I hope you all are doing well and that 2009 isn’t bringing you too much economic gloom and doom!

My husband and I (OK, particularly my husband, but I am learning daily) have always been pretty environmentally conscious. We reduce, reuse, and recycle regularly, we compost, we rinse out Ziploc bags, use reusable canvas bags at the grocery store, don’t shop very much or “consume” many products, use public transportation, etc. I’m sure there is always more we can do (and please feel free to make some suggestions — we’re always looking for better ways to do things!) but for the most part we really try hard to be as “green” as possible.

However, sometime over the past three years we have stumbled GREATLY. Suddenly I am driving everywhere, in a “big gas-guzzling SUV” that was the only thing we could find that we thought would hold three carseats (and now that we have two carseats in there already, that third one is going to be a mighty tight fit!). It is nearly impossible to take MUNI with two young children and a stroller (see here for more on that…), and I’m using more Ziploc bags for sandwiches and carrots and other lunch goodies than I ever thought was possible!

And don’t even let me get started on our “digital clutter”….we have thousands of digital pictures and videos stored on hard drives that are destined to become obsolete and buried in the “Electronic Hazardous Waste” graveyard in just a few years, not to mention cellphones that are quickly becoming outdated, PC’s, digital cameras, and more.

We buy stuff now, too. Lots of stuff. TONS of stuff. For “non-stuff-oriented” people, “stuff” has basically exploded all over our house! We have baby gates and high chairs and bouncy seats and a Gymini and teethers and stuffed animals and hundreds of plastic toys (probably all made in China) and cribs and baby clothes and baby silverware and baby plates and baby wipes and diapers and…. well, you get the idea. We are swimming in a huge pool of STUFF and it’s truly insane and drives us crazy, and yet, we somehow still seem to accumulate MORE instead of “cutting back” and living with less!

There was a study released just yesterday in the UK on how children are more likely to remember a day at the beach with their parents than the latest new gadget or toy. I fully believe this is true, as when I look back at my own childhood I definitely remember the experiences that I had far more than the toys that I played with (well, except maybe for Star Wars — the Millenium Falcon was really cool!). But despite this fact, we still seem to accumulate so much STUFF for our girls! Yes, a lot of it is gifts, and some are generous hand-me-downs, but the end result is the same — we are drowning in stuff.

And the amazing thing is, except for a very few toys, both Keilani and Malia are pretty much non-interested in this stuff! The most fascinating object for Keilani is whatever Mommy or Daddy is using at the time, whether it be our real cellphones (not the cute pink plastic one that is “hers”), our keys, a wooden spoon (still interesting even after 2 years), etc. And Malia at this point is pretty much fascinated by everything — a plastic bag, a cardboard box, watching leaves sway on a tree (actually I like watching that, too!).

We tell ourselves that we are holding on to these things until Baby #3 arrives, should we decide to have him/her in the future, but I somehow doubt that Baby #3 will be any more interested than Keilani and Malia are!

So what is a family of four to do? Boycott all toys? Go down to a 5-toy-per-child limit? Move someplace where we can walk everywhere? There are definitely steps that we can take and as we become more aware of our environmental impact I look forward to seeing how we can do things better. Much better!

Got any ideas? We’ve a long way to go and would love to hear them!

After waking the absolute bare-minimum required to let her out of her room I fall back into bed (it’s 5:45AM!) and my mini-me follows me. “Sleep in Mommy’s bed, yes?” she “asks”. “OK, yes, fine, but you have to SLEEP, Keilani! And don’t wake up your sister!” I mumble, trying not to wake up anymore than I already have.

Seconds later my mini-me has wedged as much of herself as is humanly possible against my body, despite the vastness of our queen-size bed, and begins to thrash around. “Get up, Mommy? PEAS, Mommy, get up! Peas?” she asks. I pretend to sleep, praying for just a few more minutes of blissful rest and hope that she doesn’t wake up her sister. As Malia stirs, however, I realize the day has dawned and I must get up.

My mini-me follows me to the bathroom where we get ready for the day, “Mommy wash her face, yes?” she asks and has me lift her into her special seat on the counter to watch. “Mommy needs to make her coffee, honey”, I reply groggily, but do wash my face and dust a little powder onto her cheek as I put some on my own.

