times, and the day after that, she made it more often than not, with a lot of reminding.

Today, her third completely dry day, was almost entirely her own doing - nary a reminder from me. And there have been a couple dry nights mixed in this week as well. And she keeps asking to wear underpants at night. At this point, I feel pretty secure in thinking she won't be going back to diapers.

The moral of the potty training story: Catherine does what she wants. When she's ready.

oh the life of the oldest child

And I guess when she turned three she decided she's ready to do all kinds of things. Today, I looked over from my desk when I heard the water in the kitchen sink start running. Catherine had moved a stool from her room, plugged the drain, squirted in some soap, grabbed a rag, turned on the water, and started doing dishes.




Later she took it upon herself to get Mary ready to go outside in the snow, and then to work on clearing the snow from the driveway like Daddy.



She tried to talk Mary into helping her, but Mary just wanted to run around the yard. Eventually Catherine decided she had done her duty with the driveway and joined in the playing. There's not much more a couple toddlers can do in frozen-solid snow than make footprints.


And throw the occasional "snowball" (otherwise known as giant ice chunks accumulated from shoveling the sidewalk).


Luckily for me, Catherine also spent a significant portion of the day jumping like a frog, twirling in her princess ballerina tutu, whining for attention, and demanding that Daddy throw her up in the air. If not for these delightful toddler antics, I might be sitting here at the computer researching colleges for her to go off to next year.