Pichí in the potty!

If you are thinking that this is going to be a post about potty training, you are correct! Less than 2 weeks ago (the day after our snow fun, in fact), Ted and I took a deep breath and, with my mom's invaluable help, started our quest to train the girls.

Based on a recommendation from fellow quad mom Suz Steece, we used the 3-day potty-training method. Basically, the author says that if you follow her method to the letter, your kid will be fully potty-trained in 3 days. She also claims that the best time to potty-train is at 22 months. I figured that since my mom would be in town around the time the kids hit the adjusted age of 22 months—and since the girls, in particular, have been so interested in removing their clothing and diapers over the past few months—it couldn't hurt to try!

A few days before my mom arrived, though, I chickened out of training all four kids at once—and I am so glad I did. Even with three adults on potty-training duty, taking care of the girls while not neglecting the boys was nearly impossible. And forget about getting anything extra done around the house! All we did while my mom was here was watch for signs that the girls needed to go; say "Tell me if you need to go pichí in the potty!" about a million times; and run the girls to the potties for every accident, success, and false alarm (of which there were many).

The first couple of days were a nightmare, with big accidents left and right. (We did decide to go against the 3-day method's advice and use pull-ups during naps and nighttime; I can't even imagine how much worse it would have been if the girls had been sleeping in their panties!) After the third day, though, we were rewarded: Lucy got it!! (The pee part, anyway—we're still working on putting #2 in the potty.) She has now been accident-free for a week, and we are very proud of her (but probably not as proud as she is of herself!). 

Potty sisters: Lucy and Dahlia
(you can see some of the tattoos they got for going pichí in the potty)

Dahlia, however, has been a different story. She knows when she has to go, but she refuses to relieve herself until she absolutely can't hold it any longer. Unfortunately, this usually ends up being when she is not sitting on the potty. During the last couple of days, she had even starting throwing tantrums when we tried to sit her on the potty, so today (with the blessing of our pediatrician) we finally threw in the towel and put her back in diapers. We will try again in about a month or when she lets us know that she's ready to be a big girl like Lucy, whichever comes first.

Looking back, I wish that I had tried training just Lucy first, since she is the one who showed the most awareness of her wet or dirty diaper. And I have decided that, going forward, I will definitely train one kid at a time (the jury is still out on whether we will use the 3-day method again). I don't know how other families of multiples manage to train everyone at once with the 3-day method—call me a wimp, but trying to train both girls together (even with the help of Ted and my mom) was truly one of the worst weeks of my life!

Oh, and did I mention that all this was going on during the crib-escaping drama, the Christmas holiday, and the birthday party? Yeah, we could really use a vacation right about now!

Stripping down

Dahlia has been hard at work on a big project: Learning how to undress herself. As you may recall, it all started with the girls figuring out how to pull down their pants and remove their diapers. After that rather alarming development, I began to dress the kids only in one-piece outfits, hoping that the snaps would provide protection against further diaper-removal episodes.

This tactic has been a success in that it has banished bare tushies from the playroom (for the time being, anyway—read on). It has not, however, kept Dahlia from continuing to experiment with clothing removal. Her next challenge was to learn how to unzip and shed her sleepsack. Mission accomplished—this is how I found her after a nap a few weeks ago:

To prevent her from taking off her sleepsack again (and possibly causing further naptime mischief, such as learning how to unsnap her onesie to remove her diaper, or figuring out how to climb out of her crib by gripping the rails with her toes), we started putting the sleepsack on her backwards. Problem solved.

But for how long? Even with the zipper in the back, she can still unzip it up to her knees. And her zipper-mania is no longer limited to just her sleepsack. Last week I found her in the playroom like this, almost completely out of her zip-up jammies: 

Of course, none of this unzipping business matters, as long as she doesn't know how to unsnap her onesie, right? After all, it's the taking off of the diaper that I am really worried about. Well, here's the newsflash: As of a couple of days ago, Dahlia has figured out how to work snaps, too. And she is very happy about it:

What am I going to do with this girl? She will not be contained, but I can't afford for her to have access to her diaper (I shudder even thinking about the possibilities that this could entail!). And I know that if Dahlia is becoming adept at taking off her clothes, the other three are probably not far behind. Could duct-taped diapers really be in my future?

Bumming around

A few months ago, Jude figured out how to remove his pants. Since then, we find him in a state of semi-undress just about every day:

Surprisingly, during all this time, the other kids had failed to pick up this pesky habit—until yesterday. Watching Jude slip out of his pants for the millionth time, the girls finally decided to follow suit. And then Dahlia took the pants-free look a step further: In a daring move, she shed her diaper as well:


Since it was bedtime, we slapped the (thankfully dry) diaper back onto her bare bum, immediately zipped her into her sleepsack, and hoped the incident had been a fluke.

It wasn't. Today Lucy decided to try the same trick, this time with a very wet diaper:


I really don't want to see what happens when one (or more) of the kids takes off a dirty diaper, but neither am I quite ready to resort to duct-taping them into their diapers. Looks like the Fab Four will be wearing one-piece outfits from now on—and I'll just have to hope that they don't learn how to unsnap them anytime soon!

It's normal to us

A week ago, my cousin Glenda moved in to help take care of the babies over the summer. She's been helping us every Friday since January, so she knows a lot of the ins and outs of how we run things around here. She had yet to see me prepare formula, though, so her expression was priceless when she walked into the kitchen on her first night here and saw me mixing this:

A gallon a day keeps the doctor away!

Being first-time parents, Ted and I sometimes forget that we're "different." We just don't know any better until someone points out the freakish amount of [insert baby item here] that we own/use. More examples:

Bibs for 1 day (if it's not a messy one)

A basketful of burp cloths (enough for 2 days)

These diapers will be landfill in about 5 days

A day's worth of bottles, bottles, bottles!

You mean other people don't keep four dozen pacifiers on the coffee table?

It's like magic!

Last week, my coworker Zoe sent me a sweet message saying that she'd ordered Baby Massage For Dummies for me and the quads. We got it on Friday afternoon, and it couldn't have arrived at a better time! If your baby is constipated, you have got to get this book. Since Isaac still wasn't "moving" on Saturday morning, I looked up "constipation" in the index and proceeded to give him a little belly massage. Poor Isaac instantly relaxed, cooing and smiling while I rubbed his tummy for about 15 minutes. When I finished, he promptly fell asleep, and within an hour, he pooped! I never knew I could get so excited by a dirty diaper. I have a feeling that Isaac felt pretty good about it, too!