The Ins and Outs of Potty-Training a Tween

While Will isn't actually a tween, since Laura's been around, I've felt like Will is much, much bigger than he was before. So whenever I put a diaper on him at night, I have to remind myself that he's only three. That seems to help with my exasperation with the situation, if nothing else.

In any case, I've compiled a handy-dandy, super informative list of tips on potty training your older child, for anyone in need.

• Do go ahead and plan on buying diapers for your child's first 10 or so years of life. Make sure to include a column for thousands upon thousands of diapers in your budget. Make peace with your contribution to the planet's environmental demise.
• Don't spend time obsessing about other kids who, despite being half the age of your child, are already potty-trained. Their parents are obviously superior to you, so there's no need to waste any mental activity on this.
• Do bring your child into the bathroom with you, not necessarily to pique their curiosity about this toilet business and what happens there, but rather to make sure that he or she isn't poking his or her younger sibling with a sharp object.
• Don't get pregnant and/or have a baby during the time that your child is at prime potty-training age. It will surely mean disaster.
• Don't start to get nice and smug when your two year old is "potty trained". If this is the case, you'll find your genius child peeing in the corner smirking at you the very next morning. This will sting even more if you're pregnant and/or have a newborn because you're also completely exhausted. You will also be completely demoralized at this point and may go ahead and throw in the towel.
• Do remind yourself that the parents who say things like "Oh, now, how many six-year-olds do you know who aren't potty trained?" are almost always  the ones who seem to have kids who were potty trained at birth or very shortly thereafter, whose babies apparently signaled their needs by some sort of elaborate system that may or may not have involved choreographed rattle shaking and meaningful eye blinks.  
• Do take every available opportunity to place the blame elsewhere: your spouse, pregnancy and a baby, a difficult spell with the child, vacation, home improvement projects, growth spurts, lack of sleep . . . all of these make lovely scapegoats and divert the attention from the fact that you dropped the ball. Or the training pants. Whatever.
• Don't permanently throw in the towel. When things are at their darkest, sometimes something just seems to click. Finally. And then an underwear-clad miracle takes the place of that kid smirking in the corner at you just after he's soaked the carpet. The day will come, I promise.

I know this type of parenting wisdom is incredibly hard to come by. So I'll just go ahead and say it: you're very welcome.

One Bumbo, Many Uses

Laura spending some q.t. developing her core in the Bumbo. A strong core is essential for things like watching your hands move around in front of your face, sucking on your fingers and holding onto your rattle.

Will has other ideas, though.

I'm not saying this to be mean, but I often wonder if Laura is going to seem like some kind of mad genius to us after his antics. (One of his favorite activities for some time now has been walking around with a blanket on his head. He always acts truly shocked when he walks into something and realizes that it's painful.)

Also, please notice that Will is wearing underwear. I never thought the day would come but it appears that the best approach with him is not the touchy-feely "he'll do it when he's ready" one. He always seems to respond best to some combination of force and smoke-and-mirrors tactics. ("No, we don't have any more diapers. We only have a single diaper for bedtime." He's not yet caught on that we don't go to the store daily and buy one diaper at a time. It's only a matter of time with him, though, as he tends to see through our white lies.)

Happy Friday!

Mommy Had a Little Lamb

For your Monday dose of cute:

These were part of my effort to take more bathtime pictures of Laura. They were taken shortly after Will splashed her in the face like she was at a waterpark. Or like she was a few years older. I'm not certain he ever really grasped why he got in trouble for it.

She looks so much plumper in pictures where she's smiling. She's actually quite petite (5th percentile for weight) but the bouncy seat/smile combo isn't her most flattering. Not flattering, but still pretty cute.

She slept in her room last night for the first time ever, as she's rolling around everywhere now and the co-sleeper next to the bed was getting to be too restrictive for her. Will happily slept (swaddled, no less) in the co-sleeper until we moved to Cincinnati/WV when he was six months old. (It's always surprising to me when I realize just how different these two are. Maybe it's just me realizing how different we are as parents this time around. We're so much less stressed about every little thing.)

I just remembered the other day that Will didn't start rolling over in his bed until about six months, whereas Miss Wiggle Worm has been doing it for at least three weeks now and she won't be five months old until Saturday. The obvious implication of this is that we are simply much better parents, right?

(Tangent: Will has taken to calling me Sara in the past few days. He thinks it's hilarious. He started by calling out "Sara, come talk to me" when he wanted me to get him from his room during his "rest" time. He also was looking at Laura's hair the other day and noticed that she has a few longer hairs, to which he said, "Look, Mommy, she has some strong hairs.")

In living color

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled black and white programming to bring you this:

And now for a closeup (pardon the awful face but it's the best look at the actual bruise that I got):

First, for a bit of news: my sister had my newest nephew Friday afternoon, a handsome little devil named Thomas. We went up to Columbus for the birth and this is what Will accomplished with his time in the waiting room. Most people go to hospitals after sustaining an injury, but Will prefers to injure himself while actually at the hospital. This little black eye was courtesy of a shelf that he plunged into headlong. Waiting rooms and Will are a horrible combination for everyone involved. Things like this happen. He belongs outside, where he can run and roam and dig and be free. For everyone's sake.

PS. Believe it or not, this is his very first black eye.

It's complicated

I've been looking through old pictures this evening for no particular reason and I stumbled upon some of Will that I hadn't seen in a while. This one was taken at one of his many checkups during his first weeks of life as he struggled to gain weight. At his smallest, he weighed five and a half pounds. At the time, I was too silly to realize just how small that really was.

What I did realize, though, was that I didn't want to fail him. Ever. And so I pumped about four million times a day and supplemented nursing with bottles of pumped milk. I spent so much of my time either pumping or feeding him that I did little else during these weeks. Sometimes it got a little exhausting and monotonous. But I did it because I wanted what was best for him.

