Category Archives: Family/Parenting

Because there is more than just Stella.

The second time around: What it all means.

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I am now on the 2-week rotation with my doctor, wherein every two weeks I get the enviable task of peeing in cup and getting weighed. Every girl should wish for as much. It is all the great lead up to my highly anticipated task of having to squeeze the equivalent of a Ford Pinto through an opening the size of a mail slot.

A brief ray of sunlight shone upon me this week, however, when I was informed that a.) I had NOT given myself gestational diabetes over the holiday season, and b.) I had actually lost 3 pounds over the two weeks since the new year began. Booyah! So I promptly went home and made a gargantuan pan of brownies.

Here’s the part of the story where all of you who are DISGUSTED by the fact that we aren’t finding out the sex of the wriggling mass in my uterus will jump to attention. While listening to the heartbeat, I asked my midwife where the numbers were – to which she said they were in the 140s and, OFFHANDEDLY COMMENTED THAT THEY SOUNDED “BOYISH”. There you have it. Almost as scientific as the string and pencil test.

This week we also started seranading SJ with a random selection of tunes from the iPod. Unlike Stella, who was subjected to listening to the bombastic classical music CD that came stock with the belly-phones kit, we have given SJ a much larger and more diverse range of listening pleasures. It is hard to tell whether the violent kicks I get each time we listen are telling me that SJ is dancing or trying to kick the apparatus off my person. Given that my insides are regularly being rabbit kicked – regarless of whether music is being pumped in – it is hard to tell exactly what this kid is doing in there. Sometimes I wonder it if it has started playing Dance Dance Revolution to pass the time. The other night at the movies, it literally kicked me NONSTOP through the entire 2+ hours. My memories of Brokeback Mountain will forever be comingled with the sensation of having my ribcage extended beyond it’s natural reaches.

It really is hard to believe that I have so little time left before we become a family of 4. This pregnancy has gone by quickly. The diversion of being subjected to a crash course in Toddler 101 has inevitably changed the dynamics of pregnancy this time around – something I have been pondering non-stop lately. I think I have finally resolved myself to the reality that it defies all logic to think that parity can exist when raising more than one child. Sure, there are superficial things we can do to help even the playing field a little bit, but when it really comes down to it, everything about our lives is different than it was 2 years ago – and because of that, this new child will be born into it’s own unique reality. And, if experience says anything, these kids will probably have nothing more than some DNA in common. As the second child, there will be many rewards that come from the fact that we have done this all before. It won’t be the same and really, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Our priorities are new and different and our parenting style has evolved (hopefully, for the better), but more than anything, the idea of giving both Stella and this new baby all the opportunities that come from sharing your life with a sister or brother is how the whole puzzle really fits together…which is what I will tell them each time they come to me wanting to murder each other.

Hindsight

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Last night, Steve had an epiphone: “It is so wierd to think that Stella is actually done with diapers. I mean, there was no ceremonial ‘last time’ or any realization that we were coming to the end of an era that has ruled our lives for the last two years. I can’t believe it went so fast.”

To which, I can only respond that everything has been this way. The last time she crawled (out of pure necessity), the last time she ate baby food, the last time she recreationally licked the refrigerator. All of these things end so quickly and – for the most part – without fanfare. Sure, we break out the pinatas when it comes to all of her “firsts”, but it is all of those “lasts” that we never really seem to recognize.

As a big punctuation mark on this whole thing, today I was sent home with the few remaining diapers left at day care. It is officially over…

…at least for the next 2 and a half months.

She with the built-in megaphone.

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Picture it:

Steve, Stella and Natalie are sitting at a local mexican food restaurant for lunch. Natalie (she who has the equivalent of a wriggling boulder sitting directly on her bladder) excuses herself to use the restroom. As she emerges from the bathroom and begins the trek back towards the table on the other side of the cavernous room hears her daughter yelling at the top of her lungs, “Mommy! MommyMommyMommyMommy! I so glad you’re back!! Yeaaaaaaa!” And yes, she was also applauding.

Our potty chair cup runneth over.

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My life for the last 4 days has been fixated on bodily functions. Everything swirls around the did-she-or-didn’t-she? question that is always hanging in the back of my head. Internal dialogue: “Has she peed in the last 20 minutes? How much liquid has she drank? What is her demeanor? Is she acting antsy? Why is she being so quiet?” And on and on (and on) it goes.

As I have learned this week, potty training is not one overarching “thing” you do, but rather a series of small modules that create the greater program.

