Documenting Progress

We finally made it up to Idaho, so I'm blogging from windy and gray Idaho Falls! I am happy to report that Maren has kept her bed dry overnight since Christmas Eve (that was one of my best presents), and even kept it dry up here at Grandma's house. I think that deserved a blog mention. I'm going to go out on a limb and say she's about 90% accurate on keeping herself dry. If I had the webcam set up you'd see me doing the happy potty dance. It's been seven weeks since we began this process and I think she's done pretty well. We only had to stop three times for potty breaks on our drive up yesterday, and she produced every time she asked to stop.

Now the next hurdle is to get her to dampen her enthusiasm about changing her own accidents. Twice in the past week, Sarah has called me to the bathroom to observe Maren swirling her own underwear around in the toilet. I know she's just trying to be big like I've been pushing her to be, but there are some things that I don't want her to be independent in. Let's keep the panty swish as a mommy job, please.

Since I'm on the subject of Maren, I'll share a funny story. She's been quite afraid of Santa Claus this year and hasn't wanted to sit on his lap or anything like that. But we didn't quite realize the scope of her fear. The other day all the other kids were running around crazy in the living room after dinner. They tend to do that routinely every night- I can't decide if it's an ingenious way to avoid dishes by playing happily together or if they just have one more burst of energy they've got to dispose of. Anyway, they were being monsters and chasing each other around. Maren observed for a few minutes and then charged in. She yelled in her scariest voice, "I Santa Claus!! HO HO HO!"