Diapers and bodily functions

The title of this post should be fair warning to those of you who don't want to hear about bodily functions. I have a four year old, a two year old and a not quite three month old baby. My life is filled with bodily functions and I am not going to be apologetic about it.

I thought that I ought to give an update about the cloth diaper situation. I have started using cloth diapers finally. We decided to use disposables until child number three grew into his 3-6 month clothes. This saved me from washing out huge numbers of poopy diapers for my newborn. Now that he is pooping only once or twice a day, that is a much more manageable amount. All is going well. It isn't nearly as convenient as disposables, but not as inconvenient as I first imagined. I went for prefold diapers and diaper covers. I can see why people would like to go for "All-in-ones" (which is as convenient as a disposable), since replacing the diaper inside the cover is sometimes annoying. the nice thick diapers that I use are a little difficult to dry thoroughly in my dryer, so I have to run them through twice. We use the disposables when we go out, but even then, I will leave the cloth diapers on if we go out for a short errand. I suspect that I will go back to disposables briefly when he hits the teething diarhea stage. We are doing the cloth diapers more to stretch our finances than to make an environmental statement.

This summer I plan to work with child number two a little more with potty training this summer. She currently uses pull ups and sometimes tells me "I got poop." Sometimes she does sometimes she doesn't. She is aware of what is going on in her pants, so she might be receptive to some extra attention to get it in the potty.

Child number one has been my tough to potty train child. I think that I can confidently say that she is now potty trained. She takes herself to the bathroom when she needs to and does the whole process herself. I have to remind her that it has been a long time occasionally or insist she use the toilet before we go somewhere. But, otherwise it has been all her responsibility and she does it. She hasn't had an accident in a long time. The last time was when we were visiting grandparents and she hated stopping the play long enough to use the toilet. She was just over excited and distracted with extra fun. I think what finally did the trick was her own desire to do things herself. She hit an age where she wants to do everything that she possibly can, on her own. She was getting annoyed by being told when to use the potty and wanted to do it herself. So we finally gave it a trial after she was consistent enough and it worked. She also had incentive from earning rewards for long term success. She is extremely independent minded and it shows in the potty training, too. Now if we can get her to stop coming out of the bathroom with her pants down.

Well, baby is crying so I need to stop here. I'll do a homeschool update soon.