Miranda is now potty-trained! We used last week’s three-day weekend to buckle down and try potty-training Miranda again. Bernard took Eleanor out all morning and Miranda and I holed up in the house with the potty. This time, I knew she understood the whole concept, so I didn’t use the potty-training doll or go through the steps of what she needed to do. I put her in underwear, we said “Bye-bye” to the diapers, and I loaded her up with juice.

The trick was M&Ms and television. Last time, she just didn’t want to sit on the potty long enough to pee (basically no more than ten seconds). This time, I had the potty in the family room in front of the TV. I asked her to sit there every 20 minutes for five minutes. Finally, the fourth time she sat down, she started peeing. She had a look of astonishment on her face and started yelling, “I did it! I did it!” I gave her a lot of praise and one M&M, which made her even more excited. Note: we avoided giving her any M&Ms for more than three months to maximize their effect.

I told her she would get an M&M every time she peed in the potty and it turned out to be an incredible motivator. The final test was school. At school, they can’t give M&Ms. (I guess they’re considered hard candy and therefore, a choking hazard.) So I brought her to daycare with five pairs of underwear and pants, Hello Kitty stickers, and a bag of gummy fruit snacks. Well, she did even better than Eleanor. She went an entire week without a single accident.

Miranda goes to the preschool class in the late afternoon now that Eleanor is there the whole day. They haven’t talked to me about transitioning her yet since it usually takes the toddlers a couple months after starting potty-training to be fully ready to go to the preschool, but Miranda is really eager to move ahead. Yesterday, when I picked them up, Miranda said, “Look, I in preschool! With Eleanor!” And she patted Eleanor on the head. I’ll be happy when they’re together in the same class again.

For Christmas in 2006, Erin and Albert bought our girls some skirts. At the time, they were too large (Miranda wore hers over her flannel pajamas). Last month, Miranda found these skirts again, and the kids wore them to school.

They got quite a few compliments from the daycare teachers on their skirts–we just never dress our kids in them.

Our thirty month photos are up on the site. This month Miranda is still in her diapers, though she’s been starting to show more interest in learning to use the potty. As of the writing of this entry, we’re in the middle of teaching her again.

A new phrase that the kids picked up from school is “don’t tell me no”. When we tell them “no, you can’t do that”, they respond with “don’t tell me no”. That doesn’t prevent us from telling them they can’t do something though.

Miranda has picked up a quirk in how she’s pronouncing things. She’ll repeat the last hard consonant sound of the last word of a sentence. She’ll say “What’s that-t-t?” or “hole starts with H-ch-ch”. Agnes says to not point it out to her, and it’ll go away on its own. Eleanor has been mangling Miranda’s name more and more recently. Instead of a two-syllable “mranda”, she’s been saying “mana”. I tried correcting her, but she just gave me the evil eye.

We rearranged the house a little bit. We moved the kids’ blue table into our room to make more room in the family room. It also allows the kids to play the piano more easily. The downside is that the kids now play in our room. They’ve also spread out to the other rooms in the house. If they put on our shoes and start clomping through the house, you can bet they’re heading to the stairs at the back of the house so they can go upstairs.

Miranda has been more aware of the camera. She’ll say “cheese” and then ask to see the picture. It may become more difficult to take candid pictures of them. Eleanor smiles for the camera as well, but she doesn’t seem to care to see the picture I just took.

This is the first month that I would say they’re actually running. Given the delay in walking, this late running isn’t that surprising. They still don’t manage to jump though.

This blog entry is officially for complaining about mothers and mothers-in-law. The kids have been sick the last two days, so my mother took care of them yesterday and Bernard’s mother took care of them today. I’ll preface this post by saying that the kids have the best grandparents and we really appreciate the fact that we were able to call them last minute to provide childcare so that neither Bernard nor I had to miss work. And since they do it for free, I guess a little criticism of my mothering ability (which is what I’m complaining about) is a small price to pay.

It all centers around the phenomenon that I call “sundowning”. You medical types know that this term usually refers to the delirium that Alzheimer or elderly hospitalized patients exhibit around evening time. For me, it refers to the daily meltdown that the kids have when I pick them up after work. Now, I know this happens to a lot of working mothers; the daycare teachers see it everyday. Eleanor and Miranda are very well-behaved at school and with the grandparents, but with me, from 5 pm until the bedtime routine, they start whining up a storm, and bawling when they don’t get their way. Yesterday, when I got home from work, the kids ran to me and started their usual whine-fest. My mother said, “You know, you really shouldn’t tolerate this behavior, or you’re going to be in real trouble when they’re older.”

I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling at my mother, because really, what am I supposed to do? Yell and scream at them? I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. In fact, my New Year’s resolution is all about not losing my temper during peak sundowning hours. All I can do is stay calm, ignore the whining, and not do what the kids want me to do until they ask me politely.

A few months ago, when my mother-in-law witnessed the sundowning, she said, “Hmm, they were fine with me all day. I don’t know why they’re acting like this.” Today, she said, “The reason they’re behaving like this is because you give them too much freedom.” I interpret this as, “You don’t set enough limits–that’s why they’re out-of-control.”

