After my third bum change today, Ellie informed me I shouldn’t ask Chloe, “Do you want to go and change your bum?” I should instead say, “Do you want to go and change your diaper as she has a perfectly good bum.” Mark the time, my five year old is officially smarter than me.

I did think it might be fun to bring out the old Dora potty seat and see how Chloe would respond to sitting on the toilet for the first time, recognizing this being the third child, I still have no chance at getting her to do this in a timely and/or efficient manner so I’m not pressuring either one of us to become experts at this unless the week before she starts school she’s still in a pull-up. Only then will I have no choice but to rub her nose in any accidents and generally make her life miserable. Until then, it’s breezy.

She immediately got comfortable on the cushiony seat, though confused by this unknown character plastered all over it. The Dora theme is old news now that the older girls are onto yeast infections and Canesten commercials so poor Chloe doesn’t have a lot of choice in what she watches. She’s confused by this Spanish kid with the backpack dancing around her bare bum. It’s certainly not the first kid she’ll see with a monkey on her back (both literally and figuratively) but for now, the strangeness of the experience coupled with the interesting characters is holding her interest.

I’m impressed with her immediate smiling, “Psssssssssss, pssshhhhhhh.”

She says, “peeps” and “poops” and “all done,” before quickly leaping onto the floor and sticking her head in the bowl to see if there is anything of interest to examine like the monkey, map or backpack would be canoeing across the brown log, swimming through the amber river before reaching the highest waterfall. There isn’t but these are better signs than screaming to get down or sinking through the hole a la Winnie The Pooh and becoming stuck (which may or may not have happened to me at age five during a sleepover at a friend’s).

She insists on carrying the Dora potty around like a trophy, wearing it around her neck on occasion, placing it on the ottoman, the couch, the kitchen chairs. This list is actually more of a reference guide for me for future places to wipe down with vinegar and possibly bleach.

The more I hear people’s horror stories about potty training the more I’m once again dreading this experience. I have a friend who is not proud of putting her son in a cold shower after defecating on just about everything in the house. She’s obviously changed her name and had plastic surgery to disguise her face but it’s not surprising the lengths people go to when feeling the pressures of competition from other parents and diaperless kids wandering around rubbing our noses in their seamless panty-lines (huh, a full circle moment).

If you want to pee once at 19 months and then not again for another year? Fine by me. That was your big sister’s trick and if twitter had been around then, I would have looked like quite the braggety fool.

For now, I know I’ve enlisted the help of a willing partner in Dora. She’s been around the bowl a few times.