Hannah's Potty Training Update and Other Fun

Dear Nathan and Hannah, 

We spent pretty much all of Wednesday through Saturday at home (except for a short trip to the grocery store on Friday), but surprisingly, it was a good break from the hustle and bustle of our regular weekly schedule. It was nice to be able to lounge around in our pjs all day if we wanted to and just relax. 

Well, Hannah is currently about 65% potty trained. In the mornings, you can keep your undies dry if I make sure you go potty every 45 - 60 mins. You will wet your undies just a bit, but realize it and stop your stream and exclaim, "pee pee in the potty!" when you feel the urge to go. You are pretty good about announcing when you have to go number 2, so we haven't had to clean up one of those messes in a long time. 

It's still early, but you have your accidents when you are doing something really fun or you are in the middle of eating, so I usually have you go potty before you eat. 

In the afternoon, your "schedule" is a bit more sporatic. Sometimes you go 45 minutes between having to go, but then, sometime its more like 15 minutes. So in the afternoon, you have accidents more often. Nathan was the same way for awhile, but I think you are still just learning this process. This is on the young side, but you were showing the signs, so I decided to give it a try, thinking that maybe it won't work, but I'd call it a success. 

 Day 1: We focused on keeping your undies dry. I had chocolate chips, cookies, and water on hand to give you when you wanted them. Every so often, I would ask if your undies were dry, and if they were, I would give you a treat. You were having accidents, not realizing that you were going, and I was cleaning up messes allday. However, when I put you on the potty, you would empty as much as you could.

Day 2: I upped the ante and brought out more treats and JUICE! This got you drinking more, and peeing more as well. I kept things up, alternating between, letting you tell me when you need to go, and me just putting you on the potty. Things were still not very encouraging. You were starting to realize when you were going, but you could not stop your stream.

Day 3: We had a play group over our house, so I was a bit more conservative and brought you to the potty every 45 minutes or so. You did just fine. After lunch, we even braved the grocery store in undies and you got to pick out more treats (yogurt covered pretzels). At this point, I've pretty much given up letting you tell us when you need to go, and simply just take you every 45 minutes or so.

Day 4: You slept in that morning, like an hour and half past when you normally wake up, so I'm thinking that you had some sort of mental leap that night. When we were home, I let you decide when to go potty, but when we were out, I would just take you when it was time. You were actually showing some progress with your control.

Since Nathan just recently became completely potty trained at over 3.5 years, I'll take where you are at. We can go through a day with 1 or 2 very small accidents, and plus you can now put your undies on by yourself. In fact, you can also put on your own swim suits. You grabbed this one today as we were playing and slipped it over your regular clothes (there is a denim skirt underneath that suit).

On Sunday, while I was at a derby scrimmage, Daddy took you two to a friend's 3rd birthday party. She's pretty much right in between the two of you in age, so both of you had lots of fun at the party. 

 On Tuesday, we had a small play date/potluck at another one of our friends' house. Here's the little kids' table.

 And the big kids' table.

 At one point, when some of the kids were not letting another kid play, I overheard Nathan tell the "mean" kids that they weren't being nice and then he invited the other kid to play with him. [Heart melts] I had a talk with you about this once, and you remembered!

After being spoiled with all the fun crafts that Auntie Momo did, quiet time is now a bit different. We are deviating from the schedule and doing more things like science experiments and art projects. We are both really excited about this project below, inspired from a book that we recently read. We'll be working on this for a few days and I'll be sure to post the final product next week.

 Storms derailed our plans this morning to go to the wildflower center. Instead, I cleaned out the car, while you guys played in the rain.

 I also took out some shaving cream for you guys to play with. It was all fun and exciting, until Hannah, you decided to touch your face (maybe you had an itch?) and landed a big glob of shaving cream around your mouth.

Hannah is speaking more 2-3 word phrases (mostly in English), and I can see a lot of what you say are things that Nathan says. You can sing the ABC song, count to 10 in both chinese and english, you know about 10 animals, along with their sounds, and a few colors, although, you don't know them really well, just yet. You love to sing twinkle twinkle little stars in both english and chinese, and your favorite books are Hop on Pop and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do you See? . 

Well, that's it for this week! Until next week, 

Love, 

Mommy