Eirinn started wearing big girl underwear yesterday.  Not by choice, but as a natural progression from Pull Ups.  Because my mom has a week with no other kids, she has dedicated her time to Intensive Potty Training Boot Camp.  This includes asking if she has to use the potty every 10 minutes, the wearing of Disney Princess big girl underwear, and the occasional accident so she can feel the wet pants.

As a first day, it went pretty well.  There were a couple of accidents, as is to be expected, but she went on the potty several times.  She is resistant, as Eirinn is with every type of change, but with a bribe of chocolate or a great round of applause she can usually be convinced to at least try to use the potty.  And a couple of times she even asked if she could use it.

Yesterday before dinner, while I was washing the dishes from the day before (shut up), Eirinn left the kitchen and pulled her potty from the powder room to the front door (she likes to watch the construction vehicles and her potty is one of those potty/stool hybrids).  She was content and thankfully not wanting to “help” with the dishes, so I left her on her own. 

After a couple of minutes of silence (rarely a good thing with an active toddler), I peeked to check on her again.  She had flipped the lid of the potty and was sitting on her throne like a little princess.

“Whatcha doing, Eirinn?”

“Going pee-pee!”

“You are!  What a big girl to go pee-pee all by yourself.  Did you do it?”

“Yes!  A big one!  Come see.”

She had, indeed, peed a great deal into her potty, temporarily located in our front foyer.

“Wow, that was a big one!”

One snag though.  While she had in fact recognized the sensation of having to pee and she had taken the proper steps of opening the lid and sitting on the potty and peeing like such a good girl, she had forgotten one incredibly important part.

She hadn’t pulled her pants or underwear down and had peed straight through them.

But she was so proud, we’ll still give her an ‘A’ for effort.

On Sunday, Carly threw me a non-surprise second baby shower.  The difference between a first baby shower and a second baby shower is that with the first one, the goal is to collect as many free baby goods as is legal.  So you invite every woman you’ve ever met (or the host invites every person they believe you’ve ever met), promise them cake and appetizers, and don’t let them in the door unless they bring a very large gift bag or a fully loaded gift card.  The goal of the second is to spend a relaxing afternoon with a few close friends and family, enjoying the toddler-freedom, and absorbing as much of the peacefulness as possible because you know there won’t be many more days like this.

This was exactly what Carly provided.  She invited my mom and sister, my Anonymous mother-in-law, and a few close friends collected from our weekly Mom’s Night Out excursions.  We played a few shower games, but I specifically told her that I would divorce her as my best friend if they were the kind of games that either a) embarrassed me, or b) required us to examine melted chocolate bars arranged to look like poop in diapers.  She (mostly) obliged.  There was one instance where I had to draw “birth control pills” for my mother-in-law, in a baby-themed round of Pictionary. 

We had delicious cheese and mayonnaise based food, followed by yummy cake and brownies.

I also got some presents!  Lots of teeny tiny diapers, teeny tiny baby clothes, food for after the baby arrives and no one feels like cooking, a new digital baby monitor to replace our half-busted old monitor, a new stylish diaper bag to replace my very diaper bag-ish one, a baby sling, and I’m sure there’s more but I forget.  Pregnancy brain.  But everything I got was fabulous and very appreciated and I feel so lucky to have such generous people in my life.

With Eirinn, I started leaking fluid at 35 weeks.  Picture a pin prick into a water balloon near the top (that’s a leak), as opposed to a burst water balloon (that’s water “breaking”).  We waited for one week to see if I was still leaking and to ensure maximum lung development.  Because I was leaking for that long, that meant that I had the sensation of slowly wetting my pants sporatically for the next seven days.  Scary, most definitely, and also very uncomfortable in the pantal region. 

My mom and my mom-in-law both had to quickly reschedule their showers for the same weekend.  My mom’s on Saturday, m-i-l on Sunday.  I was swollen like a sausage, had gained 42 lbs (keep in mind, I hadn’t even entered the last month), was nervous about a) impending labour and delivery and b) becoming a mother.  Add onto this a weeks worth of pants-peeing and now all of this in front of 20 people, two days in a row.  While I was elated and ecstatic to have two parties thrown in honour of me (well, the baby) and they were wonderful showers and I was totally spoiled, I was a little uncomfortable.

So, Saturday, Sunday showers.  My week of waiting was up on Monday.  We scheduled the induction for the next day.  Talk about timing. 

Needless to say all of this was in the back of my mind this Sunday, making for some nerve-racking deja vu.  You know, except for the peeing of the pants and the sausage feet and the feeling of impending doom.

Rabbits rabbits rabbits.

Does anyone else do this?  Say ‘rabbits’ three times on the first day of every month?  It’s supposed to be good luck.  If you do, could you please tell me why?  I can’t for the life of me figure out what this means, yet I say it every month and have for as long as I can remember.

I’m not supersticious, but there are a few things I do without thinking about it.  I lift my feet when I cross railway tracks in the car.  I cross my fingers when I pass a cemetery.  I know what these ones mean but I just don’t know why I do them.  However, with the ‘rabbits’ thing, I don’t have a clue where it came from.