Headbath

I asked two mothers I admired when they potty trained their now pre-adolescent children. They both didn’t seem to remember and said, 'it just happened.'  I was anxious. It seemed like a very grown up thing to do - teach a human how to use the toilet. We didn’t really cinch house training with the fuzzball so I severely doubted my ability to teach another living being this essential life skill. I’d bought the No-Cry Potty Training Solution  around the same time I bought the No-Cry Nap Solution but only got around to reading it when E was 10-months old. We had minor successes with getting her to eliminate in the potty (read about our adventures here ) but I think she forced herself to learn how to walk because she just wanted to get away from the potty. The poor expensive potty sat in a corner of the bathroom, unused. We didn’t force her to use it because we’d read enough Freud or at least the Wikipedia entry on Freud  to suspect that the premature potty training o...

At 11-months, E was on four meals of solids and just around 6 milk feeds a day. My body was slowly becoming mine again, and I was excitedly learning the basics of steaming and puréeing fruit and veg for my baby with budding tastebuds.  As with all food, what goes in must come out. I quickly learnt that the introduction of solids meant that her poop was no longer the lovely sunshine yellow, smell of fresh yoghurt that it used to be.  It had began to smell and feel like human excrement. And when a child is in diapers, it just smooshes all over the posterior making the cleaning a long and smelly process.  Up until now, the husband and I would coo over E's multiple times a day output, calling it our "golden treasure" and grinning through poop cleaning because we were convinced positive body image starts early (and also breastmilk poop is cute) but suddenly, we were finding it hard keeping it together. My mother, as mothers are wont to do , helpfully infor...