Little Miss Thing has been showing signs of potty readiness for a couple months now. I set a little potty in the bathroom when she was 15 months old. This week I started trying to have her use her little potty full time. Here she is rocking her her new panties in the yard today. They inevitably became wet, but even though she is still learning she shows signs of desire and understanding with the potty. Tonight, she laid in bed for over and hour(with diaper on of course). She would lay still eyes shut, toss and turn and stay awake. This is not typical for her. Finally, she sat up said, "paa paa, paa paa(potty potty)" and we ran to the bathroom. Sure enough within seconds on the potty she peed. It took less than five minutes for her to fall asleep when we got back in bed.
Some of her readiness signs included:
- dry through the night and naps
- wanting to sit on her potty
- putting her baby dolls on the potty(never showing her that could be done)
- patting her diaper and saying dirty
- getting the wipes and a new diaper, laying down dry, peeing, then saying dirty
- peeing in her potty before getting into the tub, without being told to sit on the potty(3 times in one week)
- Sitting on the potty with a dry diaper on, getting up with a freshly peed in diaper on.
I couldn't find support anywhere that said it was okay to potty train before 18 months... but ummm... some of those signs scream, "Just potty-train her already!" I do not expect her to be trained in 3 days but I we have already realized some success. Here's to hoping she will be completely done with the potty training process by 21 months old. (In time for her baby sister's arrival)
Here is a cute video after an accident 24 hours into this rodeo.
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| Random silly pic |
I have really been enjoying Toben's desire to learn lately. Since the summer reading program he has really taken off with reading. We attempt to read daily for 15-30 minutes and do some math as well. He has been reading a lot of Biscuit books from the I Can Read series. He also reads Dr. Seuss books like Fox in Socks and Green Eggs and Ham, usually over two or three days due to the length. This week he has read Biscuit Wants to Play by Alyssa Capucilli and Mittens by Lola Schaeffer. Today he read a portion of Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop as well as a few BOB Books we borrowed from the library. Teaching reading seemed easy to me. I taught him his letters by his second birthday using a Eric Carle book and letter magnets mostly. He knew his letter sounds by his third birthday; again, by using letter magnets but also by him playing starfall.com. His first words learned were simple three letter words like cat and dog. He had partial phonetic awareness at 3 & 1/2 years old when we started. Meaning, he could hear the word while he sounded out each letter. "Ck, ahh, Ttt" became cat easily. It wasn't until a month or so into reading that he could then also take a word and break it down into its phonetic parts without seeing the word. He would sound out a word by saying, "you know mommy, pop is ppah, oooo, pppahh. Thats POP." I haven't taught him how to write letters yet, but I think that is the next thing that he wants to get into doing. Above is a picture from this week. He asked me out of the blue while I was reading my magazine, "Can you show he how to do a big R?"
Toben asked me to take a video of him with this little book he wrote in because he wanted to share it with Zach who was away at work for a few days. He loved using the pencil to attempt to write the weather words.
Believe it or not, teaching math has not come easily to me. This week our focus has been on counting frontwards and backwards. The number line on the porch has been tons of fun. We count down and bast-off after zero. He can work out simple addition and subtraction equations but he seems to need some more work with the basics.
