It's a Potty at the Winslow House...

Big things are happening around here! Suzannah's new potty was delivered this week, and ever since then, my little girl has worn underpants all! day! long!

A little backstory:

Suzannah has been "ready" to potty-train for a very, very long time. A ridiculously long time. But she is stubborn in many ways, and this child would hold her bladder for -- I'm not even kidding -- ten or twelve hours some days. She just couldn't seem to relax enough to go. We hoped maybe she'd see the other kids using the potty at daycare and go there (it works with food, since she'll eat things over there that she won't eat at home), but for the longest time, no dice. She'd sit on the potty with no complaints, but she wouldn't actually use it. (This has never been a great source of stress for me; I'm pretty chill about the potty-training thing in that I just trust that it will happen when she's ready. I was never one of those gung-ho mamas who insisted on potty-training at eighteen months by having my child go without pants for a week, tethered to me twenty-four hours a day. But she's not eighteen months old anymore, and I think it would be really lovely to only have one child in diapers come December.)

Anyway, one day after lunch, she was sitting on the potty as usual right before naptime. She was so sleepy that she actually nodded off for a moment, and that moment was all it took for her to relax enough to pee in the potty. She didn't actually mean to, so it kind of surprised her, but from that point on she had no problems going. We sent her in underpants every day and she'd come home dry in underpants every day! Victory!

Except.

She wouldn't use it a home. For weeks she was cheerfully using the potty at daycare, but not a drop at home. We'd started her with a potty Matt's parents gave us a long time ago, and she started sitting on that well over a year ago. Fine. But she didn't ever actually use it. Then we thought, hey, maybe we need a fancy potty, one that she picks out, one that sings to her when she pees in it or something. So we bought this little potty that doubles as a footstool, and the seat can unsnap to fit over a regular toilet. We let her decorate it with stickers every time she sat on it. We read her potty books every time she sat on it. We gave her m&m's for sitting on it. And it actually was supposed to play music when it got wet, but we never would have known that worked if Matt hadn't tested it with a little bit of water from the sink.

In hindsight, it was a ridiculous potty.

Finally -- and I am embarrassed that it took so long to arrive at this conclusion -- I thought that maybe we'd have more success if we bought the same potty they used at daycare. This was almost too much for my husband, who was all, WE HAVE TWO POTTIES, and a potty is a potty, WE ARE NOT SPENDING MONEY ON ANOTHER ONE. But Suzannah never seemed to fit right on the Stupid Singing Potty, could never seem to get comfortable, and plus there was a stupid splash guard thing that flipped up and down and got in the way, and every time Suzannah sat on the potty she'd snap it out and say, "I BROKE IT," and I thought, hey, we'll just hide it, but was THAT okay with Suzannah? You've got to be kidding.

Finally, I told Matt that parenting is trial and error, and sometimes that means buying a THIRD POTTY. I asked what kind they used at daycare, and armed with this new knowledge I ordered the Bjorn Potty Chair from Target. It's not even available in stores, but after reading the online reviews I felt pretty stupid for not asking sooner, since pretty much all of the posters said things like, "We went through twenty-seven potty chairs before we found this one AND NO ONE SHOULD EVER USE ANYTHING DIFFERENT. We recommend this one to all our friends!" Unfortunately, not very many of our friends have had to potty train children, so we missed out on all the recommendations, but we've caught up now. (Friends reading this blog: Consider this my recommendation, whenever you may need it.)

So it was delivered in a big box several days ago, and Suzannah and I opened it together after school.

"Look, Zannah, it's a new potty!" I exclaimed, trying to make it sound as exciting as possible, because I was getting desperate. What if this one didn't work either? My husband would have lost his mind.

"NEW POTTY!" she shrieked. I think she was humoring me, because her reaction was perhaps a little too enthusiastic for a blue plastic pee receptacle, not that I didn't appreciate the effort. Anyway, it worked, IT WORKED, she started using the potty at home that very evening, and we are all terribly excited about it. Although for the first few days she used it as yet another bedtime stalling tactic, insisting that she had to go potty just one more time please. We were too new at this, far too hopeful, to tell her no, you don't need to go potty, so she'd march smugly into the bathroom and squeeze out three drops of pee. I have to admit, after the eleventh trip to the bathroom, long after I wanted to go to bed, I considered whether it would really be that bad to leave her in diapers until the third grade.