Ok, Sign me up

for one of those "bad mom awards!" Let me just say up front that I felt so bad about what happened. In the big picture it wasn't all that bad, nothing serious happened, nobody got hurt - it's actually quite trivial - except for the fact that I felt so bad!

Last night I had just started the potatoes for dinner and then I took Kayla to the bathroom and she went. She's good to go for a couple of hours and now I can go back to preparing dinner.

Kayla went in her room to play and I went back to the kitchen. Joe's not home from work yet. About 15-20 minutes later I thought I heard Kayla say "pee pee." So I stopped what I was doing for a second so I could listen again and I thought sure enough it sounds like that is what she's saying. But it can't be because she just went less than 1/2 an hour ago. Every once in awhile her "baby" and "pee pee" sound very similar; so I thought she was probably saying baby.

Or she might be playing with her Tinkle Time Kelly Doll; although now that I think about it when she's playing with that she usually says "potty" and not "pee pee."

So the fact is - I ignored her. Yep. I blew it off because I didn't think she really needed to go to the bathroom again. And of course you know where this is going.

Another 10 min later I go to her bedroom to tell her it's time to eat. She only has her shirt on so I say, "Kayla! You silly, you took your pants off!" I quickly scan her room and don't see the pants. I ask her "Kayla, where are your pants?" She immediately points down the hallway and says "there!"

I walk down the hallway and something tells me (with a sinking heart) to go to the bathroom. Yep. There are her pants/underwear on the floor and the lid on her seat is lifted up (we have the kind where you just put the seat on the toilet).

She did pee; not a lot (because, again, she had just went!) but enough to get the seat of her pants wet.

She doesn't always tell us when she has to go; we do a lot of asking, prompting, reminding and just taking her to the bathroom if it's been a couple hours. She is getting there though and will tell us sometimes (and she did yesterday morning actually.)

I felt so bad because I didn't go see if she really did need to go to the bathroom or not because I was too preoccupied with dinner. I felt so bad because we "drill" into her over and over again, "Kayla tell mommy/daddy when you need to go potty. Just tell us you have to pee pee. We pee pee in the potty not in our underwear. We don't want our underwear/pants to be all wet." Blah blah blah. Here she was trying to tell me she had to go and I did nothing.

She still needs some help in the bathroom, she can pull her pants down, get up on the stool, and sit herself on the toilet, but sometimes it seems slow-going. I don't always know how long she can hold it, or if she really really has to go, so I take the easy way out and do most of it for her. Which I know is not doing her any favors, I need to let her do it herself, and we are trying to get better at that, I'm just afraid she'll have to go before she gets the whole process done! So seeing that she did go into the bathroom, lifted up the lid, and tried to get her pants down in time just made me feel bad that I wasn't there to help her.