After my last blog entry, we decided to give it one more intensive push with Miranda. Well, we failed. But it’s okay, we’re going to try again in January. (I say January because that’s my next three day weekend. I’m on call from Christmas until New Year’s.) We did get her to pee in the potty, but only with intensive effort on our part. Here’s what we had to do:

1. Get rid of Eleanor. We sent Eleanor to my mom’s house for two days, so that both of us could focus on Miranda’s potty-training.
2. Watch Miranda like a hawk. Basically, one of us was never more than two feet from Miranda. This is because Miranda does not give any signs of when she needs to pee, except get a little restless. She doesn’t cross her legs, hold her crotch, or say anything (unlike Eleanor, who did all three.) When we noticed anything unusual, we immediately placed her on the potty, which leads me to the next item…
3. Keep the potty within two feet of Miranda at all times. We had the potty out in the family room for two days straight.
4. Follow all other instructions in the potty-training book. This meant continually talking about potty-related topics, doing “dry pants” checks every five minutes, and forced potty sitting every twenty minutes.

Well, looking back on these past two days, we realized that Miranda didn’t get any closer to being trained, but Bernard and I became highly trained at picking up on full bladder cues, stripping Miranda of her underwear and pants, and putting her on the potty in less than two seconds. Miranda didn’t care if she wet her pants, and she wasn’t happy when she peed in the potty either, since she was forced to sit there by us. We’re not sure if she still can’t tell when she needs to pee, or she just doesn’t care.

At least Bernard and I can say that we gave it a good effort. This is our defense when people ask, “Why didn’t you train them at the same time?” Believe it or not, we get this question all the time, and it’s highly annoying. We both felt immensely relieved when we put her in diapers tonight. Miranda seemed pretty happy too. She pointed at the characters on the front of her diaper and said, “Mickey Mouse! Minnie Mouse!” Now we can leave the house again!

It’s time for a break from all of the potty training blog entries. You may wish to turn down the volume of your speakers before playing this video as it is just a bunch of yelling. Miranda and Eleanor were having fun yelling over and over. Every now and then, someone will say “No Heeming! (Screaming)”

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.9MB).]

Surprisingly, I think Miranda is louder than Eleanor. She’s usually pretty quiet.

We’ve been trying the last ten days to potty train Miranda. Eleanor is completely out of diapers and she’s dry at night as well. Miranda has been trying to copy Eleanor and asks to use the potty at school; she’s also jealous of the attention that Eleanor gets. We did a half-hearted effort last weekend, so she never really got it, and she spent all week at school having accidents. Today we tried a full-on effort, but she still kept having accidents. She’s only ever peed in the potty once at home, and she’s had probably up to twenty accidents. And the one time she peed in the potty, I was forcibly holding her down so she couldn’t get off the potty.

I’ve opted to just give up and put her back in diapers. Bernard thinks we should ask my mom if she wants to give it a try, so I’ll probably give her a call tonight. My mom prides herself on her ability to raise small children; she says my sister and brother were potty-trained by 14 months, and I was trained by 18 months, but I’m highly skeptical. Bernard and I are exhausted with the potty-training. It involves a highly concerted effort from both of us, because one person has to leave the house early with one twin, while one of us trains the other twin. Since I’m the trainer, I haven’t left the house in two weeks, except to go to work, so I’m feeling extremely cooped up. Also, we haven’t been able to do anything fun as a family since every free day has been spent doing potty-training.

On the other hand, maybe our expectations are too high because Eleanor was completely potty-trained in two days. Jo Frost, the Supernanny on TV, thinks that two weeks is realistic for achieving potty training. Still, the thought of continuing with Miranda makes me feel extremely depressed. I also feel guilty because I’ve been pretty harsh with Miranda. She doesn’t get upset when she pees in her pants, so I make sure she’s upset. We’ve tried everything from rubbing her cold, wet underwear on her legs, to forcing her to sit in her puddle of pee for fifteen minutes, to yelling at her. She cries briefly, but then goes on as if nothing’s happened.

