Our Four Year Old and Potty Training

I just noticed last summer I was trying to get caught up in July.  This year it's still June.  Is that improvement?  Not much, but yay for small victories. 

Anyway, in February, Maddie turned four.  She still hadn't agreed to potty training (I know, most of you had your kids potty trained by the time they were two!  Yay for you, but not the case with my kids)!  Maddie kept telling us that when she was four, she would be potty trained.  Well, her birthday came and went, and she had no desire to sit on the toilet.  I think she sat on it the day after her birthday, but did nothing.  If we put her on the toilet, she would cry and cry and say she was scared, so I still didn't fight it much.  We kept suggesting to her that she use the toilet, but she kept putting it off.  This is one of my stubborn children I was given a heads up about in my patriarchal blessing!  She did not seem to care that she was wearing diapers at age four.  Spring break rolled around and I was hoping to get her trained then, but that didn't happen.  We tried letting her sit backwards on the toilet and draw with a dry erase marker while she was sitting there, but mostly just the other kids started drawing pictures and messages instead of Maddie.

A message from one of the boys - 2/12/18

She finally sat there without crying, but it didn't help the potty results 2/24/18.

I don't even remember exactly when it was, but she eventually started peeing in the potty, and she did it pretty consistantly.  But she wouldn't poop in the toilet.  That was still scary to her.  Sean and I would bribe her with treats like candy and donuts, toys, dresses, and one time Sean was so desperate for her to be potty trained (he was sick of buying diapers and smelling stinky diapers) he even bribed her with a kitty!!!  I couldn't believe it when I heard that come out of his mouth!  And then I couldn't believe it when Maddie said, "No! I don't want a kitty!"  Talk about stubborn!  We just laughed.  We were running out of diapers and we were not going to buy another box of them!  Mormor suggested pullups, and gave us a box of them.  Maddie didn't even want those at first, but she finally started using them. But poopy pullups are worse than poopy diapers, so we really kept trying to encourage her to poop in the potty.  She was still scared for some reason.  One day in late April or early May, I came home from school and Maddie had POOPED in the potty!  Hooray for Sean!  I don't know how he convinced her.  Oh wait, I think he was singing funny songs about pooping in the potty and saying her little poops wanted to go swimming in the toilet or something like that, and she finally did it!  She was rewarded with a donut!  That got to be kind of the routine for a while.  If she would poop in the potty, Sean would take her for a donut.  She loves her daddy and her donuts!  So it really hasn't been that long since she's been fully potty trained, but I think we're pretty much there. Transitioning her from pullups to underwear was tougher than I thought.  I thought if she picked out some cute unders, it would motivate her, but nope!  She tried them once or twice, but she didn't like them because they gave her a wedgie!  She cried about having to wear underwear!  Finally, we were down to the last few pullups, so I insisted she wear unders. She didn't like it at first, but of course, she got used to them, and has been doing really well.  She's had very few accidents, and she is still so proud of herself for pooping in the toilet, she usually has to tell someone (anyone) when she does it. It took long enough, but hooray!  We're finally done with diapers after over nine years of having kids in diapers!  Still using some pullups at night, but those usually end up dry, as well.  Yay!

Helping some friends feed the calves.

Still a girly girl.  Sometimes she lets me put in pigtails.

So here are some photos from her birthday in February.  She requested a unicorn cake, and was hoping for anything unicorn related.  She got a stuffed unicorn from Mormor and unicorn jammies from Grandma and Grandpa, so it was a grand birthday!

Her last night as a three year old.

Birthday donut!

We weren't really having a friend party for her, but somehow she managed to invite Hazel and Vera over. How can you turn down those cute faces?

Unicorn from Mormor

Loving her unicorn jammies from Grandma Peggy

Sweet dreams!

Maddie still says "call phones" instead of phonecalls when she talks about Daddy making calls for work. She is working on her "th" sounds and after saying "firsty" sometimes she will really try hard and say, "th, th, THIRSTY!"  She has been able to write her own name for several months now.  I think she was learning to write her name around Christmas time while she was still three.  She could write her name, but wouldn't use the potty.  Silly girl!  Some of her word pronunciations are still pretty funny.  My favorite one right now that she's saying is "pyrocracker".  Sean and I have been going to the chiropractor lately, and she calls him the pyrocracker.  So funny!  The other day when we were there, one of the girls had my phone and took a photo, so here I am at the pyrocracker.

For a while, Maddie was falling asleep in some fun places like her tent, or forts built in the living room, my room, or in the kitchen...

Last Saturday night, she decided she was ready to pedal her bike.  She got a strider/balance bike when she was two and rode it for a year until the boys and a bigger neighbor boy broke it last summer.  We were too cheap to buy a new one and she was really doing well balancing on it, so I refused to put the training wheels back on our littlest bike.  I told her just to ride it like her balance bike and she didn't like it too much last summer, but for the past few weeks she's been working on it and Saturday she pedaled for the first time!  Now she thinks she's an expert and likes to ride to the Dyreng's house or to the Picketts'.  She's got a new found independence!  She had a pretty good wipeout the other night.  Brooke was doing tricks on her bike, so Maddie thought she could do some.  She got going a little too fast and raised up her legs off the pedals to be tricky, shouted out a good "Wooohoooooo!" and then wiped out!  But only a few minutes of tears, and she was back on it again.

She is such a cute and smart little stink.  We just love her!  Oh, and we still haven't had her four year checkup, so we'll have to do that someday and see how she compares.  She's definitely smaller than the other three were at this age.  Funny how we follow a close schedule with our first one or two children, but the more we have, the more lax we get.  I was always really good at scheduling checkups for the kids, but since we've moved to Gunnison, we haven't quite followed the recommendations.  Oops!  Better get on that.  Anyway, it's hard to believe our baby is four.  She enjoyed going to school on occasion with me last school year and she's looking forward to starting preschool in the Fall.