Potty training strike

There's this unpublished post, a long one, that details our trials and travails with potty training. It was long. It was detailed. It remains unfinished.

The basic story is this. Animalia started potty training on her own initiative somewhere around 18 months. She just decided that she wanted to go and she did. Not all the time, but regularly enough. Then a little more than a month ago, she was going at Nana's house once or twice a day and most of the time when she was at home. "Wooohooooo!!" I thought. "We'll be out of diapers by two!!!"

And then, a little less than two weeks ago, she quit. She now refuses to go to the potty. She's on strike.

Crap.

Cupcakes

"Aya needs a cupcake," Animalia says, peering into Nana's refrigerator.
"There are no cupcakes," Nana and Mama both say, almost in unison.
"No cupcakes, " she whispers, almost as if she's giving herself a reminder. "The cupcakes are at Nina's house."

Nina bought her a cupcake during our visit in August and apparently it's made it into her long term memory.

Potions.

I'm watching Animalia in the shower. She has appropriated a couple of shampoo bottles, empty ones, and some plastic containers to pour water from one to another. Then she delicately mixes it with her finger. She's very busy.

All I can think about is when we were young, me and Nina and Uncle Buncle (Tío Javier). Nina and I used to lock ourselves in the bathroom and mix potions from random liquids we found in the bathroom cabinet. Nasty stuff-- alcohol and hydrogen peroxide and various shampoos. Javier would be banging on the door, begging to play with us, and after the potion was ready, we'd open the door. We'd tell him he could play with us if he drank our potion. He'd drink the stuff. And then we'd lock him out again. We were rotten. In retrospect I'm surprised we didn't kill or poison him.

So I'm watching Animalia play with this water and I imagine her with siblings. I laugh.

I love you, Daddy!

Daddy says, "Give me a beso," and starts leaning toward Animalia. Animalia starts backing away. "Give me a kiss, " he says again, pushing his face toward hers. She's struggling slightly, trying to get away from his beard. She puts her hands up, blocking him. She shakes her head. "I love you daddy, I love you, I love you, I love you." But no kisses today.

Words of Wisdom, Part 2

"You're done."

-- Animalia to Tata, irritated at the way he was reading to her. She took the book from his hands and closed it.

Words of Wisdom, Part 1

"She had a major occurance and now she needs to go through the car wash."

--Tata, describing a particularly disgusting poopy diaper

The bed.

Lately, the Animalia's favorite place to play is the bed. Any bed. It can be Nana's bed, Mama's bed, or even "the playpen bed." So once she's in a bed, she wraps the blankets around herself and lays down on the pillow. She scrunches her eyes closed. Then she announces that she's asleep, that it's nighttime, that she's "dreaming in the night." She pops up to a sitting position and laughs. "Aya's awake!"


The dreaming thing really gets me. She talks about dreams, sometimes, when she actually wakes up from actual sleep, she tells us what she dreamt. "Aya's dreaming about Daddy," she told me one morning when she woke up and found that her dad had already left to work. "I dream in the nighttime," she tells us when we ask her. "I want to have dreaming!" she says when she's exhausted and desperate to go to bed.

Last night, she woke up in the middle of the night. I think she had a nightmare. "Dreaming!" she said in a half cry, "Bad boy!" I scooped her up, kissed and hugged her and she fell asleep with her head against my shoulder. In the morning, I asked her about it. "Did you have a scary dream?" "Dreaming is bad boy. No, no, no dreams!" she said, in broken toddlerish.

Two is just around the corner.

Time flies. My baby now calls herself a "teeny tiny girl." She walks and talks and demands. She plays and "reads" books. She sings and dances. She chooses her own clothes, mainly dresses. She can put on her own shoes and pull on her own zapetas. She can identify the doctor's office and the credit union when we pass by in the car ("the doctor girl's house" and the kangaroo's house). When she wants to go somewhere she says "Take my hand." On her tippy toes, she's tall enough to reach the lower mail slot at the post office and loves to push the mail in. She has imaginary friends, still The Boy, plus some random others that she talks to occasionally. She can buckle herself into her stroller and she does, when I'm in a hurry and I just throw her in. She loves to go to the store, any store and she makes up names for stores she wants to go to (The Dancing Store!). She continues to look more and more like a kid and less and less like a baby. She makes jokes. She's bossy. She's lovey. She loves hair and clothes and zapatos.