Anyway, I’m not sure what to do. Should we continue to plug on with Miranda, or put her in diapers and try again in two months? I’m worried that this will affect her self-esteem, since Eleanor constantly lords it over her that she’s pee-peed in the potty, that she has dry pants, that she’s a big girl. Eleanor also says to Miranda, “You have wet pants. You pee-peed in your pants. Wet pants are bad.” Also, they’ve accomplished every single other milestone within two weeks of each other (rolling over, sitting, crawling, standing, walking, talking), so it upsets me that they’re going to be far apart on potty-training. On the other hand, having Miranda continually fail and get disapproval from us isn’t helping either.

Here’s a picture of Miranda looking at the potty-training book. She loves the pictures in it, and flips through it on her own every day.

The girls turned twenty-seven months at the beginning of November and we’ve posted photos for the month. This month included a trip the LA Zoo, Halloween, and an airplane trip to Boston for Erin and Albert’s wedding. We didn’t include photos from the wedding trip–we’re going to push those into the next month’s pictures.

Over the last month, the kids have picked up a couple new phrases. When one of our kids is having a temper tantrum, the other will say “No Screaming!” (which is what we tell them). In Eleanor’s case, it’s “No Heeming” for some reason. Eleanor has also been fascinated with her “boogies”. She’ll say “I boogies” (the verb kind of gets dropped somewhere in her pronunciation) when she gets her nose wiped. She’ll also say “I runny nose”. With the Halloween holiday, the girls have been noticing all of the pumpkins. They call out “a pumpkin! a pumpkin!” whenever they see one. We need to respond “yes, a pumpkin” or they’ll start to say it more frantically.

In preparation for our trip to Boston, we tried to expand Eleanor’s culinary options. She’ll eat most fried foods. She’ll also eat spaghetti, as long as it doesn’t have a red sauce on it. We prepare it with some soy sauce and sesame oil. She’ll eat most meats and most kinds of noodles, but she won’t eat any short pasta: no ziti, no penne, no fusilli, no rotini, etc. Miranda has also been voicing more of a preference for what she likes to eat and what she doesn’t. She used to be more indiscriminate about what she would eat, but she has definitely been showing her preference for things that are more fatty, salty, or sweet. At the same time, she does still like tofu and broccoli. Finally, the girls are strangely more willing to eat something if I’m snacking on it. I’ll have a bagel or a cup of yogurt while sitting on the sofa, and they’ll come over to open their mouths to ask for some. If we just give them the bagel or yogurt, it ends up largely unfinished.

Recently, Miranda’s been showing much more of a preference for Agnes. There have been a number of cases where she’s asked for Agnes to do something and won’t accept me as a substitute (putting on her jacket, getting her shoes, getting her milk). Eleanor doesn’t seem to care quite as much.

We’ve been trying to get the girls to ask for things more politely recently. So, instead of “I want milk. I want milk!”, we try to get them to say “I want milk, please”. We started by responding to their demands with “what are you supposed to say?” and they’ve learned to respond with “please”, but now we’re instructing them “You’re supposed to say ‘Can I have some milk, please?'”, which they translate to “I want milk, please”.

Next month will include the wedding and Thanksgiving.

So Eleanor has been doing pretty well with the potty training. Two days ago was her first day at school and she managed to use those extra high toilets. She’s completely out of diapers during the day, and we’re letting her wear pull-ups at night. Actually, the first two nights she was dry, but then, yesterday, I decided to go running in the morning and didn’t get back in time to get her from her crib until close to 7AM and she had peed in her pull-ups. She looked really disappointed as she said, “I pee-peed. I have wet pants.” I guess I need to get up extra early if I want to go running.

Miranda, on the other hand, is extremely jealous at all the attention that Eleanor is getting, and she’s been acting up. Yesterday, she asked to use the potty at school, and she actually peed in the toilet twice. I had been thinking about postponing her potty training for a few months, but it looks like we’ll have to do it this weekend.

