Six mornings in a row the Girl has had a completely dry diaper. We attribute this to four nights of waking up around midnight, hearing L crying out for the potty.

The new ritual is well established now. I stumble to the guest bathroom for the potty chair as quickly as I can while half asleep: I don’t want L to wake up any more than she has to. The real adventure begins in her room, for she’s often still partially or completely asleep. And she can fall back asleep at several points in the process. She has dozed off while

• I take her out of the crib;
• I lean her against me to take off her diaper;
• she sits on the potty;
• I put her diaper back on; and,
• I put her back in the crib.

One night last week, she drifted off during four out of those five times.

“It’s time to start planning the final step of potty training,” I say to K over breakfast. There are the obvious things: a switch to training pants; a re-make of the crib; several nights of helping L get out of the bed and trundle off to the potty. There is an enormous potential pitfall, too, and a very literal one at that: our guest bathroom is just at the top of a short flight of stairs down to the kitchen.

Now that all the gates and barriers in the house are long gone, it’s time to start thinking about putting up new ones, which is sort of what parenting is all about: creating boundaries that (ideally) keep little hands safe but not restricted. Those gates will soon be much less literal, though.