My mini-me knows that we need to turn the baby monitor on for Malia, “Need the monitor, Mommy, Kani do it?” and follows me down to the kitchen. As I make my coffee my mini-me opens our beverage refrigerator and peruses the selection, finally settling on a 100% apple juice box and pouring it into a cup before drinking it (she has just recently mastered pouring and still manages to splash quite a bit of juice onto the floor as well as into her cup).

The rest of the day progresses in much the same manner — when Malia cries Keilani shouts, “It’s OK Baby, Mommy’s coming! Don’t cry Baby!” and rushes to beat me upstairs to get to Malia first (she loves her sister very much!). When I go to sit down on our couch to nurse Malia my mini-me arrives there just ahead of me and I end up sitting on top of her, trying not to squish her but laughing loudly — she loves this game, and nurses her baby “Tina” right beside me as I nurse Malia.

My mini-me next wants to “work on something, Mommy, yes?” at Daddy’s computer while I work on mine alongside her, and she then calls Daddy or Grandma as I do and talks on the phone to them, hardly needing my help and cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder as she’s seen me do a thousand times.

My mini-me is the best and worst of me, giving loving care to her beautiful baby sister but also lecturing and yelling at her, “No, Baby, No! Don’t spill Baby! That’s not NICE, Baby!” as I’ve said (OK shouted) to Keilani many times before, and when I hear her I am looking in a mirror in which my parenting is perfectly reflected back in all its “glory” (and gory!).

I hope that I am fostering more of the loving warmth and less of the “No, Baby, NO!” in her, but only time will tell. In the meantime, I love my little mini-me with all of my heart, and her baby sister, too! Malia already looks at Keilani with such rapt adoration; it is only a matter of time before Keilani has a little mini-me of her own.

A few minutes before Keilani pooped in her pants she told me, “poo! poo!” and we rushed into the bathroom with Boobaby following closely behind. Keilani loves Boobaby and told me that she didn’t mind if Boobaby came in when I asked her if that was OK, so Boobaby stood next to Keilani and watched with curiosity as Keilani tried to poop. I think Keilani wasn’t quite ready to “perform under pressure”, however, and so didn’t go—false alarm. However, just a few minutes later she once again said “poo! poo!” and this time Daddy rushed her upstairs to the bathroom. By the time they got there though she had already pooped in her pants. Rats!

We are very proud of her and hope that she is now on the home stretch of this whole potty-training process! (Knock on wood!)

In short, no, Keilani did not pee for our nanny on Day 7 of potty-training. She sat on the potty with our nanny at the playground three times before leaving to come home but didn’t go…until she went in her pants while standing on the back of the stroller on the way home. Our nanny asked her if she wanted to go at home and she said yes, but she just didn’t make it… shoot! Oh well, maybe next time! The rest of Day 7 passed uneventfully, although she did have two more accidents. Argh! Maybe she is just not ready? Or maybe it does take time to learn? It’s so hard to tell!

Day 8

On Day 8 we ventured out to Santana Row in San Jose where they purported to celebrate “Bastille Day”:

“Vive la France” et “Vive la Tradition Française” at Left Bank Brasserie with fun and games for both adults and children: a live Poodle Parade, classic French clowns and jugglers to entertain and awe, Parisian swing bands, accordion players, Pétanque on the lawn, special menus inspired by and dedicated to the Revolution, a “Storming of the Bastille”, pastis tastings and even appearances of Marie-Antoinette herself!

Sounds pretty fun, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the clown who made balloon animals for children had seen better days…his trusty balloon bag carried only one color of balloon and he must have just completed clown school as he knew how to make only one kind of balloon animal:

Clown to parent, spoken in your best fake French accent: “vuht ahneemul vould your leetle geerl like today?”

Parent: “Um, how about a cat?”

Clown: “How about a dog?” (<– note the sudden lack of French accent)

Child: “NO! I want a CAT!”

Clown, embarrassed, twisting balloon: “Um, OK, here you go!” (as one balloon leg of the dog pops) “It’s a CAT!”

Child: “That’s not a CAT! That’s a DOG!”

Parent, just wanting to get out of there: “Um, thank the nice clown for your balloon, honey”

But I digress…apart from the zaniness of the broken-down-carnival atmosphere of “Bastille Day” and the craziness of the upscale “live to shop!” exuberance of Santana Row itself, which is worth a whole ‘nother post in and of itself, we had a great time and Keilani did pretty OK with the potty. (Which is supposed to be what this post is about, anyway!)

She peed in the public potty on her Sesame Street Toilet Seat successfully when we got there, and then had a few false alarms throughout the day. However, recognizing that Santana Row was really no place for an active toddler, an infant, and parents who never spend more than $20 on a pair of jeans, we decided to adjourn to a local playground.

