Potty training, part 2

I explained our potty training approach with Littles in my last post. I would say that we took a fairly typical approach with her, waiting till she was about two years old, watching her for signs of readiness, etc.

With Noob, we took a different approach, known as "elimination communication," or EC.

To summarize very briefly, parents who practice EC introduce the potty at a very early age, typically between 0-4 months. They watch their babies for cues when they need to pee/poop, and put them on the potty at those times. I don't want to go into a ton of detail on the theory and mechanics of EC here. If you're interested in learning more, the Wikipedia article on it gives a good overview, and includes references to some books that go into even more detail.

Anyway, full-blown EC presents some obvious challenges to working parents. Some EC'ing parents forego diapers entirely, starting from birth. Good luck finding a daycare that will agree to that! Even using diapers regularly as "backup," it's a lot to ask for a daycare provider who is responsible for a number of kids to carefully watch one of them for subtle elimination cues, or spend time taking him/her to the potty.

But there's no reason why you can't EC part-time. And that's what we did with Noob.

Elimination communication
I started with EC towards the end of my maternity leave, so Noob was about 3-4 months old. (I tried earlier, but found he was a little too floppy to comfortably hold over the potty.) I put him on the potty whenever I changed his diaper -- I never did get good at actually identifying his elimination cues, so I mostly just put him on the potty based on time. At that age, I simply held him over the toilet: He faced away from me and towards the toilet tank, with his back resting on my arms/torso. Sometimes he went, sometimes he didn't. No big deal either way. But I will say that I was quite surprised by how many "catches" we had, even that early on, even not doing it consistently at all.

I returned to work when Noob was almost 5 months old, and my mother-in-law took over child care duties, followed a few months later by my husband, and finally by "A," our nanny/sitter, when Noob was just shy of 1 year. I never asked or expected anyone besides me to put Noob on the potty. I think my husband did it a few times, but aside from that, I just kept at it when I was with Noob and happened to think about it. Sometimes it went well, and sometimes there were long stretches where I simply forgot to put Noob on the potty much, or where he resisted it.

As Noob got older and more mobile, I started letting him have some diaper-free time around the house, gradually increasing the duration, and taking him to the potty when I thought he might need to go (again, based mostly on time). By 15 months old, he was pottying fairly consistently when I put him on it. At around 18 months old, he started independently going to the potty at times. (We left little potties around, so he could go by himself when he felt the need. The LÄTTSAM potty from Ikea is the best one we've found. Sturdy, easy to clean, and cheap!) He also started leaking out of his naptime diapers, so I told A that she might try putting him on the potty right before naptime, and she reported frequent success with that.

Shortly afterwards, he developed a bad diaper rash, which was eventually diagnosed as eczema and ended up lasting for months. His doctors recommended plenty of diaper-free time, prefacing that recommendation with, "I know this will get messy, but..." In fact, Noob got pretty good about letting us know when he needed to go, resulting in surprisingly few messes.

One common misconception about EC is that it constitutes "potty training" from an early age. Throughout this period, I never considered Noob to be truly "potty training." I wasn't trying to get him out of diapers. I was just making the potty a normal part of his daily routine.

In fact, I actually wanted Noob to stay in diapers through a 2-week trip to China that we took in January. (We did an international trip a few weeks after Littles potty trained, and while she did well, it wasn't an experience I was eager to repeat!) Which he did, thankfully.

Pee training
Right after we returned from China, and right around the time of his 2nd birthday, Noob started at Littles' preschool. I didn't feel he was ready to go to underwear quite yet, so I sewed him a bunch of cloth training pants, to use in lieu of the disposable pullups required by the school. (If you're interested in the details of how I made the cloth trainers, check out my sewing blog.)

Things went really well for the first few weeks. Thanks to the guidance of his teacher (the same one who had so much patience with all of Littles' accidents) and positive peer pressure from his classmates, Noob suddenly showed a lot more interest in using the potty independently. He even had days where he kept his training pants completely dry all day long at school!

Meanwhile, at home (mornings/nights/weekends), we switched him over to underwear exclusively around mid-February. Up till this point, most of his diaper-free time around the house had been bare-bottomed time. So when we first put him in underwear, he didn't quite realize that underwear was not the same as a diaper :) But we stuck with it through some accidents, and he figured it out. By the end of February, a month after starting school, he was doing pretty well with pottying, both at home and at school.

