Another HUGE Milestone!

This has been a low key week at the Brown household for two reasons: Lily has been a little under the weather and Eden is potty training!

I know most of you have summer goals such as reading a few good books or going to lunch and catching up with friends, but my two goals for the summer were 1) to get Parker to stop sucking his thumb and 2) to potty train Eden. Exciting goals, aren't they?!?! (Don't be jealous- you too can have these goals if you are crazy enough to have three kids in 3 1/2 years!!)

We spent the month of June helping Parker reach his goal of not sucking his thumb and I decided that July would be spent helping Eden reach her goal of getting potty trained. I have been dreading this for a while but decided that I could not put it off any longer if we were going to be completely potty trained by the time school starts in August. Everyone kept telling me that "girls are easier to train than boys" but that still didn't make me want to start this process again. It was just last summer that we did this with Parker. I truly think that potty training is one of the worst responsibilities that parents have. It is so messy and inconvenient and constant. It's kind of like having a puppy. The only difference is that you can't rub their little noses in it when they have an accident!!

I decided that Tuesday was going to be our day to start. This weekend I made sure we were stocked up on Dora panties, M&M's, stickers for our reward chart, a Cinderella potty watch, and plenty of carpet cleaner! Tuesday morning did not go well- Eden had an accident within 15 minutes of putting her panties on. After cleaning up the carpet and the 20 little pee shaped footprints on the tile, we tried again. Another accident. The doubts started creeping in my head. Maybe she's just not ready. Maybe we should wait another week to start. But I stuck with it and that night when Cory got home, something just "clicked" with Eden. She has pretty much been accident-free for the past two days. She has even been successful pooping on the potty, which is something that took months for Parker to do. We are so proud of her and are amazed at how quickly she has figured this out. She has even started telling us when she needs to go rather than me having to ask her every few minutes.

I am very realistic and know that we will probably still have some accidents and for that reason we have not ventured out in public in our "big girl" panties yet. But, overall, I am very pleased at how well Eden has done in just three days. Once again, she has given us another reason to call her our "easy" child!