Right. So. Remember when I said my kids were potty trained? Well…

Rebecca is doing great. A superstar. I can think of only one accident in the last week. She can hold it, she tells me when she needs to go, she isn’t freaking out about poop the way some kids do, and she is perfectly willing to use the travel potty when we’re out and about. No problemo.

And then, there’s Daniel.  Oh, Daniel.

Sigh.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know we’ve had a very, very difficult week.  Daniel has gotten hit HARD by the terrible-two-and-a-halfs.  Much like when he went through this phase back in October, he feels the need to be contrary AT ALL TIMES.  He pitches a fit that he doesn’t want breakfast.  Then he pitches a fit that he wants oatmeal. And raisins. NO RAISINS! I WANT RAISINS! NOT ON THAT SIDE OF THE PLACEMAT!  And this is all before 8:30am.  It goes on all day long.  If I ask him something or offer him something, he has to say no. I go to put it away, and he demands whatever he just declined. He claims to not want to play outside, not want to go to a friend’s house, not want to go to Starbucks. Riiight.  Sure ya don’t, buddy.

Worst of all, this has spilled over into potty training.  He did so well the first week.  Not perfect, but really well. He’d have a tiny accident (like small enough that a change of undies was not really necessary), stop himself, ask to use the potty, and finish. Brilliant.  No longer.

For one thing, he seems to have tuned out from listening to his body.  Now he has a full-on accident, and THEN tells me he needs to use the potty. When we’re at home, when we’re out. All over the damn place.  And, of course, if I ask him if he needs to go or ask him to sit and try before we leave the house… well, you can guess what the response is. “I don’t wanna! I don’t need to use the potty!”  Five minutes later… new pants. Again.  And did I mention he’s a notorious incomplete-emptier? The kid goes about a tablespoon at a time. Ugh.

The kicker is that sometimes he does well. Sometimes he asks to use the potty before he goes in his pants. Sometimes he poops in the potty.  He is very capable.  But much of the day, he tunes out and/or refuses all suggestion.  And those who have been through this will understand how it simply brought me to tears on Thursday night. Exhausted. Defeated. Broken. Sobbing.

So, friends, where do we go from here on the potty front?  Re-boot-camp?  New incentives? Back off and put on Pull-Ups for my own sanity?  As a general rule, I want to be as consistent as possible and don’t like going “backwards.” But I would also like to not end up in the looney bin.

And as for the behavior – pick my battles and ride it out? Be extra strict and nip the attitude in the bud? Start drinking heavily?

At my moms of twins club meeting this week, I gave away my remaining stash of diapers. Pampers Cruisers are now gone from my house, and both kids are in underwear.

(cue heavenly chorus)

If someone asked me if my kids are potty-trained, I would say yes. Yes, they wear underwear. Yes, they do their business in the potty. Yes, accidents are more the exception than the norm.

The moms of young kids, of course, know all about the asterisks that qualify my ‘yes.’ They still require a lot of reminders. They can’t go by themselves. The bedtime Pull-Ups** are not always kept dry.  For right now (and the immediately forseeable future) it’s a MUCH bigger hassle than diapers ever were.

And seriously, sometimes having two newly potty-trained toddlers seems like it’s going to push me straight over the edge. We bolt for the nearest bathroom (or discrete corner, or back of the minivan) at the slightest mention of “mommy, I need to use the potty.” They fight over who gets to use the little potty and who uses the seat on the big potty (we have one of each in both bathrooms). Daniel is king of the false alarm and, ahem, incomplete emptying. Rebecca refuses to “try” before we leave the house, but has to go the minute we arrive at the grocery store. There are times when it is incredibly hard for me to stay positive and patient, and there are times when I fail to do so.

But, still, we’ve made it over that first big hump.  The diapers are gone, the undies remain largely dry, and the potty is in use.

For anyone wondering, I took much the same approach with Daniel as I did with Rebecca. Last Saturday, we put on the undies and ditched the diapers, cold turkey.  Daniel proved much more open to suggestion and would pretty much pee on command. A handy skill, and his only accident on the first day was right before bedtime. Hell, we even threw caution to the wind and went out to dinner!

The trick is, of course, that they actually need the accidents to start to learn to listen to their bodies.  The second day included a few more accidents, but also progress (i.e. a very small accident that then led him to finish peeing on the potty). Overall, I found this second go-around less tense and stressful than my weekend with Rebecca, I think because he could (and was willing to) go more frequently.  On the other hand, I found myself a bit more tired and a bit less patient. I just wanted this part to be over.