In March, it went downhill. He started having more accidents at home, and wetting his training pants more at school.

We suspected that the training pants might be the problem. At school, he knew he could pee in them, so he did. And at home, he forgot he wasn't wearing them, resulting in accidents.

In early April, we decided to cut out the training pants at school, and just send him in underwear. He did fantastic! For the first few days, he stayed completely dry at school! And then he came home and promptly had an accident :) But it didn't take long till he was virtually accident-free, in both places.

In retrospect, we should have ditched the training pants long before we did. The great thing about training pants is that they prevent an accident from making a big mess. But the bad thing about training pants is that they prevent an accident from making a big mess :) With both of my kids, their motivation for using the potty came from wanting to avoid making a mess. Taking away the mess meant taking away the motivation, too.

So, that's my cautionary tale on the use of training pants. (This applies to disposable pullups as well as cloth training pants like we used.) A lot of parents think that they're necessary to work on potty training. They're not. They're basically just expensive diapers. I think going straight from diapers to underwear is much more effective, not to mention a whole lot cheaper.

Poop training
Just like his big sister, Noob struggled with pooping in the potty even once he had peeing down. With him, bribing worked well to get him past his fear of pooping. I got some Chuggington trains (he loves trains) on clearance at Walmart. We put one in each bathroom. When we were pretty sure he needed to poop, we'd put him on the potty, let him hold the train in its package, and explain that he could keep it if he pooped in the potty. It took a month or so, and a few stops and starts, but he eventually started going consistently.

Nap training
This was pretty easy. We continued to send a pair of training pants to school with him each day, to wear at naptime. Most days, he kept it dry. So one weekend (in mid-April, I think), we put him down for his nap in underwear both days, and he continued to stay dry. We stopped sending training pants to school and he continued to stay dry. That was that.

We haven't tackled night training yet, and probably won't for a while, since we have a new baby coming in a few weeks and will be up at night already with him/her!

Overall, I felt like this approach really worked well. I think that working on pottying from an early age, even as inconsistently as we did, helped lay the groundwork while Noob was at an age where he was still very compliant. That meant that once we decided to "officially" start potty training, it went faster and was a lot less frustrating than it had been with Littles. I'm definitely planning to take a similar approach with our new baby.

Potty training, part 1

Noob recently potty trained -- yay! I get asked sometimes about how we tackled potty training. It was something of a process, with both kids, and I often forget the details. So I figured I should write it down before I forget even more.

I'll start off with Littles. Her story is a good example of how a supportive daycare/preschool can make all the difference in potty training, hence why this is up on my working mom blog :)

Daytime pee training
We started shortly after her second birthday, in July 2009. The first step was simply introducing her to the potty, specifically to the concept that she could actually put pee/poop in there. We had an early dinner one night and afterwards, I put her on her little potty with a portable DVD player. And waited. Sure enough, she eventually peed a little.

She promptly freaked out! I can't blame her. She had been peeing in diapers for two years; it must've been weird to pee somewhere other than a diaper. I calmed her down and put her on the big potty and she peed some more. Cue lots and lots of praise!

Over the next two months or so, we worked with her more and more on using the potty around the house. Sometimes, we just took her diaper off so she could go. Other times, we let her run around bare bottomed. The latter did result in the occasional accident, but seemed to help her get the hang of it much faster.

During this time, she was still in diapers at preschool. Her preschool requires pullups, but we did cloth diapers at home. So we were sending cloth diapers that could be pre-snapped and pulled up. In September, her teachers complained that the diapers were too hard for her to pull up/down independently. I met with them to discuss, and when I shared the progress she was making towards potty training at home, they encouraged me to send her to school in underwear.

So we made the switch to full-time underwear. It was a rough road for the first few weeks. There were days when we picked her up from school and she had five pairs of wet underwear in her bag. Luckily for us, she saved most of her accidents for school :). And thankfully, her teachers were super-supportive. There were times when I wondered whether we should just go back to diapers -- but her teachers never wavered. I figured they had potty trained a lot more kids than I had! We took their lead, and one week in October, things just "clicked" for Littles. She went from having multiple accidents per day to just one or two per week.

