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By rebecca, January 26, 2011 12:09 am

Confession: my two-year-old has been going commando for days.

That’s right, nothing but bare baby butt under those pink yoga pants or patterned tights. After 48 hours of wearing the same pull-up-style diaper with no accidents, I decided to do away with them altogether. (And after four days of stripping her crib and washing the bedding I brought them back for overnight.)

The daytime regimen is sticking, though, and as long as I remember to plop her on the toilet every couple of hours, we’re good. As long as I remember . . . Right, so you can see where we’re going with this. It didn’t take long to burn through the two pairs of real, big girl underpants, the three pairs of waffled training underpants and the two or three pairs of cloth training diapers that we have. We wet a number of pants and stockings while going commando, too, to which I reply, “Sucker! If I wasn’t so behind on the laundry, I’d have one more thing to wash now.”

Cross fingers, knock on wood, do your ritualistic sacrifice of a virgin rat, what have you, but it’s been a couple days now since we’ve had an accident. Progress! AND she has even told me on more than one occasion that she needs to use the toilet — pee and poo! Booyah!

That deserves a celebration. I think I might just do a load or two of laundry and then pass out for the night.

Post script:

I know you’re all dying to know how Irene compares to her big brother in this department. So here goes.

Night training: Colum reigns supreme by routinely waking up dry (and thus not needing a diaper overnight) at the ripe old age of 18 months. Listen, I would not lie about this. He can hold it for-freaking-ever.

Daytime, No. 1: Irene has a slight edge because she sometimes tells me when she has to go and will pee just about every time I sit her on a toilet. Colum was strong here, too, and his iron-walled bladder meant that he seldom had accidents even when I forgot to bring him to the bathroom. But he never really told me he had to go. I kept waiting for that development and it never happened. He went from me bringing him to the loo every couple hours to just getting up and going all on his own without a word to anybody.

Daytime, No. 2: This is where I thank my lucky stars that Irene is so much easier. She often goes when she’s peeing and has even told me a couple times that she needs to poo. Even if she has an accident, she has much better, er, form and the clean up is super easy. (Neither kid would sit in it.) Not the case with Colum, let’s just leave it at that.

All in all, Irene is 27 months old and I’m really hoping for full toilet training status by two and a half. Colum was a bit older, but then again he was in daycare at Irene’s age. That changes everything.

And that concludes the toddler excrement session of Way Too Much Information. Please join me next week as I discuss the state of my nursing bras during the first months of breastfeeding.

Comments (4)

By rebecca, December 7, 2010 5:07 pm

The majority of us are just trying to get through the holiday season intact without tainting the joy too much for our kids. Am I right? I mean, I already know that when we go to choose our “organic” tree (is there another kind?) from the supermarket parking lot we’ll need to find a compromise between my husband’s desire to buy what the tree guy calls “the Ferrari of Christmas trees” and my desire to have some money left over for groceries. Then there will be the swearing and complaining as the needles dig into your skin and the whole, “Why can’t you hold the damn tree straight?!” episode. The kids will load up the bottom of the tree with decorations, fighting over them and destroying some in the process, almost for sure. They’ll be all hopped up on the gingerbread house I won’t let them touch until we get the tree up, and then they’ll very likely knock the whole tree down at least once. I’ll be sweeping up needles until May and pulling ornaments out of the toy boxes until … oh, look, here’s one from last year.

And that’s just the tree, my friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas as much as the next guy, but the holidays are stressful. So, yes, I’ll take whatever help I can get to keep the magic alive for my kids. It just so happens that the help comes in the form of an overweight, white dude in a red suit who lives on the North Pole. Whatever. I’ll take it.

Not everyone agrees, though. Daniela Syrovy of sympatico.ca’s Coffee Talk argues that Santa is nothing but a myth that celebrates materialism and magnifies socio-economic disparity. (Except she doesn’t sound like she’s writing a graduate paper in her column.) Guest blogger Grinchmommy on momlogic.com adds that Santa sets up kids for disappointment and makes a liar out of parents and is smug about how her kindergarten-aged daughter brought her classmates to tears telling them the truth about Santa. This dad made these same arguments a couple years ago, adding that it’s important to know where a gift comes from.