Now, I know I should just ignore these comments. The kids act up because they’ve been struggling to stay on their best behavior all day, and when they see me, they decompress. Nevertheless, I’ve been very sensitive to criticism since I was a child, and I can’t help but think, “Maybe I am doing something wrong.”

Here’s a list of all the ways I give the kids “too much freedom”. Either my mother or Bernard’s mother have commented on these things before:

1. I let them have as many toys in the bathtub as they want.
2. I let them empty the potty into the toilet.
3. I let them eject videos and put the videos they want to see into the VCR.
4. I let them make a mess while eating. They have no table manners.
5. I let them take off the lids of their sippy cups.
6. I let them do their own zippers, buckle the straps on their car seats and booster seats, and open the doors of the minivan.
7. I let them pick out their clothes everyday.
8. I let them play with the water in the sink and in the bathtub for as long as they want.

You can just see the grandmothers wincing as the kids spill a little urine on the floor, splash water or juice onto themselves, spill rice on the floor, pinch their fingers with the plastic buckle straps etc. I don’t know, maybe I do give them too much leeway. In part, this is because I don’t see them all day, and I don’t want my only interaction with them to be punitive. I guess all I can do is try to be consistent with what I allow them to do–and train them to be obedient little Chinese girls when they’re around the grandparents.

Recently we’ve started rewarding Eleanor for pooping in the potty chair with m&ms because she has had a number of accidents. We thought the positive reinforcement would help motivate her in getting this right. On the first day we gave her an m&m for succeeding, she viewed the m&m suspiciously, but she was eventually convinced when Agnes told her it was chocolate. That same day, she did all sorts of straining while on the potty and ended up with a couple more m&ms. She’s gotten a lot better with pooping in the potty, and whenever she succeeds she celebrates by showing everyone her m&m.

The last time we gave Miranda m&ms is when we last tried potty training her. She loves them. She’s been upset recently that Eleanor gets m&ms and she doesn’t, so we told her that she can have an m&m if she pees in the potty. Tonight, as we got ready for her bath, I asked her if she wanted to pee pee in the potty. She said yes and sat down. She looked like she was concentrating really hard, but nothing came out.

After a long while, I said “okay, it’s time for your bath”, and lifted her into the bathtub. She said she wanted to pee pee in the potty, so I dried off her feet and let her sit down for a while longer. Agnes eventually came in to sit with her while I entertained Eleanor. Miranda just couldn’t figure it out. She said “help me”, but there’s not really a whole lot we can do to help her figure out how to pee. Eventually, she looked resigned and said “all done” and stood up. Agnes gave her a bath, and when she still asked for some chocolate, Agnes had to tell her that it’s only if she pee pees in the potty. We both feel awful.

Eleanor is transitioning to the preschool class while Miranda is staying in the toddler room. Bernard and I had mixed feelings about this, but we told the daycare that we would be okay with Eleanor moving on. This week Eleanor is spending about one hour a day in the preschool class; next week, half the day, and then she’ll officially be in preschool starting February 19th.

The first day, when I came to pick them up, Eleanor was in the preschool room on the floor, dwarfed by five other kids, playing with cars. As you know from my previous posts about “failure-to-thrive”, our kids are tiny, and you could definitely see it here. Most kids in the preschool are three years old, over thirty pounds, and well over three feet tall. Eleanor is about twenty-four pounds and thirty-four inches. Nevertheless, she seemed to be really enjoying herself. The second day, she was sitting at the table, cutting construction paper with scissors. We have never let her touch scissors before, so I was amazed that she was holding them correctly and managing to cut strips of paper. The more I see her, the more I know it was the right decision to let her move on to the next class. The toddler room has kids as young as 18 months who are bigger and taller than our kids, but without language or self-control, so there’s a lot more hitting and grabbing of toys in that class.

Miranda, on the other hand, is still in the toddler room because she’s not toilet-trained. After our failed attempt in November, I’ve been really hesitant to try again, since she really didn’t seem to be ready. And nothing’s changed since then either. When I ask Miranda if she wants to use the potty after getting up in the morning or before her bath, she says “no” right away. When I picked up Miranda from the toddler room, I asked her “Where’s Eleanor?” The first day, she swung her head around, looking for Eleanor, but she had no clue that they had brought Eleanor to the preschool room. The second day she knew, and kept saying, “I want see him [sic], I want see him!” I brought Miranda into the preschool room and she and Eleanor and I all played with the scissors and construction paper until the daycare center closed.

Bernard and I and the daycare teachers are all hoping that separating Eleanor will motivate Miranda to use the potty. I’ve told her that “Eleanor is in the big kids class because she pees in the potty,” but I’m not sure she gets it yet though. So far, neither of them seem traumatized by the separation, but it’s only an hour a day right now. We’re definitely going to separate them for kindergarten, but it’s kind of traumatic for Bernard and me to see them in different classes now.