As a working mom, I can't stress enough how much I valued the support of Littles' teachers when it came to potty training. Potty training requires consistency, day in and day out, so it's important for all of a child's caregivers -- parents as well as teachers, daycare providers, or anyone else -- to be on the same page. Some daycares refuse to work on potty training until a child is in the 2-year-old room, even if s/he is ready earlier. Others will only "allow" one or two accidents a day before putting the child back in pullups. I'm so thankful that Littles' teachers weren't like that. It helped tremendously with getting her trained sooner rather than later.

I always encourage parents looking at daycares or other child care arrangements to ask about how they handle potty training. It's one of those questions that seems so strange to ask when you're searching for child care for an infant -- "surely my little baby will use diapers forever" :) -- but time goes by fast! And it can be frustrating to get two years down the line, only to discover that your daycare won't follow your lead on potty training.

Poop training
OK, now, all of that was just for pee. Poop took a lot longer. It was clear that she knew when she needed to go, but she was just scared to go in the potty, for some reason.

She often went either when waking up from her nap or before falling asleep at night, so we put a little potty in her room for her to use. Weeks went by, no difference. One day in January 2010 (4ish months after pee training!), I was complaining to a friend that she'd go off to college still pooping in her underwear. That night, after we put her to bed, she called to us. She had pooped in the little potty for the very first time!

From that moment forward, poop accidents were nonexistent. For the first few weeks, most of her pooping was done on that little potty when she was alone in her room. I think she just needed her privacy :)

Nap training
As I mentioned, Littles often pooped when waking up from her nap, when she was still wearing a diaper. So one of the things we tried for poop training was putting her down for a nap in underwear. She had way too many accidents, so we went back to diapers at naptime. But a few weeks later, in February or maybe March 2010, she started peeing in her diaper before falling asleep, taking it off, putting on underwear -- and keeping the underwear dry. So we cut out the diaper step, just put her down in underwear, and she did well with it.

Night training
In the midst of all this, Noob had arrived. We were already up at various hours of the night with him, and didn't particularly want to start doing the same with Littles, so we put off night training for quite a while.

In late 2010, Littles started outgrowing her overnight diapers. One symptom of this was that she'd sometimes have strange leaks where the diaper was not saturated or even completely dry, but the pee would leak right out the legs. Funny thing is, this happened every so often when we were reading bedtime stories. She had been daytime trained for over a year at this point, so there was absolutely no reason for her to have an "accident" with an adult sitting right there... unless she was peeing in her diaper just because she knew she could.

Looking back, I realized that Littles had never really initiated potty usage on her own while still in diapers. She was still peeing regularly in her diapers when we took them away during the day, and she was still peeing regularly in her diapers when we took them away at naptime. But in both those instances, she turned out to be more than capable of holding her pee at that time. The diapers just gave her a reason not to.

I figured night training might be the same. So one night in February 2011, we put her to bed in underwear. This was a major leap of faith, because not only had she never woken up dry in her life, she was completely soaked every morning. To our surprise, she did really well with it, and immediately started staying dry most nights!

She did wet the bed maybe once a week, so we started doing a "dream pee," putting her on the potty just before we went to sleep. She usually peed without waking up, and that helped her get through the night dry. A few months later, we stopped doing the dream pee, and Littles continued to remain dry at night.

And that was that for Littles and diapers! As I said, it was a process :) Although really not that painful, with the exception of that September/October 2009 period. I was pregnant with Noob during that time, and it really got me thinking as to how we might approach things differently with him. We did take a very different approach... but I'll save that for my next post.

Yes, I leave my kids with strangers

"I'm so lucky that I don't have to send my kid to daycare. I could never leave him/her with strangers all day."

Drives.me.nuts.

I've talked to working parents who have purposefully gone to great lengths to avoid daycare. Working opposite shifts from each other so that one parent is always home with the baby. (But rarely home with the other parent...) Putting up with a grandparent or other relative who provides substandard care. All because they believe that anything is better than daycare.

Don't get me wrong. I know that some grandparents/relatives provide great care. Some parents work opposite shifts because they need to or want to. Some parents aren't able to use daycare for reasons of finances, logistics, etc.

But I resent the implication that daycare is a last resort. Because it's not. The "lucky" kids are the ones who receive quality care all day long, whether that care comes from a daycare center or a nanny or a grandparent or a stay-at-home parent.