I’m glad I separated the kids and didn’t attempt to work with both in the same weekend. I think we benefited from the ability to focus, and had all four of us been shut in the house for that much time, we might have killed each other.

Truth be told, I really have nothing to complain about.  Both kids are reasonably reliable after only a very short period of time. Clearly, they were “ready,” whatever that might mean. That’s not to say there was a lot of talk of potty and all of that before we started.  They seem to just have been cognitively/emotionally/physically ready.  And so passes one of the last big transitions of babyhood.  My big kids.

**Yes, we are using Pull-Ups for naptime and overnight. I don’t really think of them as a useful potty training tool, but I was not willing to mess with sleep in the name of the potty. I liked making the switch to Pull-Ups so that we could, even just in name, be totally done with “baby” diapers.  We call them “night-time undies,” and while they aren’t always kept dry, Rebecca for one is quite distressed when she pees or poops in them during naptime. I take that as a good sign, and will try to ditch them for naps within a month or two.

I never thought I’d be tickled that my kids have started arguing.

Oh, not the push-pull-gimme-mine-scream kind of arguing. They’ve been doing that for ages and there is no end in sight. It’s not pleasant.

Nor am I talking about the times when they seem to be fighting over a syllable. We’ll be in the car, and Daniel will say “Becca! Becca! …. uh-huh!”  And she freaks.  “Nooo, Daniel!”  And he continues.  “Uh-huh!”  “NOOOO!”  “Uh-huh!” *giggle* “NOOOO, DANIEL!”  That one’s weird, and a little hilarious, but not my current favorite.

No, what I love the most right now is the actual conversation.  They pointedly speak to one another, listen, understand, and disagree. Hello, cognitive and language development! I love you!

Yesterday’s example: we were in the car on the way to a friend’s house.  Daniel saw a backhoe, which is, of course, an endless source of delight and amusement.  In his excited, drawn-out, stutter-y way, he said “It’s a backhoe, mommy! It’s for pushing dirt. And it spins.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what he was saying, so I repeated back to him, “it spins, buddy?”
“Yeah!”
Uh, OK.  Not sure about the spinning backhoe.  Apparently, neither was Rebecca.  She replied calmly but firmly, “no, Daniel.  Backhoe not for spinning. It for pushing dirt.”

They now do this sort of thing all day long.  They verbally invite each other to play a game, take a toy, or any of their other daily activities.  Sometimes one kid goes along with what the other says, and sometimes not.  But I love watching them process the demand/order/request from the other kid and formulate an opinion and a response.

And to think that, this time last year, I was feeling a little nervous about the fact that they each had basically a single word in their vocabularies.

You remember how, just a few weeks ago, I talked about what a challenging phase Daniel was going through?  I wrote about it on HDYDI, too, how I feel crappy to have times when I prefer one kid over the other.

And, as predicted, they have now done the great twin personality switcheroo.

This is not to say they are suddenly fundamentally different kids, of course.  But the dial has been turned up on one and down on the other.  Daniel seems to now be spending more time as his happy, silly, engaging self.

Rebecca, on the other hand…. Hoo, boy.

The girl has always been capable of epic tantrums, even at two days old.  Much of the time, she’s fairly even.  Independent, easily entertained, pretty chill.  Until the RAGE reappears.  OMG, the RAGE.

The RAGE has been making extraordinarily frequent appearances as of the last week or so.  This morning she had her first tantrum before getting out of bed.  There was not really a marked improvement for the rest of the day.

Her tantrums seem to have a subtly different underlying theme than Daniel’s.  His was all about grasping control over his environment, over other people.  Rebecca’s fits are nearly all set off by something having to do with “Becca do it by self.”  It’s all about independence.  In a way, that is still in the same theme as “control,” but a slightly different side.

And, yes, before you even say it… I know she totally gets this from me.

Naturally, she and I are butting heads in a major way right now.  I try to pick my battles. I try to let her do the things that she is capable of doing, and try things that she probably can’t do.  But she gets set off at the drop of a hat.  I so much as look at her the wrong way at the wrong time and it’s all over. I spend a lot of time ignoring her and hanging out with Daniel when she’s in the middle of a screaming fit.  But sometimes we just need to get out the door and in the car, and she is just not having it.  Yeesh.

One way in which I’m grateful for having twins is the way they do seem to alternate a lot of these phases.  It helps to know that it will pass.  That my sweet kid will come back, and that they’ll likely trade places again, so I don’t have to feel too guilty about the fact that I’d rather spend time with one over the other at times like these.

