Reading and potty-training: Connection?

When Ella was 2, she was having none of this potty-training stuff. She wasn't rude about it, or even vehement, she was just my happy little comfort-loving kid. Her attitude was: "No, thanks. Doin' just fine. Diapers are easy and convenient, I'm stickin' with what I know." No response to my mild hints like "well, when you're a Big Girl you'll learn to use the potty." She was perfectly happy to be a little girl and have someone else take care of the diaper.

Then, one day, four days after she turned three, she decided to wear underpants. And never put the diapers on again (during the day). No fanfare or anything, just a decision she made quietly.

I'm thinking the reading has been like this for her.

Ella can read. Two weeks ago, she finished Set Five of the EPS Phonics Series, reading one 16-page book per day. So what I decided was that we would start way back at the beginning, Set Two, and let her read again through the whole series.

It turned out to be a good idea. She sat down and read four of the Set Two books the first day. She knows she gets a prize when she finishes all four sets of books. But she was motivated to read so many in a day because it's now easy for her. She can remember very clearly when she read the first series -- it took her 17 days to get through the 10 books. But now...four in a day...in 15 minutes! without any struggle or difficulty. She didn't even mind reading them to herself, rather than to me...she did that for the next two days, "getting her reading done" on her own, asking me if a particular word stymied her. (The word "use" kept getting in her way.)

But what Ella has never done was made the effort to use her reading skills in real life. It's as though she lets the words from signs, from TV, from name brands written on the side of objects, just wash right over her without her trying to identify them at all. That's just something that "big kids" do, that Madison does, and Ella has never seen the need to push it, to be one of those "Big Kids" before she's ready. She knows she'll get there eventually, she has proof that it will happen in a sister who is 20 months older.

And now I'm wondering if yesterday doesn't constitute an "underpants" moment. Because she was looking at the maze game on the back of David's "Cap'n Crunch" breakfast cereal (when it's someone's birthday in our house, they get a box of sugary kiddie cereal to eat as long as it lasts), and was trying to figure it out. "Oh!" she suddenly said, startled. "That's the word START!"

I think she's starting to see the utility in this reading business after all.