As for the idea that daycare = leaving kids with strangers? I mean, come on. It's not like I picked a random person off the street to watch my kids. Yes, daycare teachers are strangers... but if they're good ones, they don't stay strangers for long at all.

Case in point. Meet one of the "strangers" who I leave my kids with every day:

That's "V," and I'd like to tell you two quick stories about her.

#1: When Littles first started at her preschool, V was one of two teachers in her classroom. A few months in to the school year, as my due date with Noob approached, V asked me about plans for Littles when I went into labor. I said that since we have no family in the area, we were hoping one of our friends could help out, but we'd have to play it by ear. Without hesitation, V gave me her cell phone number, and encouraged me to call her if we needed any help with Littles. We didn't end up needing to do so, but it was a huge weight off my shoulders, knowing that we had backup from someone who Littles knew and trusted fully.

#2: We're expecting again! I'm due with "Q" in July 2012. We waited to tell Littles until after we heard Q's heartbeat for the first time. When we did, at a morning midwife appointment, my husband was so excited that he suggested going straight to Littles' school to break the news. V has moved out of the classroom and into the director role, so she was the one to answer the door when we got there. She took one look at our faces and said, "Are you pregnant?" And when I smiled and nodded yes, she screamed, "Congratulations!" and gave me a big hug.

So yes. If V is a "stranger," then I freely admit that I leave my kids with strangers every day. And I'm proud of it.

Another cool website for working parents

As with Relish!, I originally tried Readeo through the Mamasource deals site, but it's now become a permanent part of my working mom bag of tricks.

Basically, Readeo allows you to read childrens' books on your computer. It provides a library of a bunch of books (I won't hazard an estimate, but suffice to say we've had the subscription for over three months now and are still discovering new books) and you can flip through them, pictures and text and all. Littles owns tons of real books and we check out books from the library, too, but since we discovered Readeo, she almost always bypasses the real books to ask for "books on the computer" for her nightly storytime.

That alone is probably worth the $9.99 monthly subscription fee. But what makes it great for traveling parents is that you have the ability to "BookChat" with someone on another computer. You can flip through the pages of the books together, and even bring in audio and video. (The video appears at the bottom of the screen with the book "pages" on it.)

So last week, while I was on a business trip, I was still able to do storytime with Littles. Littles loved it, I loved it, and it gave my husband a much-deserved break!

It's also great for distant grandparents and other family members. You can invite them to join the site and they can create their own guest accounts for free. Then, when they BookChat with you on your paid account, they will have access to the full Readeo library. (Guests not BookChatting with a paid subscriber have access to the book of the month, as well as a few other free books.)

Downsides? The audio/video quality is not as good as Skype or other dedicated video conferencing tools, but it's definitely serviceable, and the book-reading functionality more than makes up for it. Also, the site makes heavy use of Adobe Flash, so it's not usable from devices that don't support Flash, such as the iPad.

Readeo does offer a 14-day free trial, so sign up for it before your next business trip and give it a shot!

What's for dinner?

I will be honest here. I have many talents. Cooking is most definitely not one of them.

Fortunately for me, I married a man who does enjoy cooking. Even so, in a household with two busy working parents and two kids who are typical eaters for their ages (that is, a little picky), "What's for dinner?" is often one of the most challenging questions of the day. And the answer is "Take-out" a little more often than we'd like.

As of late, we've started using a service called Relish! We originally found it through Mamasource deals site, and it's really helped us with meal planning and preparation.

I've discovered that what I like least about cooking is not the cooking itself, but planning and shopping. Relish! helps tremendously with this. Each week, it provides about 10-15 different dinner options. All you have to do is click a button to add them to your weekly menu. When you're done, it generates a shopping list for you. Easy! It also stores every recipe in a searchable database, so you can go back and choose favorites from a past week.

We've tried a lot of different meals over the last few months, and have found them consistently easy to prepare and absolutely delicious! Trust me, when I say they're easy to prepare... they're easy to prepare. To give you an idea of my lack of cooking skills, I've messed up cooking rice before. But Indian chicken korma? Spinach lasagna rollups? No problem.

