Not a Baby Anymore

Molly has had this persistent rash on her rear end for quite a while now. It seems like it gets a little better or worse but never completely goes away. Yesterday I finally called the pediatrician, thinking they would want to see her to prescribe some kind of cream and send me on my way. Instead, the triage nurse just told me to keep her out of her diaper as much as possible (along with a few other suggestions) and see if it would go away on its own.

Thus began some spur-of-the-moment potty training. I thought, if I'm expecting her to go a while without a diaper, I might as well at least try to teach her how not to pee all over my house. I cannot begin to describe how much I was DREADING today. Molly will still poop in her diaper and not say anything, only getting it changed when I discover it. It doesn't seem to bother her to be wet. These in my mind are big indications of being ready to potty train, and if she is not ready I would much rather clean a mess contained in a diaper than all over my floor.

Ready for this? In the first hour or so that Molly didn't have her diaper on, she has one major accident (peeing all over the beach towel I had set up in my living room) and two small ones. After both of the small ones, she peed a little on the floor, then ran to her potty chair and finished on the potty. I did what I've done with both the other girls and made a huge deal of her being a big girl and rewarding pee in the potty with a jelly bean (thank you leftover Easter candy). Those three incidents were the ONLY ones. All. Day. Long. By the end of the morning I was no longer asking her if she needed to sit on the potty. She was playing all over the living room area, because when she had to she would stop whatever she was doing to go and pee in her potty. She even pooped in the potty - twice! Any parent who's ever potty-trained a child can appreciate how astounded I am at the end of today. I honestly didn't plan on this being the beginning of permanent potty training - I thought it would be a temporary thing until her hind end cleared up. But once again Molly has blown me away with how quickly she learns skills. I am not dumb enough to think this transition will be this easy from here on out, but I love Molly for being such a trooper and taking this big developmental step like the champ that she continues to show me that she is.