On a side note, my favorite word for underwear is “chonies”. Their daycare class is quite ethnically diverse (three African-Americans, two Latinos, three Asians, one Caucasian), so you get a lot of different words for use in potty training, e.g. “Pull up your pants! Your chonies are showing!”

Wow–so potty training has been a huge challenge. Eleanor did pretty well the first day. She was dry overnight, and the second day, peed in the morning and had her first bowel movement in the potty as well. Then, later that day, she got upset because Bernard tried to put a shirt on her that she didn’t like, then, as she was having a mini-tantrum because she hated her shirt, she peed in her pants. Bernard then followed the instructions in the Azrin book, which involves having the child put on their wet underpants and “practice” running to the bathroom, sitting on the potty for one second, getting up, putting the wet underpants back on and doing this over and over ten times. Unfortunately, Bernard didn’t read the whole book, and he had Eleanor also put on her soaked pants on top of her underwear over and over, all the while screaming hysterically.

This is a major criticism of the book. A child that feels humiliated by wet pants has to put them on over and over, and also acknowledge that they aren’t dry. At one point, Eleanor was saying, “Wet pants bad.” Anyway, Eleanor has now become extremely anxious about going to the potty. She’s withholding her urine, so now I’m paranoid that she’s going to get a urinary tract infection. The overall anxiety level in the house is extremely high. And poor Miranda is essentially being ignored, and her schedule is thrown off because she has to wait every time Eleanor is sitting on the potty.

This morning we took her to school, and the two of us just hovered over her, worried that she was going to pee in her pants. Finally, the teacher just told me to leave, and tried to reassure me that Eleanor would be fine. I’m crossing my fingers.

We decided to bite the bullet and introduce potty training this weekend. We bought a potty a while ago, but we hadn’t made any attempt to have them use it. We used Azrin’s Toilet Training in Less Than a Day on a friend’s recommendation. It was written in the 70s and comes across that way, but it uses standard behavioral techniques, i.e. positive and negative reinforcement, in a fairly straightforward way.

Yesterday, I tried to potty train Miranda, but gave up by noontime. There were two major problems: one, Miranda hates fluids, and the technique relies on filling their bladder up so that you’ll have many opportunities to teach using the potty. I offered milk, water and four kinds of juice, and I could only get her to drink a total of six ounces in four hours. Miranda has never liked liquids, which accounts for her chronic constipation and dry skin/eczema. Therefore, she only peed once the entire morning and it was on the floor, of course. The other problem was that she didn’t want to sit on the potty for more than ten seconds, and would start to cry if I insisted that she sit for longer. I guess if her bladder was empty, she really didn’t see the point of it.

I think that she understands the concept. She was able to undress the potty training doll, put it on the potty, and clean up the “pee” afterwards. She’ll just need to be trained over a period of several days where she can be put on the potty every 90 minutes or so, but as of now, she’s back in diapers.

This morning, I tried to train Eleanor. Eleanor is the opposite of Miranda, in that she doesn’t like very many solid foods, but she loves liquids. If she could eat a completely liquid diet, she would. Therefore, in the same four hours that Miranda drank six ounces of fluid, Eleanor drank 35 ounces! And instead of peeing one time, she peed ten times! Five times were on the floor though. However, by the end, she seemed to understand what the urge to pee felt like. And she was initiating going to the bathroom by herself. The problem though, was that sometimes she didn’t make to the bathroom fast enough. I guess that’s why the book recommends keeping a potty in every room in the house, including the backyard if you’re having a barbecue!

Anyway, Eleanor was beaming by noontime. She was so proud of herself and her new underwear. And the good thing about this technique is that you don’t have to keep bringing them to the potty, you just ask them if they need to use the potty every hour or so, and they can decide themselves if they need to go.

I’ll update further when she goes back to school in two days. I hope that she’s willing to use the toilets at school. They’re basically miniature versions of adult toilets, but they’re still a lot bigger than the potty, i.e. her feet dangle and she could fall right in if she leaned back too far.