Relish! also provides freezer meal options. This worked out well when both Hubby and I went out of town on business a few weeks ago. We were able to prepare a weeks' worth of freezer meals ahead of time for my mother-in-law, who was staying with the kids. Then, all she had to do was pull a meal out of the freezer and pop it in the oven, rather than hassling with cooking dinner with two kids under her feet. We've also used this for quick weeknight dinners, or just to have a home-cooked meal option even if we haven't had time to get to the grocery store yet.

One limitation of Relish! is that it's really geared towards dinners, not breakfasts or lunches. This is fine by me, as I usually just do cereal/yogurt for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch -- easy enough to plan for. But Hubby likes to eat more elaborate meals earlier in the day, and he says he's used other sites that provide good breakfast/lunch options.

Still, we both really like how easy Relish! makes dinner. So, if you're already in a good groove with your dinner preparations -- rock on! But if not, I highly recommend checking out Relish!

Easy.

Twice in the last few months, I've had stay-at-home moms tell me that it's easier to be a working mom than a stay-at-home mom. The reason they always give? "At least you get to go to the bathroom by yourself."

The peeing-with-an-audience situation also came up in a Babble article posted by another friend, entitled "Stay-At-Home vs. Working Parents: Questions to help spouses bridge the communication gap." It's meant to be a humorous explanation of the different stresses that stay-at-home parents face, as compared to their working spouses.

Even working moms sometimes echo the sentiment that they have it easier, such as in a recent post by NPR Baby Project blogger Christy Lilley, as she prepares to return to work after the birth of her second baby:

I often think being a stay-at-home mom is harder than being a working mom.

After a particularly exhausting weekend with James [her toddler], going back to work feels like a break. Even though I'm working, I find little moments of time throughout the day to myself. Whether it's catching up with a friend on the phone during my commute or listening to whatever I want on the radio instead of Raffi nursery rhymes, working out at the company gym during my lunch hour, or reading the news online in between meetings, I savor these moments.

When I'm home, I have no time to myself. It's all kids, all the time.

Let me be clear: I agree that being a stay-at-home mom is hard. But I don't think it's inherently harder -- or easier -- than being a working mom.

In fact, after stating that being a stay-at-home mom is harder than being a working mom, Lilley goes on to discuss the many challenges that she faces as a working mom. The constant guilt. Working with people who are either single or have a stay-at-home spouse and therefore don't have to drop everything at 5 PM to get the kids from daycare. Being pulled in a million different directions, and feeling like you're doing neither of your full-time jobs (the one that's paid in money, and the one that's paid in toddler-hugs and baby-kisses) very well.

But she also talks about how much she enjoys her job. I enjoy my job, too. And so that is why for me, being a working mom is easier than being a stay-at-home mom, despite the challenges. If it were harder --if the enjoyment I got out of the job wasn't worth the challenges I faced in it -- then I would stay at home.

I have no personal experience aside from maternity leave, but presumably, it's the same for stay-at-home moms, no? A commenter on the Babble article stated:

I've been both a SAHM [stay-at-home mom] and a WOHM [work-outside-the-home mom] at different points in my life, and I have to admit that for me personally there is less stress as a SAHM because despite all my children's craziness, I madly, deeply and passionately love them and no matter how mad I get, my love for them covers all. Can't say the same for colleagues and bosses!

Exactly.

So, can we please quit with the whole "who has it harder" discussion? Forget stay-at-home vs. working moms. Being an adult is hard. Period.

I can envy my husband, who never seems to struggle with guilt because he works, and say that working dads have it easier than working moms. But I know he feels an inherent drive to be the primary financial provider for our family, even though he doesn't have to be. I don't feel that same drive.

He might envy his co-workers with stay-at-home wives, for whom going on a business trip simply entails a quick phone call home to say, "Hey, I need to travel next week," rather than the complicated coordination of travel schedules and daycare pickups and freezer meals that we have to go through whenever either of us has to go out of town. But surely he doesn't carry the same pressure that they do of knowing that they're just one silly mistake away from losing their family's entire income.

