I am potty training two kids at the same time!

October 25, 2008 at 3:45 pm (kids)
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My almost 4 year old, and my 1 1/2 year old!  How unfair could this be?  (Except when I suddenly need no diapers, which, I actually feel is quite a ways off yet.)

My son is doing pretty well.  He’s been mostly dry now and wearing underwear for the past 3 days.  People have told me over and over he will not do it until he is ready.  His problem, is that he is LAZY.  He has been “ready” for a long time.  He just didn’t have a REASON to do it.  Well, we found his reason this week.  It’s his friends’ little brother, who is a little younger than Sophie, wearing UNDERWEAR and pooping in the potty!!  Immediately he started doing the same.  It was pretty much the very next day.  He needed a fire lit under his butt and that was it.

Just now, my daughter, who is 20 months, pooped in her little pink potty!  She has been obsessed with using the potty for a few weeks and I try to put her on it as much as she wants (unless we are running late).  She doesn’t ever have dry diapers though, so we are a ways off from underwear or even pull ups.  But, it’s a start, and she’s much further along than my son was at this age.  She loves our potty books and loves to flush.  It would be cool if she started pooping in it regularly, if all I had was wet diapers to contend with, I’d be thrilled.  But, it might be a totally isolated incident and might not happen again for months, like things went with my son.  She seems to be a little more motivated, by what, I’m not sure, but she is.

The fun never ends around here.

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Autumn in the UP

October 20, 2008 at 2:17 pm (family)
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We just returned from a week-long trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I am from the Houghton area, the home of Michigan Tech, so when we go to the UP, that’s where we go. Usually by this time of year, the fall colors are past peak, but we were really lucky this year! The first couple of days we were home, the colors were actually AT peak. Then it was very windy, and suddenly, they were past peak. I have not been back during the color season so it was a real treat! We even had an unusual 80 degree day. Then, of course, two days later it was only 47 and we needed to dig out the sweaters and run the furnace!

One of the highlights of our trip was touring the Quincy Mine Steam Hoist. The No. 2 shaft is a very important and well-recognized landmark in the area, as it’s on top of a steep hill and can be seen easily. There is a tram that goes down a very steep hill and we all took a ride on that. You can tour the mine as well (it was the old Tech mine, for those of you who are Old Skool). Will and I returned for the mine tour as I didn’t think Sophie would have handled it well. It was probably a little bit much for Will, he kept asking me when we were going to go in the mine, when we were already in it!! I think he expected to see trains (of course) and I had to explain to him that it’s been many, many years since there were actually trains or cars in the mine. It was a really interesting tour and I tried to imagine how much activity there used to be when all the mines were operational. It must have been a very busy, and noisy, place.

One of the other highlights of the trip was spending some time with Nancy at IT Chick, Running Dork. We have been friends since grade school and we lost touch about 15 years ago. I just recently found her on Facebook and we’ve had fun catching up ever since! We had lunch a couple of times, had dinner out once, went to the Keweenaw Brewing Company for some beer, went to the Mine Shaft to play games with the kids, went to the LSPR Rally meet and greet, and took the kids to the beach at Lake Superior. She’d asked about a pair of hand knit mittens so I offered to make them if she bought the yarn – we did that and I got them done for her in 4 days!! (Pics on my Ravelry page – I’m having issues with WordPress images right now!)

Another really neat thing we did was go to a pancake breakfast at my old school, E.B. Holman. I hadn’t been inside the building for years, and I can’t even remember now why or when I went. Even though they added on to the building, it seemed so small! And the playground was a lot cooler than it used to be. However, the gym, the desks, so many things were the same. I started kindergarten there in 1974!!! So that was a long time ago. I even ran into an old classmate and his family when we took the kids over to the playground. It was fun catching up!

Before this becomes a book, Sophie turned 20 months old today. I’m going through the pictures of our trip and she is starting to look less like a baby. She can do so many things, she feeds herself and drinks from a real cup. She is obsessed with the potty and pees in it about once a day. She can take off most of her clothes and tries to put some of them on. She can say so many words now – bubble, ball, doll, *duck sound*, *rocket sound*, please, thank you, hello, bye bye, no, banana, milk, grandpa, grandma, mama, dada, and probably more that I can’t think of. She is still sleeping like crap, but I shouldn’t expect that to change any time soon, because she seems to think every day is Christmas! (She still calls cats “bvvv” and I don’t know why really!) I am constantly reminded why the time between 18 months and 2 years is not for the faint of heart. She’s giving all of us a run for our money!

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Baby is stealing my brain cells

October 1, 2008 at 5:41 pm (family)
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My daughter is going through a super clingy clingon phase right now and it’s making me insane.  She had a horrible time going to sleep last night and then woke up, and wouldn’t go back to sleep!  So my poor husband got out of bed and mercifully gave me a few hours of sleep in our bed alone.  (My poor back didn’t know what to do with such a wonderful mattress… and I woke up not knowing where I was!)  She is napping right now so we’ll see how that goes.  It’s really late which means she’ll be up til kingdom come tonight.  Might as well have a good cup of black tea, get out the knitting and prepare for a long evening.

Speaking of knitting, I am taking apart a sweater.  The yarn is so pretty, it’s a wool/alpaca/acrylic blend and the sweater that was made from it didn’t do it justice.  It’s an old LL Bean sweater, and a little too picky for me, plus it made me look like a big marshmallow!  I don’t know what I’ll do with it, it will probably be split up into several smaller projects.  I will have a lot of yarn and I wish I liked the feel of it on my neck, but I just don’t.  In any case, it was free, so I’ll make sure I put it to good use.  I managed to finally finish one pair of socks today and started the second of my Noro socks.  I still have a pair of socks I’m going to frog and start something different because my pattern wasn’t doing the yarn justice, and, I wasn’t enjoying the process.

Our CSA is coming to an end and I’m pretty disappointed.  He did have difficult weather this summer, but so did all the other farmers in the area – and they somehow managed to grow enough to make the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings feel like a frat party!  (So many people, you can’t walk very fast!)  It was really, really difficult to go to the farmer’s market and see mountains of cantaloupe, apples, berries, peaches, pears, sweet corn, herbs, and stuff picked when it should have been instead of when it got gigantic, tough and woody.  I just can’t justify spending my money on it again.  I think the idea is fabulous, and I want to keep my grocery money in the local economy as much as I can, and I really, really wanted it to work.  But it wasn’t so good.  I wouldn’t say it was awful, I did try some new things I like and a lot of what we did get was really, really tasty.  But, I think he has a lot to learn both about farming, organic farming and dealing with the public.  I almost feel like we were experimented on, we paid while he tried to learn how to grow stuff.  Money is tight for everyone everywhere and I feel mine would be better spent at the farmer’s market.  I wanted strawberries, dammit!  No fruit til September, and he thinks he is done for the season now… so we lost both June and October… which made it cost a lot more than I’d bargained for.  I really wanted it to work, but I won’t do it next year, and I can’t say I’d recommend this farm to others at this point.

We did not get the land.  The owners took 3 days to decide they would come down a whopping $250 (yes two hundred fifty dollars) on the price, and there was a bunch of other weird stuff that I don’t care to get into on a public blog.  Email me for the whole story.  It’s probably best we walk away, however, if the land is still for sale in a couple of months, when the real estate market tanks even further, we could offer a few thousand less than what we just did, just to make a point, and see what happens.  Oh well.  We’re not the ones with the debt, and I wish them the best of luck!

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