Its potty time for Sarah and Pickles!

So at my parents Sarah started to want to pee on the potty, which she has been strongly against for some time now. So i was over the moon to see she was interested in it again. So when we got home she peed on the potty a couple of times but never when we were out and often on the floor..you know how it goes. Then we were at Kelly's house and i thought I'd give it a go, so i took of her nappy and let her bare little bum run around. Nick was sleeping, which is only relevant later, so she sat on the potty there...for ages, no pee pee. then mum its coming pee pee is coming! quick. She rushes sits down and pees, then she claps and is extremely excited to the point that she wakes up Nick. Bless her, she was so pleased with herself ( i too added to the excitement!) then later she did it again! yeah way to go. this time I'd figured out that if you turn on the potty (i didn't know you could) then it plays music when she pees in it! how cool was that, for a little girl that loves music. She was over the moon.
So at home we made a star chart,and then she stopped peeing on the potty! yep it had the reverse effect. she refused to use the potty and thus i didn't push the issue. Then i tried again at a friends house and she did it twice. I gave her jelly (little mega sweet things that come in tiny containers that every kid loves). She was well chuffed that she got the jelly and went home and peed again, and asked for a jelly.
So the jelly worked the stars didn't.
this kid likes rules so i placed some, i told her when she was at home she wasn't to wear a nappy anymore (only at night). So this week we'd had a few fights where she wanted me to put on the nappy...so she could pee/poop. but I'd say no then when we'd go out I'd put on one and yep she's poop in it. so i told her if she peed on the potty she could have a jelly if not then no jelly's. If she pooped then she could have two jelly's (oh the other thing she learnt to do well in the UK was to count, so cute).
today was the first day i had a break though with the potty fiasco. We didn't go out all morning and see peed 3 times and pooped once, her first ever poop on the potty!! i was so pleased. however i am started to regret the jelly rule as this morning she has already eaten 5 jelly's...not so good!
So we left the house to go to the nannies with no nappy on, yep i risked it and she made it just fine. i am quite sure she will kill me when she's older and knows that i shared this information with the world, but I'd happy and i want to tell people.
the other thing that happened earlier this morning is that my cat Pickles, pooped for the first time on the toilet too. the real toilet that is. She's been peeing on the toilet for about 3 years now but normally she has a bowl with a little bit of sand in it and holes so the pee goes threw and the poop stays and she can cover it ect...
Well Thomas looked after her when i was in England and when he returned her he forgot her bowl. She'd been peeing just fine on the loo, but would poop in the "garden". today the weather is horrible and wet and she wasn't going outside so she just pooped in the loo.
thus I've had a very busy poopy day! :)
i will post a video of pickles peeing that tom put on line...i'm happy as after 3 years of trying to potty train Pickles, i now have no more cat poop to clean up...i hope!

flight home.

So we are back in Taiwan, Sarah was sick for the flight back but i got her some sinus medication to clear up the mass amount of snot she was producing just in time for the flight. The first 11 hrs went really well and i thought to myself wow i did it it was so much better than the trip there. Then we had a short flight from bangkok to HK, which i didn't relise was on the agenda, then HK to TW...the flight to HK wasn't too bad but she feel asleep and i had to wake her up..thus not so much fun waiting for the next flight and then dealing with the next flight...
However i have to say all in all that she did really well with the whole flighting thing. Seroiouly she was great, she never had a time that she cried inconsolably, never did she have a time where she threw herself about in a big old hissy fit. She cried a bit, yes but so would i, she hates to chew gum, sweets ect so the pressure up and down wasn't so great, particulaly on the shorter flights. I hurt me and i was chewing like crazy.
All in all i think kids will do much better than you think they will. i will say this that wrapping small (kind of crappy) little gifts REALLY helps. I have to thank Heather for this idea, it really works very well and she loved it. she would sit with one in her hand for ages waiting till we got on the plane, then open it taking another 3 mins then would play with it for well lets face it no more than 20 mins, it really helped to settle her down and pass the time. The other thing was that we took my little laptop that Tom had copied her dvds onto it so she could watch them. this was a life saver too, and made the 11 hr trip much better than it would have been, i even got to watch a movie as she was so into Dora. So thank you for the tips.
The plane that we had on the way back was just as crappy as the way there, i didn't think they even ran those type of planes still, it had just the one big screen at the front which is so well last year! haha. next time i think i will try and see if you can make sure you get the back of the head entertaiment system, its so much better.
The jet lag was worst coming back then going, i always fine that to be the case. It didn't help that i had to work the next day...i didn't relise that i would be but i had to. I told them that i was happy to go to the halloween party / not really a party. So they assumed that i would have normal teaching duty before...great. poor sarah had to go to the nannies less than 24 hrs after getting of a 15 hr flight. not good. and i had to teach...maybe not my finest hrs of teaching! next time i will make sure i come back late friday so i get a weekend before i have to teach again!