it's potty time!!! (maybe????)

This may be a bit premature, but I want to mark the date anyway...

As most of you know, we started letting Finn use the potty from birth. When she turned a year old, she decided that she no longer wanted anything to do with a potty and has been using a diaper. For a long time, she would scream and cry at the suggestion that she might want to try sitting on her potty.

We started the same with Crusoe when he was born. Crusoe has been a quick study and really prefers not to wet his diaper, even in his sleep. Just now, he was sleeping in Remi's arms and started whimpering and then crying in his sleep. I took him to the bathroom, he peed, and fell right back to sleep.

Finn has been watching closely. She has squatted in the front yard a couple of times when Crusoe has been peeing and has followed suit once or twice, but she has maintained staunch resistance to sitting on a potty. She puts her babies and stuffed animals on the potty and makes the cueing noises for them. She tells us when she has to go by pointing to herself and making the cueing noises but obstinately says "No!" if we ask her if she wants to sit on her potty.

Until today...

She and I were in the basement working on a project. She started telling me that she had to go. I asked her if she wanted to sit on the potty and she walked into the bathroom and pointed. I sat her up on the seat and she went.

I danced and sang and cheered and hugged and high-fived and generally made a big fat deal of it all and then we ran upstairs to let Remi in on the excitement.

We talked about it some more at dinner and relived the fun. After dinner, I was cleaning up and Remi and the kids were in the back. Finn started calling me and I asked her to wait just a minute while I finished. She called some more, I stalled some more. Finally I finished and turned to walk back only to see Finn walking into the kitchen carrying her potty seat full and sloshing. I wondered why Remi had let her walk off carrying it, unsupervised. Then Remi came into the hall and asked me how it was that Finn was standing there holding that. We both realized what had happened and started cheering and hollering for her as we went to the bathroom to dump it.

It took us a few minutes to realize that while she knows full well how to sit on her potty, she doesn't know how to pull her panties off...