So far, we have encountered:

  • peeing during the day
  • peeing at night
  • pooping during the day
  • pooping during the night
  • peeing/pooping in a potty other than her own
  • being away from the home for extended periods of time
  • road trips (shiver)

Each of these is then broken into smaller subcategories such as doing it on her own or being coached.

Like a really bad poker player, Stella has many “tells” that give her away. Learning these tells has been the key to our early successes in this process. Her body language speaks volumes. Whenever she vehemently argues against getting on the potty chair, cries and pitches a fit, it means she REALLY has to go. When you set her on the potty chair and she is antsy and stiffens up she DEFINITELY has to go. When you open the car door to get her out of her carseat and she looks at you and immediately says “My no have to go poop!” you are pretty much guaranteed that – say it with me – SHE REALLY HAS TO GO. It is those times that you ask her if she needs to go potty and she casually responds, “No, not yet” that you can feel pretty confident that she’s telling you the truth. Or those times when she calmly sits there for 15 minutes without releasing a drop, that you know you are wasting your time.

So today, when I went to get her out of the car and she immediately blurts out that she doesn’t have to go poop (knowing full well that she hasn’t gone in over 24 hours), that I bring her in and then plead with her to sit on the potty before taking her nap. The first half hour the air was filled with the desparate, plaintiff cries of “My no have to go poop!” Then, exhausted, I gave up and just had her change into the pull-up and tried putting her down for her nap. 2.2 minutes after closing her bedroom door she emerged proclaiming, “My have to go poop!” So back in the bathroom we go for another hour. My negotiations included everything short of promising her crisp non-sequential bills in a duffel bag, but in the end it all paid off. Somehow, the magical potty fairies came and the skies opened and so did her bowels. All this for poop, people.

More than anything though, we are excited…and proud. She hasn’t peed in her underwear even once since we started (just 4 short days ago), and twice yesterday she made her way in to the bathroom without any prompting at all. This morning, after having her wake up twice in an inexplicably foul mood AND DRY PULL-UP we realized that she has somehow started to hold it, but hasn’t figured out that the uncomfortableness she is feeling is just a full bladder.

I would like to think that from this week on there is no going back. We haven’t used the ‘diaper’ word once since starting this process, and are doing everything within our power to play on Stella’s deeply ingrained sense of routine to make all this work.

Oh, and have I mentioned that we have successfully reduced her bottle consumption down to 2oz per serving?

Kids, pets and pee.

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Aside from the fact that we have decided to start this new year by instituting time-outs, banishing all diapers size 5 and up, and rationing water consumption from a bottle (only at sleep time and no more than 4oz), we decided that we needed to really go that extra mile in our new stance on tough love and extend it beyond our child and onto our pets. Why, you might wonder, are they becoming such hard-asses? Well, aside from the regularly discussed issues surrounding the “developmental enhancements” we are nudging along with Stella, there is the fact that in a period of 36 hours last week we found cat spray on the front of the refrigerator, and in two separate places on the kitchen counter. I consider that pretty much a no-brainer.

Although Steve has finally come to the reality of “cats who spray, don’t get to stay,” it has not come easily. I truly admire his compassion and kindness to the animal kingdom and that, along with having to repeatedly play bad-cop with Stella, the decision to banish Rosie like this is just killing him. But rules is rules, and if the greater population of the feline kingdom can live outdoors so can our inflexible, pampered grey cat.

So, Boris now gets to commune with his peeps 24-7 and doesn’t have to worry about informing the whole household of his dominance via urinary measures, and Rosie (who Steve really thinks is behind much of the spraying) is now banished to the outdoors whenever we aren’t here and many times even when we are. The result has been that Boris pretty much gave us the finger entirely and won’t even come around for the occasional snack anymore, and Rosie – well, Rosie has been turned into such a pampered princess by her sugar daddy that she doesn’t quite know how to function when she can’t spend 23.7 hours a day on the couch sleeping. Aside from yowling at the door long enough to actually lose her voice, she managed to get herself stuck under the house today. Not only was I busy trying to negotiate the pre-nap ritual with Stella, but it was pouring rain, and Rosie decide to perform her gutteral cries of a torture victim – right under Stella’s room! So out I went – me and my 7-month pregnant self…in the pouring rain – to free the cat who was single-handedly foiling my one shot at getting Stella down for a nap. Long and ranting story short, I had to dismantle the crawl-space and virtually drag Rosie from under the house while trying to keep the neighbor cat from crawling in, then found Stella wandering the house when I got back. I had to start the whole nap ritual all over again, thereby providing Stella’s 2-year-old bladder with a full 8oz of liquid before sending her off to sleep for 2+ hours. Odds are not good that we are going to continue with our dry streak today.

It just doesn’t get much better.