In the meantime, she still has her shining moments of funny phrases and expressions that she’s picked up from me and M.  She initiates games with her brother, she gives hugs and kisses to the dog (and everything else), and tucks her “friends” (stuffed animals) into bed.  She has that perfect toddler giggle fit down pat.

But she has also mastered the phrase “No, Mommy!  Leave it alone!”

So, you know, I’ll just have to put my head down and get through the rest of this phase.  Good times.

There is a major power struggle going on in my house right now.  Daniel has hit that most delightful stage of toddlerhood where he feels the need to exert his independence/power/control at every possible opportunity. And let me tell you, it’s a blast.

He has his favorite tactics.  Oh, sure, sometimes he just straight up says “no.”  But he tries to get more creative than that.  If I say we’re going upstairs (or out to the car, or whatever), it’s almost guaranteed that I will hear a sentence that starts with “first I…”.  “First I gonna wash the hands.” “First I gonna play with the toys.”  Et cetera, et cetera.

Another favorite phrase when he’s in a defiant/delaying mood is “I no like (yike) that.”  “I no yike dat snack.”  “I no yike the blanket.” The one you have refused to sleep without for the last 20 months? “I no yike it.”  “I no yike the bed!” Et cetera, et cetera.

He nearly always tries to pull something at bedtime, now.  Bedtime, which has been darn smooth sailing for over a year and a half, is now when Daniel likes to assert himself.  “No sleep sack!”  “More stories!”  “I no yike to lie down!”  [Yes, we still use sleep sacks. The times I've let him have his way and not wear the sleep sack are the times that he has skipped his nap. No thanks.]  I pretty much ignore all of the bedtime delay tactics, but M has a tendency to get sucked in when Daniel pulls out things like “more hugs, Daddy?”  Sucker.

I know that the desire for control is normal for this age. I know that they are having this sudden realization that the world is kind of big and overwhelming and that they don’t  have much control over what goes on.  I try to diffuse some of the situations by offering him choices, or letting him think it was his idea, all along. But I can’t always do that, and it doesn’t always work, so there are a lot of highly dramatic meltdowns with hysterical wailing and giant tears.  Man, does it grate on what little patience I have.

Oh, but when he forgets about that struggle for power, he’s so incredibly sweet and funny.  The things that he remembers, the phrases he parrots back to you, the stories he tells.  He shares with his sister, he asks me to play catch and read a story.  He says things like, “it’s de-wicious in my tummy!”  He sings songs on demand. He says “thank you” without prompting, and bids farewell to the women at the gym with an enthusiastic “have a good day, lady! See you later!” He really is just about the sweetest boy you have ever met.

When he forgets.

My girl is a darn funny kid.  Her speech is still a bit more garbled sometimes.  And even though she knows plenty of words, she still just shrieks gibberish a lot, seemingly for her own amusement.  She loves to just walk around and sing, almost more so if we’re not in the same room as she is, and can sing a number of songs in their entirety (ABC, Twinkle Twinkle, Rain Rain Go Away, Wheels on the Bus, Itsy Bitsy Spider, etc.).

In addition to the singing, I have two current favorite verbal Becca-isms:

1. We have been teaching them to say “may I be excused” when they want to get down from the table after a meal.  Rebecca’s version sounds like, “may I snooze!”  And the “sn” goes through her nose, rather than through her mouth/teeth, so it’s almost a “hnooze.”  Pretty cute.

2. Both kids have gotten better at semi-accurately answering the question “what did you do today?” when M asks it every evening.  Sometimes they tell stories about things we did weeks ago, instead of that morning, but still. Becca’s contribution to the story, though, is nearly always “and go home!”  Apparently an important part of every outing is that we did, in fact, go home at the end. It’s like she wants to finish every story with “and… Scene!”

Funny girl.

P.S. I’m never quite sure whether to write Becca/Rebecca.  When speaking, I use them both at different times, but I tend to lean towards Rebecca in writing. Anyways, please excuse the inconsistencies.

I feel really lucky, as my kids seem to have beaten the odds as far as language development.  Daniel, especially, seems fairly advanced with expressive language.  Conventional wisdom would have it that he should be somewhat behind, what with being both a boy and a twin. But he has been better-than-age-level since he was probably about 16-18 months old.  He speaks in long, rambling sentences, narrating everything he sees and does.  He is pretty good about getting pronouns correct (him, her, etc.), and experiments with plurals and past-tense by adding “es-es-es” to the end of a noun and “ed-ded” to the end of some verbs.  The overcompensation is both funny to listen to and fascinating to realize the grammatical rules he’s picking up.

