Pow-wow in the wep bear pow-wow

Wow. So the last post we put up was March 5th, eh? I guess not much has happened this month in our lives.

Or not.

It's crazy to think that in a month we may be the proud parents of the Deuce. Our primary goal for March was to get Claire potty trained; we did not want to have two kids in diapers and figured our time to devote to potty training would be negligible once the Deuce arrived. For a while we had targeted Kate's spring break - March 13-22 - to be potty training days. We started on Sunday and it became immediately clear that Claire has a bladder of steel; she would hold it... and hold it... and hold it until, hours after she seemed like she really had to go, relief would finally come, and rarely in her white bear potty (it's got a white bear on it), or as she calls it in Claire-ese "wep bear pow-wow." Last Wednesday she (and we) were miserable enough that we went to the doctor, thinking that Claire must be suffering from the not-uncommon urinary tract infection. Turns out there was nothing medically wrong with her; she was just stubborn. Of course taking her out of diapers meant that she could no longer sleep in a crib so Claire had to adjust to that as well. (And by adjusting I mean "not sleeping.") It also meant that we were very tied to our house and have not gotten out too much recently. Lack of sleep and frustration for all of us meant some pretty miserable spring break days, days that Kate needed to be using to prepare lectures, labs, tests and grants, but instead spent comforting Claire (and Will).

By the second weekend there were some glimmers of hope. Claire had decided that homemade pie was a suitable reward for putting "pow-wow in the wep bear pow-wow." That or going to church. Seriously. Sunday night Kate had to find a church service to go to because that's what Claire insisted on. Still, every peeing event was usually preceded by several hours of crying as Claire fought to hold it in.

Finally, today we seem to have had a major breakthrough as several times today Claire pulled down her own pants, sat down herself and successfully went, usually in a time frame measured in minutes, not hours. Hopefully this will continue. Our fingers are crossed.

The only upside to the last ten days has been a requirement that we have pie around to reward Claire (and her parents) and Claire only requires very small pieces of pie...

Sorry. No pictures. Everybody in the pictures would have been sad, frustrated or stuffed full of pie. Until today. There might have been some smiles today.