Growing Up

There have been two milestones left for Lana to go through in going from a "little girl" to a "big girl". One was potty training, the other was giving up her dummy.

After a bit of a push around a month ago, Lana's potty training began - and it has been a month of enormous progress for her! A month ago, we decided to let her run around the house with no nappy and pee all over the floor (and she did indeed pee all over the floor and not in the potty at all for the first few days!). These days, she is in underwear from the time that she wakes up until when she goes to bed at night, including her nap time, and the accidents are getting less and less frequent all the time. We still do put a nappy on her if we are going out and are unsure of where the toilets are, but even if we are going to the mall or the park, she is mostly in undies. I wasn't expecting it to be this easy, particularly since she wasn't really the one to initiate the toilet training! 

I really thought that getting Lana to give up her dummy would be another major issue for her. She has been extremely attached to her dummies since she was two months old and would take not one but TWO to bed so that if she lost one, she had a back-up. I have been telling her for months that she would need to throw out her dummies soon but again, she didn't seem ready to do that. I was a little wary of just throwing them out and making her quit cold turkey, so I decided to take a page out of my parents' book.

When my sister was Lana's age, she also was attached to her dummy. My parents ended up giving her a choice as to when she was ready to give up her dummy by offering to buy her a barbie doll when she threw out her dummies. Ash understood the offer and took a few months to consider the offer, but one day she decided that she wanted that barbie doll more than she wanted her dummies, so she threw them out and bought a barbie doll the same day. 

The other week, we went to a friend's place to ride bikes and this friend had a new, pink scooter which Lana loved. There it was - the perfect bribe! So after a quick talk with Bernard, we put the idea to Lana over dinner last Saturday. We explained that we wanted to buy her a scooter but scooters were for big girls who didn't need dummies for sleeping - so when she was ready to go home and throw out her dummies, we would buy her a scooter right away. And to sweeten the deal, we went to the toy store to have a look at what they had to offer.

As soon as we arrived home, Lana demanded her dummies. "I need to chuck them in the rubbish bin!!" We asked her if she was sure and she assured us that she was, so into the bin they went and off we went back to the toy store to buy her a new BLUE scooter.

Over the past week, Lana has asked for her dummy a little, but we remind her that she threw them out and got a blue scooter, so would she like us to chuck the scooter in the bin and then get some dummies instead? (she doesn't like that idea, thankfully!) The first few nights, it was a little hard for her to get to sleep - she needed a little extra comfort/cuddles/please draw on my back at bedtime - but it is getting easier for her.

Again, I'm surprised at how easy this process was - I was expecting it to be much harder as well! But Lana keeps surprising me with how adaptable she is and how easily she learns new skills. And now our little girl truly is growing up into a "big girl", and what a beautiful "big girl" she is!