Potty time

Beth, Beth, the amazing girl Beth! She used the potty yesterday. Actually sat down and waited for a few minutes and then peed right into her little potty.

Okay, so it wasn't exactly a picnic — the whole thing started when she woke up yesterday morning and I was changing her diaper (as she was standing up, insistent girl) and she let a few dribbles onto the floor. Eww. I got another diaper and held it under her, but as soon as I asked, "Do you want to go do this in the potty?" she trotted off to the bathroom quite happily. Yeeha. She got a sticker. She gets a sticker every time she sits on the potty, whether it's a productive sit or not. We've used up a whole row of puffy sea creature stickers this way.

Is every little kid as fascinated with stickers as Beth is? She loves the fact that they, well, stick. She'll stick one onto something — usually her shirt — and then, after a "Look at me!" grin, immediately pull it off and stick it someplace else. Ten minutes later all the stickiness is gone and the poor bedraggled sticker is covered with fibers from clothes, the couch, the carpet and goodness knows what else. These little puffy stickers have taken it especially hard — they're little, for starters, and Beth can't seem to let them go. I don't know if they're so very enchanting because they're puffy and sparkly (could be?) or if it's because she earned them by sitting on the potty.

I'd love to get inside her little head and figure it out, because the things she does that seem weird and random to me apparently make perfect sense to her: the mattress in the doll cradle goes on top of the stuffed animals, for example. Yesterday she climbed up on her stepstool and emptied everything out of the kitchen utensil drawer, starting with the baby spoons and measuring spoons and working through meat thermometers (how did we end up with three of them?), the nutmeg grater, and eventually a bunch of knives that I thought were safely hidden in the back (guess not). She was good about the knives — carefully handed each of them to me with a serious, "Thank you, Mama" — before pulling out the wire organizer baskets at the bottom of the drawer. Okay, I thought, she emptied a drawer. Good for her. Then she trundled off to the living room and brought back Regina the frog princess and one of Sarah's diapers, placed them up on the counter next to the pile of utensils, looked at them all with a pleased little expression on her face, then wandered off to do something else. I was left with the inverse of the Sesame Street puzzle: not "one of these things is not like the others" but "what on earth do these things have in common?" I'm still wondering.

Speaking of...we checked the "Elmo's Potty Time" DVD out of the library last week, and I sat Beth in front of it this morning while I took a shower. It wasn't the same format as Sesame Street, so she was a little weirded out. I watched the very end of it with her. Guess what? It's "brought to you by the letter P and the number 2." Heaven help us.