Poop.

This is probably not remotely interesting to anyone but me (or my husband) but when you have small children, it is amazing how much of your time you devote to thinking about someone else's poop:  how much they poop, how often they poop, and even what it looks like.  So you were forewarned by the title: this post is about POOP. 

Sam and Anna are frequent poopers and always have been.  They both poop multiple times a day even now as almost 16 month olds.  I was always jealous when I heard of other babies that pooped once every few days, because I was and still am changing sometimes 7 or more poo-filled diapers a day.  On the other side of things, because they go so often we rarely have blowouts, which is an awesome silver lining to the amount of soiled diapers we go through.

So you can imagine (maybe?) my delight in that Sam seems to be progressing in his awareness of his own bodily emissions.  He has had a "pooping spot" for a long time now- he'll go stand behind a particular chair in our home to take care of business.  When we are away from home, it is not unusual for him to find a different chair to stand behind.  It's easy to tell what he's doing (aside from the grunts) because he stand still for a bit, and he rarely does that, except to poop!  Just recently, he started to grab at his bum after standing in his selected spot, with a look of unhappiness on his face.  To my knowledge, that is yet another sign that potty training is on the horizon.

What's more- today, after I was changing Anna's dirty diaper, I stood up to toss it in the genie and turned around to find that Sam had laid down on the changing pad I put on the floor (we've been changing diapers on the floor for a long time now.  They are just too wiggly and like to protest too much to change them up higher).  He had just stood in his spot, grunted, then grabbed at his diaper so I was about to check him anyway.  I'm taking the fact that he laid down on the changing pad as a sign that he wanted me to change his diaper for him.  While changing him, he kept saying "dia, dia, dia" over and over.

I'm recording this here so that I can see how long it is between these recent changes and when we actually begin potty training.

(Side note- that child loves the Diaper Dance song on Baby Signing Time.  I wonder: do I maybe owe some credit of his diaper awareness to that?)

Anna on the other hand, has shown no signs of recognition that she has a dirty diaper.  She rarely grunts and her poo just doesn't smell as much as Sam's so it's sometimes a crap shoot (haha!) whether she needs to be changed or not.  She also poops during naps often or sometimes during night sleep, so I have a feeling it will be a looooong time before the potty training commences around here. 

Oh well.  That's just fine with me anyway.  My initial thought was to wait  to consider potty training until I was back working full time so our daycare could bear the brunt of it.  Because honestly, the thought of training two at a time to go in a toilet is another situation that frankly, has me quaking in my flip flops a little, too.  My goal?  Two potty trained kids by the time school's done for summer, next year!