One of my favorites is that both Daniel and Rebecca are starting to correctly use the first person.  After months of “Daniel did it!”, we have now moved on to “I did(ed-ded) it, Mommy!”  “I want the two blocks(es-es), Mommy!” Still some mix-ups, like today at lunch when he said “I spilled the juice on you tummy,” meaning he had spilled on himself.  But still… I just love each of these shifts as they incorporate more and more of the subtleties of language.

And, as more of a note to myself, this morning I noticed that Daniel has actually started pronouncing his own name correctly.  For ages, he and Rebecca have both said “Dan-nul,” skipping the “y” sound in the middle of the name.  Just this morning, though, I heard him say “Dan-yul” several times in a row, as though he was practicing and trying to get it right.

So, do you have a favorite word or phrase that makes you realize the crazy things your kids are picking up? An interesting cognitive connection or grammatical turn?  Yes, I’m calling on all the language geeks out there.

LauraC has a fun new feature going on, using our Phone Photos! Thought I’d play along and give the great potty update all at once.

Not shockingly, I kind of chickened out on Potty Boot Camp.  I’m just not committed enough right now, can’t psych myself up to do it, so I’m not pressing the issue.  If the kids say they want to sit on the potties, which they are still doing from time to time, they are welcome to do so, but I’m not really bringing it up.

On the one hand, we had a setback.  What I neglected to mention about the first time I did my exercise while they were up was that they decided they wanted to sit on the potties while I was working out. Fine, no biggie, go for it.  They sat for a bit, then got distracted and wanted to get up and walk around.  I decided to let them go au naturel for a few minutes, and kept reminding them that if they needed to pee, the potty was right there.  Well. Apparently I neglected to include suggestions for poop, because a few minutes later, I had some gifts on the floor of the playroom. Charming.  Eew, eew, eew. Good thing I still have a super-sized bottle of Nature’s Miracle from when we were housetraining the dog.

Then, today, we were in the car and very nearly home when Rebecca started announcing that she wanted to poop on the potty.  Fine! Great! Got home, put both kids on the potties and turned on a bit of Backyardigans while I went to get some dinner ready (they currently have a major potty/TV association that I’m not sure what to do about, but oh well).  Next thing I know, not only had Daniel proudly peed in his potty, but Rebecca got up, smiled, and there was POOP!  POOP IN THE POTTY!  WOOT!

I know. I’m sorry. Moms of toddlers talk about poop, it’s just how it goes.

Anyways, there was much rejoicing and high fives and all of that.  Wohoo!  I’m still not pressing the issue, but I’m glad they continue to show an awareness and understanding of the process.

Now, I’m off to order another super-sized box of diapers. We’re almost out.

Among other things, I’ve learned that something daughter and I seem to have in common is a love of singing. Oh, not particularly good singing. Just singing.  In recent weeks/months, she has taken to wandering around and sort of quietly mumbling various songs.  Sometimes you can tell what it is, sometimes it’s just gibberish, but she’s definitely singing to herself, not just talking.  According to my mom, I used to do the same thing as a little girl, which does not surprise me in the least.

Tuesday, however, marked a new development in that arena.  You see, lately the kids have been requesting a song after they are in bed for nap or bedtime (probably a stalling technique, but we keep it short).  We oblige, usually one short verse of whatever song they want.  On Tuesday, it was Twinkle, Twinkle.  And lo and behold, Rebecca sang along with me.  The whole song, nearly every word to the best of her ability, with noticeable attempts to match pitch and timing.

She did it again at bedtime and M just about fell over. He couldn’t stop talking about it that night. I just kind of smiled and nodded.  Seems like it’s a neat new thing almost every day around here.  The changes aren’t as dramatic and pronounced as when they were infants, when one day they can’t crawl and the next day they can, or they stand up on their own for the very first time.  Now we’re into details, improving, finessing… building on a skill (language) they already have, and doing new and more complex things with it.  I love it.

Both kids have been rather obsessed with drinking from regular cups and/or my big water bottle recently.  And, actually, have been getting reasonably good at it! So, this morning, I decided to make a switch. From now on, meals will all have milk in an open cup.  For our first breakfast, not too shabby.  Significantly more of it ended up in their mouths than in their bibs or on the floor. That’s success in the world of toddlers! And, I have to say, they were pretty jazzed about the whole thing.

In the meantime, does anyone have a recommendation for where to find small (like 4 ounce) break-resistant cups? The Take & Toss ones are OK if I don’t fill them too much, but I think a smaller cup might be nice.