Today is Kaia Pookie’s last day at her current school. She’s spent 15.5 months at her current school, in three different classrooms. And since her 18-24-month class, the teachers have always told us what a little leader she is. They call her Ms. Kaia because she loves to mimic what the teachers say in terms of instructing kids on what to do, whether it’s for sitting down, being quiet, or going to the potty. She’s “the life of the party,” one of the teachers told me yesterday. “Everyone always knows Kaia because she makes sure that you know who she is!” Apparently, teachers from other classes all know her and look forward to seeing her and her big personality. It’s truly amazing to see how much she’s grown and flourished in her time at this school. She came in as an almost 17-month-old baby, and she’s leaving as a fast-growing and maturing 32-month-old toddler. She’s no longer wearing diapers at school anymore, walking around commando (just shorts, no underwear/diaper)!

For treats for the teachers and kids, we brought mini (dairy and non-dairy) ice cream cones. We also wrote her two teachers thank-you notes. We’ll likely be back for backup care in the future, but overall, we’ve had a good experience at this school and enjoyed the curriculum and structure. Daycare has been a good experience for us, and it’s something I share with all new parents who are hesitant to move their kids from being at home with a nanny/grandparent to school. There’s something magical that happens when kids are altogether. Peer pressure can be good and bad, but I try to see the good (like the nap instilling!!) and be happy about that.

Kaia spent most of today wanting to poop. Well, she would have pooped easily if we had just given her a diaper to wear, but we’ve been pretty strict about the “no diaper” situation since we officially started the Oh Crap! method last Saturday. She needs to learn to do all pee and poop in the potty. She’s been scared to poop on the potty, though, and we’ve been struggling to make her see that it’s a good thing. We’ve read her multiple potty and poop books. I’ve squished out slime from my hand and showed her that’s what poop is like when it comes out of her butt. I’ve asked her if she wants Peter Rabbit to poop on the potty. We’ve given her endless toys and things to play with while sitting on the potty. She just can’t wrap her head around it. She did poop in the potty a few times, with a large one on Friday night when Chris coaxed her; that was the real win after struggling literally all day long at school. It doesn’t matter if it’s her little potty, on her travel potty seat at home, on her travel potty seat outside at a public rest room. She is terrified of the feeling of letting her poop go.

So while I prepared nine different components of homemade bibimbap today, Chris basically chased her around the apartment, coaxing her to get on the potty and get her poop out. Because a little poop would always come out, there was endless wiping, endless little pellets, or what the Oh Crap! support group calls “Hershey kisses,” and endless sanitizing and cleaning of any surface where said Hershey kisses landed. My baby’s poor little bottom is getting the equivalent of a diaper rash. My Kaia has never had a real diaper rash before other than some tiny red dots after about four weeks at daycare in her first class. She has no idea what this uncomfortable, sore feeling is like. I was hoping we could take her to the playground in the morning, but we couldn’t let her go without pooping.

She finally pooped today, in her little potty, at around 4pm. So we had about an hour to go to the playground and let her run around before dinner. Somehow, that poop was not enough. More is still coming!! She still had some “skidmarks” on her butt that we had to clean, both on her and on her shorts. I wasn’t quite sure how I imagined potty training would go. But I did think that poop would be a struggle since most kids struggle with this. I just didn’t realize that the “accidents” I would mostly be cleaning up would be little pellets, smears, indicating that poop is slowly but surely inching its way out.

We’ve managed to survive just over a week of potty training now. The pee has been relatively good. But I think we really need her to a) get comfortable pooping on the potty, and b) be adaptable to different toilets and her travel potty seat. We’re traveling very soon with her, so this whole potty training timing is a bit nerve wracking.

Jamie Glowacki says in her book Oh Crap! Potty Training that you will know you are done potty training when you no longer constantly have poop and pee on your mind. I am not sure when that time will come, but I know that when it does, it will be quite a relief. We are now six days into this, and I feel exhausted. Every time I see updates in the school app for Kaia, I immediately want to know if she did a poop or pee in the potty or had an accident. When we are at home, I am consistently prompting her to pee. She has also been holding in poop since Tuesday, so I know the fear of pooping in the potty is looming quite large.

