It's great.
She uses it all the time...
...to, er, stand in. And put toys in. And put on our heads. And carry from room to room.
I hope you didn't really think she's using it for its intended purpose. We're a long ways from that. However, that said, she's definitely starting to understand that big kids like Mom and Dad don't wear diapers but go potty in a potty, and she's aware that we have a potty. She follows Tyler and me to the bathroom, she's learned how to flush the toilet (so it gets flushed pretty frequently around here, if you can imagine that), and she likes to pull handfuls of toilet paper off the roll.
When she has a particularly wet diaper or a poopy one, she lets us know by walking us to her changing table. I've even heard her say a word that begins with the letter d (her saying diaper?) when she's getting hers changed. She also watches me really closely when I wash, dry, and stuff her cloth diapers, and sometimes she'll bring me one of her babies or Elmo and want me to put one of her diapers on them. She thinks that is really funny.
So, she's definitely interested in pottys, she's aware that she wears diapers and of when she needs a new one, and she's starting to understand a lot of what we say. We're no experts, but we decided for all of these reasons that, if nothing else, maybe buying her a potty and using it as a conversation piece may be a good start to the whole potty-training journey. We tell her a lot that someday she'll go potty in her potty instead of her diaper, and once or twice she's sat on her potty while we've been in the bathroom.
I don't know if you've been in the potty aisle at Target, but believe me when I say that there is a potty aisle, with crazy amounts of pottys to choose from. There are simple pottys and there are fancy pottys with handles so kids can "flush." There are even pottys that cheer and clap each time they are used. We decided to buy Emma a simple potty. She has this one from Ikea.
She had the choice of green or red, and she chose red, which was not the least big surprising to us given her love of a little red dude that goes by the name of Elmo.
