Ah, the potty training has begun.  Up until this week, we’ve been all talk and no action.  Little Miss would sit on the potty, push it around, or even put it on her head, but nothing ever happened.

That is, until my child asked for cake on Sunday (we’ve been to a lot of birthday parties lately), and I flippantly said, “I’ll bake you a cake if you go pee on the potty.”

She lit up, and announced she wanted to go potty.  Low and behold, the kid peed.  I guess she just needed a little bribery.

I didn’t happen to have the fixings for cake, so the next day, we went to the store, I found one of those microwavable single serving cakes (Lord knows my diet doesn’t need a full cake around), and we mixed it up, popped it in the microwave for 45 seconds, and voila!  Cake!  I gave her half of the cake, saying the other half she could have when she used the potty again. 

So yet again, we talked a lot about the potty this week, but there was no action until tonight.  It was mayhem at our house tonight.  JB wasn’t yet home from work, so I was cooking dinner when she announced she wanted to pee.  I dropped everything (despite being very hungry), and stripped her down, just to see that she was screwing around on the potty.  I waited about 20 minutes, and by that time not only was I starving, but I was rather annoyed, too. 

I told her that I was going to eat my dinner, and she could stay in the potty and call me when she went pee.

Mistake #1.

So I went to the kitchen, and got no further than putting my dinner on a plate when I heard, “I pee on the floor.”

Oh, that can’t be good.

I go into the bathroom to find that the kid had taken the removable bowl out of the potty, put it in the sink of all places, then proceeded to sit on the potty and pee, which of course went all over the floor.  I admit I was getting rather cranky at this point.  It was almost 8:00 and I just wanted to eat dinner, darnit.

I went back to the kitchen to get paper towels.

Mistake #2.

I then hear a crash and crying.  I come in to find that somehow, my kid has managed to fall on her back smack in the middle of the puddle of pee. 

It was like the stars aligned to play a practical joke on me.  Of course, at this point, she’s melting down, I’m still madly hungry, and I get to take her upstairs to clean her up, change her, and then go clean up the bathroom.  JB showed up as I was cleaning the bathroom, and it wasn’t until I started recounting the story to him that I realized how funny it really was.

So the kid got to have her cake and got to eat it, too.  I figured technically she did go on the potty, despite the chaos.  I really didn’t want to bribe her for potty training, but it does appear to be a strategy that works.