parenting challenges

One of my greatest challenges as a mom is not cracking up at the unintentionally hilarious things Ellie does.

Last night she was eating applesauce and doing a pretty admirable job using her spoon. However, she got distracted at one point and a large amount of applesauce slowly slid off her spoon and landed on our dog Quinn, who was crumb-surfing under her chair. If only I'd had a video camera. I actually had to go into the kitchen to have a silent laughing fit, wiping the tears from my eyes. If she'd caught on that it was funny, Quinn would never have walked away from a meal without wearing half of it again.

A less entertaining challenge: potty training.

You know, one of the things about having your baby die is that you feel (okay, I feel) like you can never complain about parenting challenges or disliking some part of being a parent. For one thing, I feel so lucky to get to parent a living child. For another thing, although it's probably a foolish superstition, it feels like if I complain about not liking something about parenting, something bad might happen to Ellie to punish me for my ingratitude.

That being said, I really do not enjoy potty training. (Who does?) I'm glad that at least it's the only aspect of parenting I haven't enjoyed yet. It's not all bad, of course. It's great to see how proud she is of herself. But whereas I naively thought I'd have less interaction with her bodily functions once she started learning to use the toilet, I now find myself visiting the bathroom with her approximately 1800 times a day.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. 1500 times a day. It's a lot.

And where I occasionally used to set her to playing with her toys, or plunk her in front of her bookcase so she could read to herself, or put on a Sesame Street video, and actually get some stuff done around the house, now every 15 minutes I'm interrupted by "Potty? Ellie go potty?" and then we spend 20 - 30 minutes in the flippin' bathroom. Also, she lives for washing her hands, which is wonderful, but also equates to about a gallon of water all over the bathroom floor every day. (As closely as I monitor her, that kid is QUICK when it comes to making a mess - I can't imagine where she gets that from.)

I know it's just a phase, and soon my involvement in her potty usage will decrease - and it's exciting to think that she might be fully trained by the time her younger sibling arrives (hopefully in five or six weeks!). She's doing a great job with it. But there has been more than one time when she has wanted to use the potty for the third time in a row (as in, we haven't even made it out of the bathroom yet) that I have felt my otherwise almost endless patience running a tad low.

Man, I feel so guilty just for writing this. Seriously. I love my kid, universe! She is amazing and wonderful and an absolute joy to be around. But I so look forward to this phase evolving from 'training' to 'trained'.

The applesauce moments, on the other hand, those can keep going indefinitely as far as I'm concerned.