After a few months in a holding pattern, Cora’s begun showing a renewed interest in potty training. And I can’t decide if it’s simply maturity – or devious cunning.

Cora’s been doing most of her pooping in the potty for a while now. She’s discovered that a poopy diaper is rather uncomfortable, and nine times out of ten she’ll tell me when she needs to poop so as to avoid having that happen. Sometimes she’ll be in the middle of a game or a social situation and not want to stop and simply use her diaper, but by and large she’s got the pooping down.

Cora went to a birthday party recently and consumed only the frosting from one of those hyper-decorated cakes, covered with sugared roses in every color of the rainbow. She was a maniac, crabby and irritable to the nth degree the rest of the day, and when she had a poop the next day that looked like seaweed or spinach I thought, “Yuck! That just confirms that I want to make my daughter’s own birthday cakes, with less artificial frostings.”

A couple months ago, a friend of mine mentioned casually that every time her daughter has a favorite sherbet, she’s hyper and crazy the rest of the day – like, ten times crazier than sugar-crazy. Her best guess was that her daughter was allergic to the dye in the orange sherbet.

Turns out, she’s not so wrong.

It would seem that both of my girls are addicted to sugar. Maddie is doing the whole “silky training” thing in an effort to keep a steady stream of Starburst candies coming her way, and as for Cora, well, she’s found another way.

Cora has learned how to poop on command.

Remember how I said yesterday that Cora’s sort of fallen into potty training, and that every time she goes pee on the potty she gets an M&M?

Yeah, Cora peed in the potty five times yesterday. Before lunch.

And tried unsuccessfully to pee an additional ten times. Before lunch.