In their DNA?

In each of these instances, Nadia did the "typical" behavior even though  (to the best of my knowledge) she had never seen it demonstrated by anyone else:

1. She took apart the very first Oreo cookie she was given and ate the icing before eating the cookie parts of the sandwich.

2. She started tearing off the paper on her crayons.

3. She climbed up the slide instead of using the steps.

4. She added kicking her legs and pounding her arms while lying on the floor to her crying routine when throwing a tantrum.

I am sure there are more examples, but those are the ones that are coming to my mind at the moment. Are there any you can think of to add to the list?

Yesterday Nadia had 3 accidents and several successes. The first "success" happened early in the morning. She started to pee (wet her Elmo underwear) but used her muscles to stop the flow. I quickly helped her to the potty where she peed a little bit. I was impressed that nothing was on the floor, but I could also tell she hadn't really let hersefl go all the way. Sure enough she had 2 accidents within a fairly short period of time. In the first case she left a trail of pee from where she was playing to the potty (she walked there on her own initiative). The second time she had come over to me to get my attention, but I didn't realize it was in reference to needing to pee because I was walking toward the dining room to put Ian in the Nap Nanny. From 9:00am to 1:00pm she didn't have any accidents (or use the potty). Her underwear was a little damp from her nap so I think the same thing must have happened (started to pee and stopped herself). Her third (and last) accident for the day happened not long after she had gotten up. I admit I was very frustrated after that one.

If I could do it over again, I wouldn't have tried potty training this week. Not because of Nadia, but because of Ian and I. It has been horrible timing that Ian has not been allowing me to sleep well At All this week. I am very tired. Her accidents often happen when I'm nursing Ian. The poor guy has been interrupted SO many times this week when she has had an accident OR when I've thought she looked like she was about to pee or poop and have hastily taken him off of me and set him on the floor. Needless to say he screams every time at the sudden removal of his milk supply and separation from Mommy. His screaming often leads to Nadia crying. So there I am using carpet cleaner for the umpteenth time and both kids are screaming. Fun Times. If I had to do it over again, I'd have waited until May for the first attempt at potty training as hopefully by that time I'll be getting more sleep at night and Ian will be more independent in playing by himself for longer periods of time. After the 3rd accident I was very, very close to throwing in the towel and saying we were done with potty training for a couple of months. However the rest of the day went much better. She didn't have any more accidents, and in the evening she kept telling me "poop." I knew she needed to go and put her on the potty briefly every time that she said that. She didn't go the first few times. I think she was holding it back, but finally the last time she said it (around 6:30pm) I asked Paul to get her to the potty ASAP and this time she succeeded. The thing that made me the happiest was that she was aware of her need to go and told me so BEFORE anything started coming out of her body. So maybe she's close to getting the hang of this?

One of her "strengths" would be that she can go many hours without going to the bathroom (or having an accident) including while she is sleeping at nap time. She also has the necessary communication skills, has learned to "hold it" if she starts to pee in the wrong place, and she is aware of her need to poop. Her weaknesses include that she can't pull down her underwear by herself yet, sometimes she has a hard time getting on her potty by herself, and the biggest two would be that she doesn't pee on the potty even when she has to go (as evidenced by the fact that she has an accident less than 30 seconds after getting off the potty) and that she hasn't expressed to me a need to pee (like she did for pooping this evening).

The M&M's backfired. They caused a lot of tears and tantrums all throughout the day even though many times I gave her one when she took the initiative to sit on the potty. I gave her 5 when she had the peeing success in the morning, and I gave her a LOT (maybe 15?) after the pooping success in the evening. We shall see if that success will help her deal better with the M&Ms today. Right now I regret asking Paul to stop and get some on his way home on Wednesday night. If it doesn't go better with them today, I'll be putting them away. My plan at the moment is to keep trying for 2-3 more days. I want to stay closer to her a greater part of the day (and go back to trying to hydrate her more than usual) so that hopefully she can pee in the potty more often. Paul's parents are coming up today as they haven't seen the kids in 3 weeks. Since there will be two extra people here I figure that I will stay with Nadia whenever I'm not nursing Ian, and someone else can stay close beside her when I am. I also plan to buy her two things at Target - a smaller potty (the froggy one is too wide for her to get on easily on her own) and more absorbant underwear (Wendy recommended that purchase). At this point I have no idea what the end result will be. Maybe she'll continue to make progress and I won't abandon potty training, or maybe I'll decide she wasn't quite ready and start up again in May. We shall see. I'm very glad that I'll have more help the next 2-3 days since Paul's parents will be here today and Paul will be home on Sat/Sun. Potty training a 20 month old by yourself while caring for a 2 month old hasn't been an easy task. At one point yesterday I actually felt like I was going to pass out (after carrying both kids upstairs simultaneously so I could give Nadia a bath as she was very dirty from playing outside). That's how tired I have been this week. I really, really can't wait for both the sleep deprivation stage and intense potty training stage to be over. Both are very unpleasant. At least when I train Ian (and I don't even want to think about that right now, LOL), I should be getting my usual 8-9 hours of sleep a night. :-)