The Potty Incident

Ever since Molly was born, the one piece of potty-training advice I've heard over and over again is, "Don't force the process until SHE indicates that she's ready." For that reason, I haven't even thought about potty-training, especially since Molly is not the most verbose toddler. I suspected it would be at least a few more months, if not longer, before she'd be anywhere close to ready.

Well, today we had an incident that in its own pitifully hilarious way, indicated that we may have to at least start thinking about the process. We spent the afternoon outside in the "Flower Power Pool", which is something we've been doing a lot of this week since temperatures have been in the mid-90s.
After playing in the pool, I stripped Molly naked on the porch before going inside. Once inside, Molly started pointing "down there" and babbling in her Molly language. I didn't think anything of it, except that she continued to very persistently point and babble. I asked her if she had to go pee pee and was surprised when she responded with a very emphatic, "UHHH" (a sound that's hard to translate into written language, but that we've learned means an affirmative response in Molly-ese).

I figured there's no harm in trying so I sat her on the porcelain throne, but she seemed scared that she was going to fall in so I quickly rifled through her closet and grabbed the potty seat we received as a shower gift before she was born. She was enthralled with the froggy potty and thought sitting on it was super-fun, but that's all she did---sit---for 10 minutes. She'd stand up, turn around, stick her foot in the potty, sit again, clap her hands, babble, squeal, laugh, point, and babble some more. But no pee pee.

I thought, "Eh, no big deal. We gave it a try. She's not ready. Perhaps I mis-read her." No sooner did I get her up off the frog potty and she started to walk toward the livingroom, then she stopped and peed right in the middle of the floor. It actually seemed to startle her. She quickly jumped back. Then she ran forward, directly through the newly-formed puddle and, swoosh, her feet flew out from under her and she landed flat on her back, you guessed it, right IN the puddle. It was a cartoon-character, banana-peel kind of fall. I tried not to burst out laughing, especially since she was definitely crying.

Needless to say, the whole episode ended with a rinse in the tub and a scrubbing of the floor, but who knows? We may have to go check out some potty-training books from the library. One thing's for sure: Molly has a new favorite seat---her froggy potty :-)

And a special thanks goes out to GG and Pop for both the pool and the potty. At least one of those two things will get plenty of use this summer . . . maybe even both of them!