Potty Training Time!

WARNING: In the following paragraphs toddler words such as pee, poo, and potty will be used. Readers who are opposed to using childish terms for excrement, urine, and voiding should use discretion. Olivia and I started working on potty training about 6 weeks ago. She started off well, but then put the breaks on after she pooed for the first time in her little potty. She was pretty grossed out by the whole experience, and refused to use the potty again for several weeks. Just the other day she informed me that she wanted to pee in the potty so that she could get her fingernails painted pink. This was an incentive I had used during the first round. Just like an old toilet-trained pro she went directly to her potty and peed. Then I told her if she used the potty two more times, Yale and I would take her and her sister swimming. Knowing this, she became like an athlete training for the Olympics, only her sport was peeing. She quickly reached her goal and was determined to go swimming that moment. It took some explaining for her to understand that, due to circumstances beyond our control, we would have to wait until the next evening for our swimming excursion. Swimming was all that she could talk about. She was so excited she could hardly stand it. She was so excited that when I went to to check on her that night before I went to bed, I found her dresser drawers open, clothes all over the floor, and her sprawled out and sound asleep in her swimming suit. She had dug it out of her bottom drawer and put it on to sleep in it. It was awfully cute. Finally, after 24 hours of talking about swimming, her swimming suit, purple bagels (this is what she calls the purple inner tubes at the rec center), and "swimming by self", we made it to the pool. After floating on the Lazy River with her dad, splashing with her sister, and swimming laps with a green noodle (another flotation device), it was time to go home. Even though she was soaked, shivering, and blue, it only took as far as the locker room before she started asking to go swimming again. I'm sure we will be using swimming again as an incentive for potty training. Sophia seemed to really like the pool, too. She's pretty tricky to manage in the water. If you let her crawl in the shallow end, she zooms every direction, and doesn't seem to care if the water is deep enough to flow into her nostrils. Trying to hold her in deeper water is like trying wrestle a greased bull dog. However, I must say, she looked quite striking in her new lime-green polka-dotted swimming suit that she got from her Aunt Beckie for her birthday!