It was here where Keilani broke down… she was having so much fun playing with Daddy that despite repeated questioning and prompts from Daddy she peed through her pants and onto the playground structure! When asked later WHY she didn’t pee in the potty she said that she was “having too much fun playing”. Well, that one we could fix…we told her that the next time she was playing and peed in her pants because she didn’t want to stop we would leave the playground immediately, but if she stopped playing just long enough to pee in the potty, we would stay and keep playing. We thought this sank in and made sense, but just minutes later she pooped in her pants! Sigh. She had only pooped successfully on the potty once before, so we didn’t know if this time was just because she didn’t want to stop playing and poop or because she wasn’t really making the connection yet between having to poop and being able to make it to a potty on time. As we had already been there over an hour, however, we left anyway, doubting this whole potty-training thing immensely and pretty much deciding that she must not be ready.

Day 9

However, Day 9 brought a 3-year-old’s birthday party and a MUCH better day with the potty for Keilani! She peed successfully several times in the morning before leaving for the party, a few more times on our portable Potette travel potty seat at the party itself (these are the greatest, by the way!), and only had ONE accident that evening at home. Could she maybe be “getting it”, we wondered?

Day 10

After more than a week of questioning and second-guessing ourselves and wondering if it was maybe just the wrong time or if Keilani simply wasn’t ready yet…

KEILANI HAD AN ACCIDENT-FREE DAY *AND* POOPED SUCCESSFULLY ON THE POTTY *AND* PEED ON THE POTTY IN A PUBLIC BATHROOM FOR OUR NANNY!!!!

We were absolutely amazed, thrilled, happy, and oh-so-proud of her! Could it be that all of that Potty Power had finally sunk in? Did Elmo’s Potty Time really do the trick? Did she *really* get it or did we just get lucky today???

Whatever the case, we are excited and very relieved that we didn’t throw in the towel earlier (and believe me, there were many times when we wanted to!) and go back to diapers! Stay tuned for Day 11…. will Keilani have another accident-free day? Was Day 10 just a fluke???

It’s true…Keilani has recently discovered the magic of pretend-play, thanks I’m sure to her new friend Boobaby, and her most favorite game (aside from pretend calling her favorite people on the phone, which is adorable) is “Let’s find parking!”.

To play “Let’s find parking!”, Keilani pushes her little toy stroller or grocery cart all around the house, talking to her baby doll and saying, “Come Baby, come! We need to find parking! Oh! There’s a spot!”. She will then careen the stroller or cart wildly, pulling into the “spot” and performing the parking cheer—”YAY Baby! We found parking! YAY!” This is good for almost twenty minutes of fun with endless variations on the theme.

I guess I sort of expected Keilani to play “house” and “school” and “fort” growing up, as I did, but it never occurred to me that:

1. We live nowhere near any sort of nature where she could really build a fort, and
2. We look for parking at least three times a day, and sometimes more, even though we live in the “suburban” area of the City where there is usually plentiful parking!

You might ask why we don’t take public transportation more often, as those of you who knew us before we had kids (BK) know that we were pretty environmentally conscious even before it became “cool” to be “green”. Well, it is next-to-impossible to manhandle a 30-pound toddler, a 13-pound infant, a 19-pound stroller (even the “ultra-light umbrella models” weigh 11 pounds!), and a 3-pound diaper bag onto the bus, particularly when they require you to take said kids and bags out of the stroller (and do what with them? have the toddler stand in the street? hand the baby to some random stranger? lie the baby down in the street?) and fold the stroller and then somehow lift all 65 pounds onto the bus without dropping anything (especially the baby!)? Impossible!

So Keilani and Malia will probably play “parking” for as long as we live in the City (or at least until MUNI changes its stroller policy… hint, hint MUNI!), but hopefully they will also learn to play “recycling” and “compost” and maybe even “fort” someday, too. In the meantime, I do love hearing Keilani say, “Let’s go Baby! We found parking!”

For all of you non-parents out there reading this, if you haven’t already done so you can safely and blissfully skip all of these “potty” posts! I certainly would have before I had kids of my own! Believe me, I never thought I would ever have this much to say about anyone’s pee and poop and when and how it happened in such abundant detail, EVER!

