Surprise!

Didn't expect that, did you?!

Haha, Sarah's not at all potty training/trained yet, though she does love to sit on the toilet with Nathan's potty seat.  We've actually had two three (one more this morning) "successful" visits to the potty, one of each "kind" which were duly celebrated.  But this Mama is just too busy hauling the kids around Boston to get serious about potty training a toddler right now.  I took it as my personal mission in life to get Nathan trained before his second birthday, but I am purposefully NOT trying to meet that goal for Sarah.  (Though I sound sarcastic, that's actually how I felt with Nathan!  I thought that accomplishment would get me an "A" in Mothering or a gold star or something.  I have since realized that motherhood is neither a graded activity nor a competition!).  I do try and let Sarah sit on the potty when she asks (don't want to discourage her) but it's really nice that Nathan and I can both make it on an exploring outing in the city for the whole morning without having to stop and search for a restroom.  Plus taking a little girl to a public restroom is somewhat of a yucky-er prospect then a little boy!  I figure when the snow drifts are over the kids heads might be a more optimal time for some serious potty training.

In addition to this "somewhat milestone" report about Sarah, I'd also share a "somewhat milestone" about Nathan.  He stopped wearing diapers at night... for about 6 weeks.  The back story is that we had a couple of weeks where Nathan was leaking through his diaper VERY often at night.  My suggestion was to wake him up and  take him to the bathroom when Brian and I go to bed, which worked quite well.  So well, in fact, that Nathan seemed to be waking up dry every morning!  So after a while (a week or two?), I decided that we should try him in underwear at night.  In hindsight I don't think I paid close enough attention for long enough to his diaper status, but we had about 10 of his diapers left and were about to make a Target run, so I wanted to make the decision before buying him a new pack of diapers rather then after.  Because, you know, Target is the only store in the whole world that sells diapers so it was a "now or never" decision (sarcasm intended, but once again I'm giving you a peek into my actual thought process, illogical as it may be).  Note - there was also a quick Amazon purchase of a waterproof mattress pad somewhere during this time.

Unfortunately after switching to underwear, we had approximately twice weekly night wakings due to Nathan's accidents.  I thought that they would taper off as he got "used" to wearing underwear, but after about 6 weeks I finally got fed up with the extra laundry and middle-of-the-night hastle.  So last week we went back to diapers for Nathan at night.

I'm not sure when we'll try switching to underwear again, but in the meantime we are also working on instituting a suggestion of Brian's (ahem, that he made at the beginning of this whole escapade) - to get serious about eliminating milk for the kids at bedtime.  We had tried just drastically reducing the amount of milk in Nathan's cup, but that didn't seem to work.  So now my "rule" is no liquids after 7:00 pm.  And, contrary to my worries, we haven't had rioting from either child when I've had to deny them milk after that time.  But this week I'll be stocking up on diapers again at Target (or maybe just a small pack)!