I was rocking Frances to sleep last night when she started reciting the alphabet. She stopped at F, and I asked her, “What starts with F?”
“Frances!” she replied.
She laid her head back down on my chest, and I kept rocking. I thought she drifting off when I heard her say, in a drowsy whisper, “And fart.”
So, as previously reported, Frances has been diaper-free for awhile. Yesterday, she hung out with Caitie, who is four-and-a-half. Caitie asked Frances if she was wearing diapers, and Frances replied that she was in underpants these days. Then Caitie asked, “Even at night?” Frances answered in the affirmative. Caitie was really impressed.
Ted told me this story because he was really proud that Frances had achieved something that so awed a big girl—and he told me this story in front of Frances because he wanted her to be proud, too. I was, indeed proud, but I also thought: Frances is totally going to want to wear a diaper to bed tonight.
Ted and I have had ample occasion to learn that Frances is impervious to peer pressure. Although we understand that, when she’s, say, fourteen, this will be an invaluable quality. Right now, though, it mostly means that Frances doesn’t care if she’s the only almost-three-year-old on the playground with a pacifier. And it means that when a big girl is impressed that Frances doesn’t wear diapers to bed, Frances doesn’t think, “Awesome! I’m cool!” She thinks, “Hmmm. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could return to the free-and-easy days when I just peed in my pants.”
She wore a diaper to bed last night. She also insisted on wearing on to school. She explained to me that she’s still a baby, and that she will return to underpants on her birthday. I passed this information along to her teacher when I dropped Frances off at school this morning. I also told Frances that I would leave her a pair of underpants, just in case.
When I called to see how Frances was doing later in the day, Miss Angie explained that Frances had just gone to her cubby, stripped off her skirt and her diaper, and put on her underpants, explaining that she was ready to be a big girl now. I’m glad that she’s back in underpants—for now, at least—and I’m also glad, really, that she’s in underpants on her own terms.
It’s been a couple of weeks since Frances wore a diaper, so I think it’s safe to say that she’s toilet-trained. This was a project that involved the whole family, but it wasn’t quite as difficult as I feared it would be. The essential element was, I believe, waiting until Frances was ready, but Ted and I ultimately decided to augment the process with bribery: stickers, M&Ms, and a present each time Frances completed a row on her potty chart. When the whole chart was filled in, she got to choose a big potty prize. She chose a doll that she can take in the bathtub.
There are still a few kinks to work out. For example, Frances seems to think it’s OK to pee freely when out-of-doors. And, as ever, Ted and I don’t really have an exit strategy. There’s no new potty chart, and Frances no longer gets stickers when she uses the toilet, but it’s entirely possible that she will decide she might as well go back to diapers when we run out of M&Ms.
Frances and I worked on this project together. Instructions for origami shirt-and-tie card here.
NOTE: This interview was conducted in 2007. I’m retrieving it from the archives because the book was just reviewed in USA Weekend.
Almost 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I didn’t know this until I had a miscarriage of my own. I was surprised to learn that it’s so common, since women almost never talk about it. I wasn’t able to find anything much written on the subject, either. I can’t say that the cultural silence surrounding miscarriage made the experience worse—I don’t know if anything could have made it worse—but it certainly didn’t make it any easier.
The anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, is a much-needed addition to the literature of mourning. I contributed an essay, and I recently interviewed the collection’s editor, Jessica Berger Gross, for Literary Mama. We talked about loss, the publishing process, and what it’s like to edit a famous author.
When I asked Frances what she wanted to make her grandmothers for Mother’s Day, she replied, “Bread and jam.” (Bread and Jam for Frances is longstanding family favorite. Bread and jam is also Frances’s current favorite dish). I might have been willing to bake bread for my mom, my grandmas, and my mother-in-law, but I was not about to make jam. So, I decided to take a more abstract approach to Frances’s idea. I used Sculpey to make tiny slices of bread, I gave Frances some textured paint—strawberry and blackberry jam—to spread on the slices, made these trinkets into charms, and put them on silver chains. Voilà! Bread and jam from Frances.
So, Frances and I were having lunch when she discovered that can use a pretzel as a stylus to scratch the finish off her chair. I asked her not to do it. She continued. I told her not to do it. She ignored me. I said, “If you keep scratching your chair with that pretzel, I will take your pretzels away.”
Frances put the pretzel back in her dish, and started scratching at her chair with her fingernail. Then she turned to me and asked, “Are you going to take away my finger?”
I didn’t know Frances’s father when he was a little boy, but I’m guessing that his mom has stories that go a lot like this one.
Ari Berk: The Secret History of Giants
Dr. Berk is an outstanding scholar (he also happens to teach in my program), and his latest entertainingly erudite work has been recommended by the Parents' Choice Foundation.
Ludwig Bemelmans: Madeline's Rescue
This is the only children’s book I know of that contains the phrase “watery grave.”
Arnold Sobel: Owl at Home
This is such a sweet, quiet, gentle book. I had forgotten about it completely until Ted brought home a copy from a garage sale. I am so delighted to have rediscovered it, and Frances likes it, too.
