Not yet

Between a Happy Friday, the weekend, a few scheduled days off and a stat holiday next week, I have a stretch of six days off work coming up (yee-haw!) This got us to wondering whether it would be a good time to start potty training Mallory. We trained Liam while I was off work on Mallory's maternity leave, and having a few days to just hang around the house and really focus on the task at hand made it go pretty smoothly. We definitely want to repeat that this time around.

We have been talking about this with Mallory for a while, and bought her a cute set of princess underpants a while ago. Academically, she knows that she will start doing her pees and poops in the toilet and can wear her underpants when she does. But although they say girls train earlier than boys, I wasn't entirely convinced that she is ready for taking the plunge, and when I asked Cindy her opinion, she concurred. Although Mallory sometimes asks to sit on the toilet at home (where she never does anything, mind you), she always turns down Cindy's offers to do the same. Cindy said she would support whatever we choose to do, but I am in the camp that says I would rather spend another couple of months in diapers and make sure that she is good and ready, instead of forcing the issue when she's not and frustrating the heck out of all of us as a result. Not to mention the added benefit of keeping the carpet free of pee stains for as long as possible.

The worst disappointment of the entire deal is that we have been using the same diaper pail on our house since Liam was born, and I have had it with that thing. It's plastic, so it cleans up well on the surface, but no amount of soaking it in bleachy water will get rid of the stink anymore. I was starting to feel bad about Mallory's room always smelling like a bathroom stall when I had the brainchild to at least move it down the hall to the laundry room, so that she is not breathing that stink in all night long. We are so close to being done with it now that I have no intention of going out and buying a replacement, but trust me when I say that it should have been kicked to the curb long ago.

So I'm guessing now that we will wait until a long weekend in the fall to revisit the idea of potty training... starting on a Friday night when we get home from work, perhaps, and hoping that by Tuesday morning when Mallory is back at Cindy's house, she is 80% of the way there. And we will have some assistance from Cindy with that last 20%, this time around. That is not entirely a bad thing, either. :)