Because we wanted all potty training done together, daytime and night, I’ve been co-sleeping with Kaia since Saturday. This is to a) make it easier to gently wake her up and prompt her to get on the potty to pee, and b) to prevent her from coming to our bed in the middle of the night, which would inevitably result in us having to strip the bed due to pee on our sheets (toddlers cannot be faulted for peeing in their sleep; they are not conscious while asleep and so, it’s up to us to help teach them to train themselves to hold pee while asleep). The night time gauging / estimating when she will need to pee has been pretty terrible to begin with, as Jamie warns. I’ve checked her and prompted her maybe 30 minutes before or after she needed to pee the previous four nights. I always missed the window (so close!!!) and she had already peed on the hospital waterproof sheet. A few times, she got on the potty in the middle of the night, either because I prompted her or she did it herself, but no pee came. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go with this co-sleeping and nighttime prompting. But finally on night 5, last night, I got the first pee timing right: she had fallen asleep just past 8pm. At around midnight, she stirred, and I saw an opening to ask if she wanted to pee. She said yes, and immediately hopped off the bed, sat on the potty, and did a nice, long pee. I was overjoyed when I saw the trickle! I quickly wiped her, cleaned up, and had her go back to sleep. Then, I did a little happy dance: I finally had a nighttime win on the FIFTH night – within WEEK ONE!

This morning, I took her to school. It is very clear that all this potty training has made sure pee and poop are top of mind for her, as well. Along the walk, she was eager to point out all the dog poop on the ground. “Look! There’s poop! Is it a doggie poop?” she’d ask. I confirmed that yes, it was dog poop, and that she should not step on it or touch it because it’s yucky. Then, she’d respond, “Ewww, that’s dog poop! Not Kaia’s poop!”

I suppose as first time parents, we kind of didn’t do a proper sleep training with Kaia as in… we never taught her how to sleep on her own. We got her to sleep through the night when she was about 12 weeks old. But we never taught her that to sleep, she should do it without us constantly coddling her and being by her side. We should tuck her in at her bed after reading together, kiss her good night, and say “see you in the morning!” But, we didn’t do that.

Well, in some ways, it’s kind of blown up in our faces, as bedtime nowadays can take 1.5-2 hours from end to end, without even factoring in the bedtime stories. And that is a true time suck when you have to do things like… work, clean the house, prepare and cook food, and all the usual tasks that need to get done in a day. And you know what this really, really takes away time from? Time to ourselves… to watch a show or movie, write on this blog (!), read articles and books, or enjoy my too-expensive candle in peace.

This last week, Chris insisted that we not lie down with her until she falls asleep. She needs to know that we’re serious, that this is bedtime, which means… she has to SLEEP. No playing, no stalling, nothing else. Go to sleep, or else. She especially is manipulative of me and pulls my hair, smushes my face, and everything in between. So we are trying “baby steps.” We sit in the chair at my desk (or at least, one of us does, usually Chris since she whines endlessly when it’s me for whatever reason), and then she eventually falls asleep on her bed. We’re doing well if we start reading at around 7:15-7:30, and she’s asleep by 8:30. If she isn’t asleep until 9… well, we need to try again the next day.

My baby isn’t a baby anymore, even if I keep calling her that. She’s over 2.5 years old now. And although she is very independent in some ways, she loves playing us and keeping us around when we probably shouldn’t be around, for our sanity, and for her own future sanity and growth.

Every stage of babyhood and toddlerhood is amazing in itself when you are literally watching your child grow every day. I’ve been so fortunate that I had a long (by U.S. standards) maternity leave and have a flexible schedule that allows me a good amount of time with Pookster. Watching her little changes day to day has always fascinated me. And I love seeing the things that she really gets into that seems to change week to week.

While we were in our Santiago hotel, one thing I would do is open my arms wide from about 5-10 feet away from her, and she’d get excited, start giggling, and run at full speed into my arms. Usually, it would be quite an impact, so part of me might even fall back a little, and I’d yell out a little “oomph!” as she dug her face into my chest and neck. But that would just add to the effect and her excitement, as she’d want to do it again and again. If I don’t initiate it and Pookster wants to do it, she’d say, “I wanna hug.” And that would be a cue for me to back up, open my arms wide, and wait for her to run into me. She also has taken a liking to smushing her face into mine and even biting my lips. Pookster can get quite aggressive sometimes with the face smushing. I just hope I don’t get a black eye with all this affection.

Sometimes when we are doing little activities like this, I get a little sad, thinking that one day, she will not be this easily amused, want to hug or kiss me, or even want to be anywhere near me. She may want to spend all her time with her friends and little to no time at all with me. But it’s just a reminder to me to soak up all the cuddles now when I can and she allows me to; to continue trying my best to create a safe space for her to be herself, voice her thoughts and opinions, and let her be who she wants to be. Every now and then, I look back at older photos and videos of her, and as trite as it sounds, I just can’t believe how quickly she is growing; even just 3-4 months ago, she had chubbier cheeks that I loved to pinch and hold. And now we’re getting into the next “big kid” phase of potty training, which is another reminder to me that every day, as much as it makes me sad, my baby is less of a baby, and far more of a growing big kid.