It makes me happy, my baby being so healthy and smart and beautiful. It makes me sad that she's headed away from being a baby.

My baby is turning two in a little more than two weeks. We'll have a quiet "Happy Birthday to You" at Nana's house on the actual day, then a bigger, more hectic "Happy Birthday to You" at the park the following weekend. Bubble-themed. And then it's goodbye to One.

Teeny tiny frustration is hilarious.

Frustration, from the self-labeled "teeny tiny girl" is so funny we can't help laughing. It begins with a shriek or a complaining noise, possibly a whine, and then ends up with her saying, "WAIT A MINUTE, WAIT A MINUTE!" while stomping. The demands soon follow. And then sometimes a scream or two, or a fake cry where she actually says, "AYA'S CWYING!" It's really hard not to laugh. Especially after being told by a not-quite-two-year-old to wait a minute.

Arizona Tour '09

Three days in a pickup truck. Four adults, one toddler. Jerome, using the wrong directions through Prescott, getting on the right path to Crown King and onto the cabin in Horsethief Basin, then through Sedona and Flagstaff to our ultimate destination, the Grand Canyon. Back through Valle, AZ to see Flintstones Bedrock City and the Chapel of the Holy Dove, through Flagstaff and Phoenix and HOME! If Google Maps is correct, we traveled over 1300 miles. That's true insanity.

Animalia was ok throughout the trip, sometimes complaining that she wanted to go home, asking for her big bed, wanting to see Nanitas, or asking if we were going to see Nina. We were loaded with distractions for the difficult times, having packed several books, some finger puppets from Cayman courtesy of Britta and probably best of all, a Melissa and Doug dry erase/magnetic chalk board that Nana bought her before we went on the trip. She loved the dry erase marker and then the "cleaning" but loved the letters equally.

Destination-wise, she liked Jerome and the wrap she borrowed from begrid to protect her against the chilly air, the lovely shop called House of Joy that used to be a brothel, where she said hi to a fake giraffe outside and told him to say hi to her, reminded herself not to touch anything inside, danced to Russian music and the lady working there (the owner maybe?) asked her name, insisting that we'd see it in lights one day. She loved the cabin in Horsethief as it gave her the opportunity to run around outside with baseball bats and "soccer baseballs" and play with her miniature cast iron skillet. She also seemed to like camping, once we finally settled in at the Grand Canyon Mather Campground. We'd prepared her with the book Maisy Goes Camping and she was pretty happy to be in the tent, just like Maisy. She was thrilled to see a raven the size of a cat in the campground, saying it was the Tata bird and asking where the Aya bird was. And when she saw the Canyon itself? Daht asked her what it was and she responded that it was "a painting."

Other highlights:
At one point she was totally frustrated with driving and started asking to go to the store to buy a bicycle, a toothbrush, and eventually just "stuff." Later, on the way home, she kept asking to stop at the "dancing store." When I asked her where it was she would look around, point at a random store and say "I found it!"
"Where's your mommy?" asked Daht. "Bad boy!" she replied, "Aya's mommy is right here!"
She really bonded with Britta although she called her Brenda for quite awhile til she finally started calling her Brin-ta.
Animalia eating fistfulls of hummus in the truck. She started with carrots and when those were gone decided that she had to use her hands.
Lots of hugs and kisses for me, telling everyone who would listen that "this is Aya's mommy."

Mostly it was a whirlwind, lots of stops, lots of driving, slightly disorganized, sometimes cold. She cried a few times in the car, frustrated at being trapped, but even then I think we were all tired and frustrated so it was understandable. We were thrilled to be home, capping the trip with a car/truck exchange at Nana's and Tata's where Animalia played in her sandbox for a few minutes, touched all her things and took a shower. Then home where she was more than thrilled to see Cooper and he was excited to see her too, nosing at her every time he'd run past her.

There was some laying around for a couple hours, then a dead sleep was had by all and we're back to the routine this morning.