And now he's three. Impossibly big and talkative and all action, all the time. I still want what's best for him but it's not nearly as easy as making sure he gets breastmilk (or "baby milk" as he calls it now). The days of pumping, feeding, pumping, feeding, on and on and on seem so simple now. So straightforward.

Will is a dweller in extremes. He's the happiest happy and the saddest sad and the maddest mad, often within a five minute span. He's loud and demanding and persistent and frequently annoying. He loves nothing more than to get under my skin, to get a reaction from me. And yet.

He can be extremely thoughtful and kind, especially to Laura. He's always proud of his ability to share (we'll check back on that one in a little while, though, as Laura gets old enough to want some of his toys). He's funny and articulate (sorry, I know I'm his mom but it's true) and a complete and total original.

And most days he drives me absolutely crazy. I hate that somewhere along the way, I seem to have misplaced the desire to not let him down. (My primary desire these days is to just get through the day with everyone fed and relatively clean.) He's still, though, the same little baby in the picture, only bigger. I hate that I yell at him and I hate even more that he doesn't respond to my ranting. (Who would?) I hate that a three year old can make me so crazy.

When I think back to what I imagined this to be like when he was just a tiny little thing, I'm not sure what I think. On the one hand, I thought I had this parenting thing figured out. The pre-child version of me was so insufferably smug. I would never have the child who threw tantrums and didn't listen. After all, I'm a teacher, someone who's had classes on child behavior and feels pretty confident in her ability to manage a classroom full of kids. But managing 30 kids in a classroom is child's play (no pun intended)compared to raising your own challenging child.

I think the primary difficulty of raising any kid is that it's so all-encompassing. I spend 100% of my time with my kids (and this certainly doesn't make me mother of the year). I realize this probably isn't normal or healthy but it just can't be any other way for now. At school, when the bell rings at the end of the day, the difficult  (and non-difficult) kids file out the classroom and get on the bus to go home while the teacher breathes a sigh of relief. There is no bell here and this is home. There is no end.

But even just typing that makes me feel guilty. Would I really want an end to this? No. He's stubborn and difficult and exhausting but such is life. And such is parenting. There is nothing harder than this, than having two little ones whose needs are often competing and whose schedules are often conflicting. But hard though it is, the only way to the other side is through it. So we wade through our everyday frustrations and annoyances hoping that the other side is in fact there, that it's not too far away. Hoping that they know I'm doing the best I can, even if it falls short.

Can you tell they're related?

I've been looking through some of Will's baby pictures and comparing them to Laura's. And while they maybe don't look quite as similar as I had thought, there are certainly some similarities. I think the thing that they both share is that they both look like little adults. Some babies just look like babies, all chub and rolls and dimples. But mine look like shrunken old men and women who may or may not exist in a constant state of unhappiness. (And I mean that as lovingly as possible.)

Will, at around 3 weeks old. It's the scowl that kills me.

And Laura, on the day we brought her home from the hospital, at about all of 36 hours old. The area between their eyes is the same. This is also one of a handful of times in her first few weeks of life that she allowed a pacifier to be within her line of sight, much less in her mouth.

The more things change

I can't believe it myself, but I'm actually typing this with two hands! Since March 28th at 10:57 pm, the times that I've not had my youngest in my arms in some form have been pretty much limited to when I'm asleep or showering. But now (and I almost hate to type this, as I don't want to jinx things), Laura has been taking naps in her crib! On her own! For more than three minutes at a time! I really admire attachment-parenting types who are able to hold/carry/wear their babies all the time, but I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to be able to do laundry again without the background noise of Laura's wailing. (Who looks forward to doing laundry??? I'm also looking forward to such thrilling domestic tasks as organizing the kitchen cabinets and cleaning out my closet.)

In any case, I realized that if it were ever going to happen, I needed to do something about it. Stat. And yesterday I did just that. For her naps, I put her in her crib and walked away. And just like her brother before her, she fussed for a minute and fell asleep on her own. And stayed that way for two whole hours. Two whole hours that Will was also sleeping! I can't put into words how blissful the quiet was. Now I feel guilty that I really thought she needed me to constantly hold/rock/pacify her. But it appears that all she really wanted was to be left alone, a woman after my own heart. Maybe she'll be more like her parents in this respect instead of like her crazy brother, who has aspirations of becoming a Walmart greeter.

I think we don't often give our kids credit for being ready for things when they really in fact are. It seems as though many parents (myself included) baby their kids needlessly, giving them this, spoonfeeding them that, but all kids really want is to feel competent in their own little world, in their own little way. We swaddled Will until he was six months old and the first night we didn't, I dreaded what would surely be an awful night as he woke up multiple times. Instead, he stretched his fat little self out in his crib, rolled over and slept all night. We approached the taking of the pacifier the same way and Will protested for a few days and that was it. And while some may think our approach to such matters is cruel, I really think the cold-turkey method is the least painful, like ripping off a bandaid quickly, bad while it lasts but over fairly fast.

Speaking of competent kids, here is one of mine:

Doesn't she look old? And more independent?

Here she is again:

I could eat her with a spoon. I had the distinct pleasure of having her all to myself last week as Mom and Dad had Will in WV. We enjoyed our girl time, despite Laura's pitiful runny nose and serious lack of sleep. If there were ever a baby who could convince me that another is a good idea, she's the one.

On the other hand:

This one convinces me daily (hourly) that another one would send me over the edge, never to regain my sanity. Or my clean(ish) house. And this is, no exaggeration, the best picture I have taken of him in the last few weeks. He's completely rotten. It's a good thing he's cute since it's saved him more than once.

I'll try to write a little more now that I have regained the ability to type with both hands! Simple pleasures. . .