And while parents will often roll their eyes or smile knowingly to themselves when a childless person complains about how difficult his/her life is, the truth is, childless people have their own challenges. About five years ago, I went to a big meeting for my entire team at work. We were being asked to travel more and more, and some people who had joined the team when it was a low-travel job were not happy about it. One of them stood up and said, "I have three small kids, so it's hard for me to travel on short notice. I think that people who don't have family commitments like that should take on more of the travel burden." Another co-worker, a brilliant single woman with a lot more guts than me, replied angrily, "How dare you? I might not have kids, but I do have other things in my life that are just as important to me as your kids are to you. I don't want travel to take me away from those things, any more than you do."

(As an aside, that woman has been promoted multiple times over the last few years. The dad no longer works at the company.)

Yes, these days, I'm often up late at night blogging or exercising or sewing or pursuing other hobbies, because that's the only time I get to myself. Whereas before kids, I could fill my evenings and weekends with coaching/refereeing high school lacrosse and captaining my local Team in Training triathlon team and training for an Ironman triathlon myself and playing ice hockey and soccer, all on top of a job that required extensive travel, and still get to bed at a reasonable hour (or sleep in if I didn't). But I had to do all that to feel fulfilled, to feel like I was doing something with my life. Now I feel like I'm doing something with my life when Noob wakes up at 6 AM and I snuggle in bed with him and fall back asleep while he nurses. Or when Littles gets home from school and we go up to the playroom and dance like fools to kids' music before dinner.

So who has it harder? Who cares. Why can't we just celebrate the joys and vent about the stresses of our jobs -- inside or outside the home -- without comparing to the joys or stresses of other people's jobs?

Hanging up the horns, round 2

Back in June, with my average daytime pumping output down to maybe an ounce a day, I decided drop my one pumping session. The pumping session was solely to keep my supply up and put milk in the freezer for donation, since Noob was drinking whole milk exclusively during the day, so it was no problem to drop that session. I dropped off my last milk bank donation shortly afterwards.

At the time, I was also pumping while on business trips. I'm currently on my third business trip in two months. On the first one, in mid-June, I brought my pump, but only pumped 3 ounces over two days. On the second one, two weeks ago, I brought my pump just in case, but ended up pumping only once, for a measly half an ounce. Back home, Noob did fine with no breastmilk.

So, last Tuesday, after dropping Littles off at preschool, I drove to the parking lot of a local 7-Eleven. There, I met up with the mom of a nine-month-old who is unable to nurse, who I had found through Eats on Feets. I handed over the remainder of my freezer stash, mostly milk pumped on business trips and therefore not frozen within the 24-hour window required by the milk bank. I really enjoyed meeting the mom whose baby would benefit from my milk. Donating to the milk bank has been great, but very anonymous.

Anyway. That donation meant I was officially hanging up the horns. I did not bring my pump on my trip this week.

When I reached this point with Littles, I wrote about a recent discussion over whether women should feel proud for breastfeeding their child, since after all, women have been breastfeeding for millenia. I said that I did feel proud, because women have not been pumping for millenia, and pumping was hard work!

I feel differently this time. Sure, I'm pleased that Noob is among only 10% of babies who are still breastfed at 1 year of age. But as I've explained in previous posts, I really didn't have to do a whole lot of pumping for him. He was home with family till just before his first birthday, and I work from home, so I mostly nursed him directly. And yes, women have been doing that for millenia. Not really an accomplishment, like something I should be really proud of doing.

I'm also pleased that I was able to donate over 400 oz of breastmilk (340 oz to the milk bank and a little over 90 oz direct to the mom I met last week). But again, I don't really feel like that's a special accomplishment. Women have been wet-nursing for millenia, too, and aside from my European adventures, it was really pretty easy to fit the extra pumping sessions into my day.

I am proud, and very very lucky, to work in a job and for a company that made breastfeeding so easy. Every woman should have the opportunity to breastfeed as long as she wants, even if she returns to work. It makes me sad that so many women find themselves in work situations that are not conducive or even openly hostile to pumping. It's just not right.

I'm also thankful that I still have the opportunity to nurse Noob. He's an early riser, usually waking up between 6-6:30 AM, and I am… well, not an early riser :) So most mornings, I get him out of his crib, bring him in bed with me, latch him on as we're both lying down, and catch a few extra minutes of sleep while he nurses. I love it, and I'm in no rush to end it.

But I do love the fact that this morning, I was able to go for a 30-minute jog on a beautiful trail next to a river, rather than spending 30 minutes pumping. It's been a great run, but I'm glad to be done.