Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Pee?

The title of this post is not specifically referring to the substance, though we will discuss that, too. "Pee?" is how Charlotte says "Please?" We taught her the word a few weeks ago since "more" seems to have disappeared from her vocabulary and we get a lot of screaming at mealtimes when she wants to eat but doesn't seem to know how to tell us what she wants. Now she says, "pee," and when she wants something REALLY bad, the "pee" is accompanied by either a grabbing hand motion, or the sign for "more." It is thoroughly adorable. Of course, now she wants everything we're eating, and it's hard to resist when she says, "Pee? Mo? Pee?" That's how we found out that Charlotte loves onions. She prefers them carmelized, but will also, weirdly, eat them raw. She learned how to say the word onion, too, all the better to beg for them. "On-yee? Mo on-yee! Pee?"

Charlotte has also, sort of, started potty training. She's been interested in it for a while, just a little bit. I thought she might be getting ready soon because every so often she grabs her diaper and says "Pee!" Who knows if she's actually peeing when she does that, or if she just suddenly notices that her diaper is full of pee, but the fact is that she's kinda gradually becoming aware of it, and that's pretty exciting. We picked up Once Upon a Potty a few weeks ago. At first Matt was reluctant to buy another book, but I pointed out that I didn't want to get it out of the library. After all, I said, where do people read that book? In the bathroom. Do we really want a book that's been on countless potties before us? It's kind of a long book for Charlotte, but she likes it just the same. Gradually after that I would sit her on the big potty for a second at bath time, just before putting her in the bath. I didn't make a big deal out of it, or even do it every time, but then she started to ask me to put her on the toilet if we were in there. She'd touch the lid and look at me and go, "pee?"

It all kind of came to a head this weekend when I made a serious error in judgment this weekend out at a restaurant and we were having a horrible diaper change and she begged to sit on the toilet. There is a page in Once Upon A Potty that goes, "Then she went Wee-Wee and Poo-Poo, but not exactly IN the potty." We had that moment. In public. Due to my bad judgment, Charlotte went back to the table with one less onesie layer and minus shoes and socks. Sunday I bought her a potty, and she sat on it a few times yesterday. Amazingly, before bed, she peed in the potty! It was awesome. One of those moments when we hooted and hollered and clapped and told Charlotte how proud we were of her, and she was like, "Ain't no thang, Mama. Can you read me another story, please?" Matt and I had a moment where he said, "Are you going to take a picture?"

"I don't know - honestly, I just was thinking about it and dismissed it as too weird."

"Well," said Matt. "How about you take it, but don't post it on the internet. We'll save it to mail to her college roommate or something." So on my hard drive are two blurry pictures of a potty. You can't even see the pee, but we know it's there.

In lieu of those potty pictures, I'm going to post some pictures from yesterday that didn't involve bodily fluids. Okay, well, not pee anyway. I put Charlotte in her crib to set up her playyard and do a few other quick chores. When I came back to get her, she had totally slimed her red play silk, and gotten dye all over her hands, face, and sheet. It was very weird - I wouldn't have thought this silk had any dye left to give up! I washed it a few times, and she's slimed it a bunch of times, and it hadn't bled like this in a long time. Such is life.


Charlotte is very proud of her dye job.