Victory!

So Naomi is potty trained! (You can obviously decide right now if you'll be reading the rest of this post.) She will be two next week, and I am so happy about not changing any more diapers.
With Penny, potty-training was a 6-month-long, tortuous ordeal. They say not to start until they're showing several signs. Um... besides throwing a violent fit every time I changed her diaper? Not really. They say not to start right before traumatic events, such as moving (does the other side of the world count?) or getting a new sibling (oops). So we were really asking for it.
But hey, it was our first child; we had NO IDEA what we were doing. And our 6-month ordeal truly demonstrated that.
For Penny, the "aha" moment when it finally clicked happened after our "aha" moment as parents: It turns out our toddler had much better bladder control when we didn't flood her system with a huge cup of juice first thing in the morning. Once we changed it to just water (which she'd only drink until she wasn't thirsty anymore), she could finally control herself, and then it was smooth sailing from there!
It was much the opposite for Naomi. She was ready. She'd been watching her sister do this "potty" thing for years. She started telling us, "my pigu hurts" (my children's code for "I gotta go!"), every time she used her diaper for over a month now. We settled into our new apartment, made sure no new siblings were on the way, and then we got down to business (bwa ha ha).
But nothing happened. Instead of floods and accidents happening all over our house, there was actually a drought. How does one potty-train a child who doesn't potty? This whole farce of taking her to the potty every 15 minutes until she does her thing-- worthless. We tried it for about 15 minutes and then I just put the potty chair in front of the TV. If she's going to be sitting somewhere for extended periods of time, it might be there.
And I started buying juice, trying to flood the system just a little.
Eventually it worked. She started calling me over to "tsa tsa pigu" (wipe her bum) more and more often, and sometimes there was something to wipe. (Confession: At the beginning of the drought, I ran and got actual paper every time and went through the motions. When this went on for more than 30 minutes, I got impatient and just patted her little cheeks with my hand and said, "There you go!" And she was none the wiser.)
Naomi has been getting pretty consistent these days, so on Tuesday I decided to take her out with me to run some errands. I hadn't even buckled her into the car seat yet before she'd already had an accident. Then when we got to the store, about 15 minutes into our shopping tour of Super Target, when I was in the back corner of the store, she decides to tell me her pigu hurts. When I huffed and puffed into the ladies room by the front door, she demonstrated it was a false alarm. And that is why she wore a diaper again.
But then on Wednesday we went to the library successfully. On Thursday, we took an all-morning trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum-- also successfully, luckily.
She doesn't like to sit on strange big public-restroom toilets, so I just hold her over it like Chinese parents do. (But unlike in China, I hear it's taboo to just hold your kids in the corner of the store or on the street. Even holding kids over bushes is frowned on. Ugh! Come on, America! How are we supposed to potty train our kids? By running all the way from the back of the store to the front, hoping there's no line at the ladies' room?) (Yes.) (I kind of liked potty training Penny in China.)
Today wasn't perfect. I was shopping for clothes, and Naomi was playing peek-a-boo in the clothing racks. One time, instead of saying "peek-a-boo," she told me, "My pigu hurts," but instead of saying it as a warning, I could tell by her wide eyes and pouty lip that it was more like a confession. I cleaned it up (because I was prepared... enough), put her in new panties, and moved along as if nothing had happened. See? I did learn a lot living in China!
So now we're done with diapers! I know there will be a few more hiccups in the next few days and weeks, but on the whole, we are claiming victory! There are a lot of exclamation points in this paragraph because I am just happy and relieved (ha ha) that the battle was short and the victory early!