"Look What I Made!"

The little victories are all you can cheer when you're dealing with kids the ages of mine. So...

The Girl is potty trained. Her obstinance (and that's precisely what it was) was finally overcome with a series of carrots and sticks. She just caved, and discovered it wasn't as bad as she had assumed. Been a week and not one accident. The huge gushing sound you may have heard was no doubt my sigh of relief at cutting my diaper load in half.

Sadly, this phase always comes with its own set of peripheral annoyances. She must describe - in detail - her every moment of waste removal. She raced out to me the other night after using the facilites to tell me she had just made a "giant breadstick in the potty." Thanks for the visual, honey.

The Boy was similarly inclined at that point in his development, however his descriptions followed a different criteria. Everything was described as letters of the alphabet - "I just made a 'J'!" or "That was a big 'W'." I became worried at one point he was trying to complete the entire series and feared he would forever be frustrated trying to achieve the very difficult 'B'. I had visions of a five year old squirming for hours on the seat in a desperate, sysiphusian quest to finish his perfect design, but fortunately that phase passed.

I'm hoping his sister will forego any attempt at completing a series of bakery items, and that the descriptive narratives will end mercifully soon.