Chloe's Next Adventure

Now that we're home from our trip, and this entire country has just celebrated the lunar New Year, there's been time for me to think a bit about what the new year will bring. As a family, this is a time of lots of big questions being up in the air. Many of you know that John has been working to investigate the possibilities of starting an English training center here in our city. He's done quite a bit of thinking and planning, and hopefully during the month of March we should have some more answers about whether that venture looks feasible or not. But in the meantime, we have been waiting to move to a new apartment until some of these business questions are answered. We really can't move until we know more about what his future job will be, and especially where it will be. As well, we still have a number of weeks before the new baby will arrive. (I'm about 31 weeks now.) Somehow in my mind, I thought that after we got back from our trip I would be really busy packing up, looking at decorating a new apartment, etc etc, but instead I have to be patient for several more weeks before anything will happen.

So this past week I realized that I have a very nice window of time here to help Chloe on a new adventure: potty training. She has been showing interest for a long time now (remember her first spoken sentence had to do with bodily functions!) and has even attempted to use the big person's potty by herself in recent weeks! She often tells me when she has to go or has just gone, and she truly seems to get the idea of what other big people do in the bathroom. She also seems to already be a "holder" like Clara Anne was--sometimes I'll check her diaper mid-day and it is either totally dry or barely wet. All this combined to make me think, wow, maybe she's ready! It would be great to have her out of diapers before another little one comes along! And we won't be leaving home for another 7-8 weeks, so she would have time to get established in her new habit before other major transitions happen in our family.

Saturday morning found us searching through our boxes of girl's clothes, looking for the training pants. [Long time readers of my blog will remember how these pants were attempted to be mailed to me from the States, but then the package was marked as a terrorist threat and returned to the States, and finally mailed again sucessfully! Who knew that pink and white, thick cotton undies were so dangerous!] We did find them (of course they were in the very last box) and also a stash of unused Pull-Ups, so I think we are ready to go! I read through some materials to refresh my memory on the game plan of training, and made sure my cupboards were stocked with plenty of tasty snacks and drinks. We've been really talking up the transition to Chloe, how exciting it is that she is a big girl now, letting her hold the panties, letting her sit on the potty seat, etc. We shall see what Monday brings! My goal is to give her four days of training, and if she just isn't getting it at all, we'll put it on hold for awhile. But if she is making some progress and catching on I think this will be a great time to help her accomplish this significant new life skill. Clara Anne is excited to help demonstrate, as well!

I don't feel the same fear and trepidation that I did before training Clara Anne, partially because there's not as much of a time pressure. With Clara Anne, we were going to be traveling about 2 months later to southeast Asia, and then back to the States, and so if I didn't train her then she would have been almost 3 rather than 23 months when I trained her. So with Chloe, there's less pressure--if she doesn't get it, we'll still wait awhile, but only 6-8 months as opposed to a whole year. We'll just see how it goes! I'm sure it will be interesting!

The next few days will be busy, but hopefully my next update will have some news on Chloe's progress. She's a big girl now!