However, two lovely daughters later, here I am, completely immersed in both of their bodily functions on an almost minute-by-minute basis. “Did Malia have a poo?”, I ask my husband after he changes her diaper, wondering whether she is eating enough, feeling sick, and/or ready to start solids yet. “Is Keilani eating enough fruit?”, I wonder later, hoping that she isn’t too constipated to poop on the potty and resolving to feed her prunes for dinner just in case. Insanity!

But anyway, such is life and I digress… back to the poop-files!

So Keilani pooped on the potty this morning! She was a little afraid at first, but I cheered her on and she did wonderfully and was so proud of herself! I was VERY proud of her, too, and extraordinarily happy that the poop actually made it straight into the toilet without first making an appearance elsewhere in our house (I think I mentioned the incident on Mommy and Daddy’s bed in a previous post)!

The rest of the day passed without incident (all successes—yay!) until this evening, when she peed on our living room rug. We had just returned from a long car ride to downtown San Francisco and back to pick up Daddy from work, and about two minutes from home Malia decided she was ravenous and started crying in her carseat.

We raced home and made it in record-time and I rushed to grab Malia from the car and take her upstairs and nurse her, leaving Daddy to bring Keilani upstairs (which is no big deal, Keilani LOVES her Daddy!). However, this night was different—she wanted “Mommy Mommy MOOM-EEEEE!!!!” and I was in the middle of nursing Malia! I thought she might just be hungry and so shouted to her, “Mommy is on the couch in the living room, come on in and snuggle with me!” and she finally came in, sobbing the whole way—I couldn’t imagine what was wrong! She hadn’t mentioned “pee” or “poop” at all and I am embarrassed to say that I just didn’t think of it—I was immersed in nursing and just wasn’t thinking about that. (Maybe even parents can only fixate on one bodily function at a time!)

At that point she peed on the floor, crying for Mommy, my poor baby girl, and my heart just broke into little tiny pieces. OF COURSE she needed to pee, she had drunk about a quart of juice (yes, we let her have juice sometimes, I know, I know, bad parents) and water and had been holding it in for the entire car ride because she so desperately wants to be a “big girl” (like the girls and boys in that Potty Power video—I can’t tell you how afraid I am for “real” peer pressure when she goes to school!).

I of course immediately handed Malia to my husband and consoled and held (and cleaned up) Keilani, and I felt terrible, like I had let my baby down. We mothers are supposed to KNOW these things and I even THOUGHT as we were driving home that I needed to get her on the potty the instant we got home, but when Malia started crying it all went right out the window and I didn’t think of anything else except hurrying home to nurse her.

So, Keilani had one accident today, but I sort of feel responsible, even though I know that she needs to be the one to say “pee” or “poop” and to communicate what she needs to us, but still. Shouldn’t a mother just know these things? Shouldn’t I have just known???

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment….first day with the nanny! Will Keilani pee (or poop?) on the potty for our nanny? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

P.S. Is it too personal to publish this type of information on the Internet? Will Keilani read this one day and be angry or hurt or embarrassed that I posted this live for the world to see? I hereby reserve the right to edit or delete this posting at a later date if I still feel conflicted about this, and I hereby also reserve the right to publish lots of boastful posts about all of her many wondrous accomplishments (which will probably embarrass her even more, but that’s OK!).

In all seriousness, I think it helps parents sometimes to read the “gory details” of other parents’ struggles which is why I am posting all of these potty details. It’s all too easy on the playground to just talk in vague generalizations and of course to leave out the really tough parts, which you either edit out deliberately (sort of like the familiar “how are you?” “fine, thanks” exchange, this one goes something like, “how’s the potty training going?” “Oh, pretty good thanks, she’s doing great and only had one accident today!”). Or, sometimes you just honestly forget—nature is wonderful in that way in allowing us to forget past pain and struggles, but I think it can help others to hear about it sometimes (particularly if their expectations are for “Just One Day!” potty-training, LOL!)

I also have to give more kudos to the “Potty Power” video today! Keilani watched “Potty Power” something like 6 times this morning (apparently we are not a “No TV or video” household after all, haha) and seems to REALLY want to be a “big kid” like the kids in the video. I think they are great motivation for her as she is not in preschool yet and doesn’t have many “older big kid” friends whom she sees often enough to want to emulate. This video seems to really provide that motivation!

Keilani only had ONE accident today (yes, her successes finally outnumbered her accidents—hooray!) and I think that this accident only happened because she was so excited to see Daddy tonight when he came home that she literally peed her pants!

Now, onto poop…Stay tuned!