Play-dates and potties

Yesterday (the real yesterday), Julia had a friend from preschool over for a few hours to play. Natalie's mom dropped her off at our house, and the girls had lunch together and then spent the next couple of hours playing with Julia's kitchen set, dancing to music, doing play-doh, driving Matchbox cars around, and so forth. All and all it was a successful play-date, although I think it may have been about a half hour too long. Towards the end, Julia especially seemed to tire out, and started moving into cranky-mode. While both girls had their bouts of storming off pouting over something, Julia actually got visibly angry at one point. Most kids would lash out with something like, "I don't like you" or "You're not my best friend" when feeling upset, but Julia decided to go with something far less commonplace and far more disturbing. Instead, she pointed her finger vehemently at Natalie and spat out, "I want to eat you!" When Natalie was understandably shaken by this, I assured her that Julia was just kidding, to which Julia responded hotly, "No I'm not kidding. I want to eat Natalie." Where would she get such a notion? Well, last night I overheard Julia squealing and giggling in half-amusement, half-terror as Ethan pretended he was coming to gobble her up, so I think that answers that... I told him it might be time to curb the "eating Julia" games for awhile...

So, for those of you who don't like reading about poop (c'mon, honestly, who doesn't?), you may want to stop right here. Many of you know that for a long time, Julia could only poop on the potty if she took all her clothes off and shut the door for privacy. We had a rule that when she turned 3, she had to start wearing at least her shirt to go on the potty. With a little resistance at first, she finally complied, and now she proudly "stays" her shirt on while she's on the potty. However, she wouldn't be Julia without getting completely obsessed and hung up on the idea of having her shirt on to poop. The past few mornings, in the middle of breakfast, Julia has suddenly, desperately announced that she wanted to go pick out an outfit and change out of her pj's. Once returning from her room with her outfit, she announces that she needs to poop. On one such morning, I suggested she just try and poop with her pajama top on, since that's a shirt of sorts, and she replied, slightly panicked, "No, we don't wear pajamas to go poop!" Ethan and I have been thinking we need to start insisting she stop with all the ridiculous rituals surrounding poop on the potty (in addition to the shirt issue, she has to have the potty training seat on the potty - which she DOESN'T use to pee - and have anything that was in the toilet, including whiskers from Daddy's razor, a dead spider, or someone else's pee flushed down, plus have the stool by her feet and the door closed) and just go without any preamble. In order to prove our point, Julia actually had an accident this morning because she took so long trying to get her outfit picked out and get everything all set. It took two parents to try and deal with the aftermath - one parent to gather up all the soiled clothes to run to the laundry, and the other to try and clean up Julia and the toilet seat (upon which she sat while still covered in poop.) To add insult to injury, while we were all in the bathroom dealing with this, Madeleine decided it was time to master a new skill and got herself out of her car seat (into which I had plopped her to go deal with the Julia issue) and was hanging out on her tummy on the floor when we came out of the bathroom.