To which I reply, eh. If you say so. I don’t think these parents are doing their kids any grave injustices by telling them the truth about Santa. I also love the way my just-turned two-year-old daughter’s eyes light up as she talks about Santa coming to her house. My husband says the only reason he believed in Santa for as long as he did is because he knew there was no way his parents could afford the toys that Santa brought. As someone who is relatively free from upper-middle class guilt (thank you, insufferable debt load), I think that’s one of the joys of Santa Claus as a parent. You can indulge your kids wants (or some of them) once a year without undermining the basic chorus of, “Sorry, that’s too expensive. No, you can’t have that. We can’t afford that, dear.”

I believed in Santa for a while, I guess, and then I didn’t. I don’t really remember when it happened and it certainly wasn’t traumatic. I’m the oldest of four, though, so I kept playing along for a long time which was fun. The whole myth is pretty out there, let’s face it, and when I started asking the right questions I think there might have been a bit of wink, wink, nudge, nudge from my parents. I don’t know exactly how I’ll deal with Santa questions as the kids get older. (Here’s what happened to Sweetney.) I’ll probably just wing it or dodge the question altogether.

The best part of this discussion is how riled up people get in the comments. Like, I for one think Santa is wonderful and who do you think you are?! Settle down, people, the Santa Claus propagators among us are still a clear majority and the fat man is going nowhere anytime soon. If only so we can distract the kids from the family politics happening at the dinner table.

Comments (4)

By rebecca, November 10, 2010 11:16 am

Did you think Facebook didn’t need to #suckit anymore? You were wrong.

Momzelle is a successful, small, local Toronto business run by the sister-brother team of Christine and Vincent Poirier. They sell made-in-Canada nursing tops that are specifically designed to allow for comfortable and discreet breastfeeding. While Momzelle does have a small store-front location (1593 Dundas St. W.), the bulk of its business is in online sales. So of course it had a Facebook page to help promote the nursing wear and breastfeeding in general. The page posted positive quotes about breastfeeding and informative news links and boasted between 600 – 800 weekly readers and 1600 fans.  It also had pictures like this:

Christine received a form email from Facebook on Monday afternoon informing her that her page had been taken down for not following the rules. It either promoted heinous hatred, personal attacks, or obscenity. Christine promptly replied to the email stating that there must be some kind of mistake and filled out a complaint form. At the time of writing this post, 30 hours later, she had yet to receive a response.

So what gives? Clearly, there is nothing offensive or obscene about the kind of image posted on the Momzelle Facebook page. In fact, the entire point of the nursing wear is to allow women to breastfeed discreetly and not have to expose their breasts. Christine is confident that no actual person working at Facebook could have viewed her page and deemed it obscene. It must be that some Facebook users have reported the page as “sexually explicit,” she speculates, and that after a certain number of reports a robot automatically takes down the page. “I love Facebook,” Christine told me. “I advertise with them. I can’t believe this is a real Facebook decision.”

The struggle for Christine and Vincent now is twofold. They need to get Facebook to hear them and have an actual person review their page and hopefully have it reinstated. They also need to address the problem of broader acceptance of public breastfeeding. The fact that any number of people would report a page like that is mind boggling. It also goes to show that rejoinders that claim that women just need to cover up and be discreet are often false in themselves. The very idea of a baby suckling on its mother’s breast is enough to offend some people.

When she first got the email, Christine couldn’t help herself. “I felt so shamed, like I was told to get out of a restaurant.” Which is, of course, exactly what her product is designed to avoid.

257,747 (and counting) people have already joined the Facebook group Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! (Official petition to Facebook). You should join too.

Update: Momzelle has a new Facebook page up and running now. They could sure use some more likes.

Update: Thanks to a influx of support, Facebook has reinstated the original Momzelle page.