And hopefully with these intentions, Pooks will still want to cuddle and kiss me, even when she’s 10, 20, 30, or 40-plus years old.

We came back to daycare this week to find out that pretty much every single child across both 2s classrooms were in the process of potty training… except Kaia. Kaia is already over 31 months old. Depending on the source you read, the “sweet spot” for potty training is at around 27 months. We were lazy and not focused on it, so we never even thought about actually doing it back in March when we probably should have. And of course, Chris being Chris, he got annoyed to think that our child was behind in her cohort. “We need to start pushing!” he insisted. We tried to get Pookster to sit on the potty this week, and luckily, she did start sitting on it for a bit. Our teacher told us that she had been sitting on the potty at school for up to two minutes, just that nothing came out.

I finally opened the “Oh Crap!” potty training book this week to get into it, and it looks like we will probably need to start with the naked “watching” phase for at least a day to see if we can push her to pee or poop in the Baby Bjorn potty I got for her via my Buy-Nothing group. Diapers are annoying for all kinds of reasons (packing for a two-week trip with so many taking up so much space in the luggage was pretty grating), but they are especially annoying when you know your child is capable of potty training and is very verbal and smart. I hope we haven’t missed the ripe window to potty train and that she won’t be too stubborn about learning. Potty training is not innate; it’s all socialized. So, we will just need to push her to do it, just as I did with walking. Walking happened just a minute after I really pushed her. I don’t think potty training will happen as quickly, but we can only hope and be optimistic.

One of the most enjoyable parts of child rearing a younger child is when they achieve things they’ve been working on or striving to master. In Kaia’s 2.5 years, it’s been everything from watching her move a ball from one hand to another (as a very young baby) to crawling, to walking, to now riding a scooter and identifying the right objects in a book when we do “search and find” activities. In the last several weeks, when she identifies the right object I ask her to, or she does something that she’s been working on and finally does it successfully, she loves to laugh, squeal, and then yell out, “I DID IT!” or, “Kaia did it!” It’s been so fun to watch and always makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Sometimes, she gets a little too excited and distracted by identifying something correctly the first time around, and she will just keep yelling, “I DID IT!” anywhere from five to ten times, which then distracts her from identifying the next object. Initially, I would get a little annoyed because we were’t moving on with the activity, but then I realized… this is all for her learning and enjoyment, anyway. So if she wants to bask in the glow of achieving something for another minute or two, there’s no harm in that. I should let her enjoy, laugh, and squeal, and just sit in the moment… Because it is always good to let your kids feel good about themselves.

The first time we visited Australia with Kaia, we did a side trip to Byron Bay, and there, we saw this book by Lonely Planet called A Time to Celebrate: Explore Festivals from Around the World. We’ve been drawn to children’s books that are multicultural for obvious reasons for her, and this one was especially fun because it has little flaps you can lift up that reveal more images and words. Even though there are a lot of long descriptions and sentences, Kaia had enjoyed this book since she was about 1.5 years old. Oftentimes, this is one of the books she will request to read at bedtime. This book highlights these global celebrations:

• The Garma Festival, Arnhem Land region, Australia
• Chinese New Year, Beijing, China
• Rio Carnival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 
• Ramadan in Morocco, Africa
• Day of the Dead, Oaxaca, Mexico
• Diwali, Mumbai or Jaipur, India
• Tu Bi’Shivat Festival, New York, USA 
• Christmas in Frankfurt, Germany

For Carnival in Brazil, there’s a line in the book that goes like this: “Lent is the time when Christians traditionally resist treats and temptations. During Carnival, they can feast and enjoy themselves one last time before Lent begins!” Kaia loves to finish sentences of books we read often (and she thus knows) — it always seems like she is reading, but in reality, we know it’s because she’s simply memorized the lines. So when I paused before “…when Christians traditionally resist….” Instead of saying “treats and temptations,” last night, she actually said, “treats and pastries!”

This cracked me up so much because for Kaia, her kryptonite is most definitely pastries. Any time she sees Chris or me carrying anything in a small brown paper bag, she yells, “I want it! I want it! I want some! WANT SOME!” It could easily be coal or dog poo, but she will insist, “I WANT IT!” It’s a weekend treat for all of us, and she most definitely always, always wants in on the goodies. Last weekend when we went to Laurel Bakery near Brooklyn Bridge Park, it was just the two of us, and I got one (very small… 🙁 ) plain croissant and one canele. She probably ate more than half of that croissant and a quarter of the canele. We don’t get them every day obviously, but pastries are most definitely beloved by everyone in our whole family. She has definitely assimilated in this way.