Tag: potty training

These are a few of my favorite things…

I have decided that in consideration of my current mood and state of mind, this post needs to be devoted to things that I am thankful for. 

 

The other day, my husband stopped at the store before coming home from work to get some cheese that I needed for our meal. When he got home, he walked in the room and handed me a bouquet of flowers, a box of chocolates, and a loaf of French baguette.  He was pulling out all the stops, in an attempt to comfort me after the very trying day I had been reporting to him, via text, throughout the day. 

 

These tangible comforts were much appreciated. I arranged the flowers in a pretty bowl and put them on my desk and they continue to be a bright spot for me. 

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Another bright spot is that my three year old is finally potty training. Yay! It was self-directed, which always seems to work best. He took off his diaper and announced to me that he didn’t need it any more. (I have not found this diaper yet. I have no idea where he put it, it has not showed up in our yard or in the house, I’m hoping he magically just decided to throw it in the trash.)  I jumped on the opportunity and put him on the potty, he went, and we have been on the potty training wagon since. He’s actually doing pretty good. Not too many accidents. Here he is, being snuggled by a big sissy. 

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Let’s see…we got bikes for the kids and have spent several evenings across the street in the bank parking lot that is right in front of our house, watching the kids ride. A couple neighborhood kids have joined in the fun. We adults sit right in the entryway to the parking lot so that any car that wants to enter to go to the ATM machine has to wait for us to move, and during that time we can yell for all the kids to get out of the way. (We do this in the evening when the bank is closed and the traffic into the parking lot is very low, one or two cars max.) 

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I’ve been paying attention to how green Tennessee is. It’s a special, light green that is very soothing and comforting. I am constantly amazed at how much color in nature can cheer me up. I am forever thankful that God decided to settle us in Eastern Tennessee. Life is good when you can just look outside and see green grass and trees. I took this picture on a rainy afternoon. 

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Hmm.. I continue to take pleasure in sitting down at my piano and playing favorite songs. It is also fun to hear my kids pecking away, creating their own songs, trying to work out their favorite melodies. Music is a gift, and this old piano, complete with dents and scratches is the perfect addition to our family. Kind of like an overgrown dog who patiently lets the toddlers climb on his back and pull his ears. 

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So…that’s what I’m doing today. Trying to purposely look around and find things to be thankful for. It’s a helpful way to keep yourself from falling into the Pits of Despair or some place similar. If you are looking for something  to do today, I recommend walking around taking pictures of things that make you happy. It’s a good exercise. 

 

Sometimes Cleaning Involves Making a Mess

Today there has been a festive note in the air. Thanksgiving is coming next week, and then we launch full-blast into Christmas. And, my son is coming home tonight after being away at school since August. YAY!!! 

 

With all the approaching festivities, my cleaning bug finally kicked in. Our house was a big ol’ mess. I had the kids help me clean up Friday night, but the problem is we had pockets of clutter all over the place. So, while everything was picked up off the floor, the room still felt a mess. So, today we tackled the clutter. I put two kids on the job of fixing our bookshelves. In order to do that they had to take all the randomly piled books off the shelf so they could organize them all neatly. In the process they also found some movies, toys and papers that didn’t belong on the shelf. 

 

I assigned another child the hall closet. He had to pull everything that had been stuffed in there and make a giant pile on the floor. Then from that pile he could hang up all the coats, put all the gloves, scarves and hats in a box, line up the boots, and put the duffel bags of snow pants back up on the shelf.

 

I cleaned out the Random Drawer that had all our coloring papers, school papers, playdough, puzzles, school supplies, and a bunch of other random kid things. (It’s a big drawer.) In order to clean it out I had to make all kinds of piles on my dining room table in order to sort everything out. 

 

Sometime in the middle of all this cleaning, my husband came in from some errands he had been running. The house looked worse than when he had left. I quickly defended myself. We ARE cleaning. It just doesn’t look like it. We’re going to have to make some messes before it all gets clean. He understood. 

 

Today I also decided it was time to start potty training our youngest. It’s way past time, I’ve just been procrastinating. So, I bought a bag of M&Ms and asked him if he wanted some in exchange for sitting on his potty. Of course! He sat and peed for me. And so far has stayed dry and peed five times in the potty! I’m super excited. But, I know that we have some accidents coming in the very near future. It’s part of the package deal. Some of our kids have potty trained in as fast as a week, and some have taken a year. But all of them had accidents. It’s part of the transition from changing dirty diapers to having clean dry underwear. 

 

One other thing I did today was commissioned my fourteen year old to paint me a Christmas Painting to hang on my mantel for the holidays. She got out her sketch pad and started sketching out some ideas. She showed me one, rough lines outlining the little drummer boy. It was a messy sketch, but I could see what she was drawing. It looked great. I knew that eventually she would turn it into a beautiful picture. 

 

Of course, you’ve probably got the point by now…It has occurred to me this evening, that in order to clean something, or accomplish a goal, you usually have to go through a messy stage where you are making progress, but it doesn’t look like it. 

 

It gives me some hope. I am dealing with some personal shortcomings that have me really discouraged. I have been spending a lot of time recently just thinking about the problem. Trying to get to the root of why I can’t seem to ever overcome in this area. Spending some concentrated time just thinking about this has not been fun. It’s put me in a bad mood. It’s also helped dredge up some old stories from my past that I’ve not properly dealt with. It’s all been rather messy. But, here’s where the hope comes in. Right now it just looks like a mess, but it’s still forward progress. I’m closer to overcoming today than I was a week ago. Sometimes, in order to clean something up, you have to make a mess first. 

 

 

Fantasies of a Middle-Aged Housewife (G-rated)

Ever since I can remember, I have put myself to sleep at night making up stories where I’m the main hero. When I was a kid I would think about some great book I had just finished reading and I would re-imagine the story with me as one of the characters. I remember Little Men by Louisa May Alcott in particular. I was a tomboy and I loved imagining being part of the gang. I would spin stories in my mind till I fell asleep.

Today, as I waited in the car line to pick up my kids from school, I found my mind wandering, starting to make up a new story. What if, for some reason or other, I was taken away from my life to some resort-like place where I would be forced to undertake some drastic, but super-healthy, weight loss program, and also take yoga classes, and lift weights, and maybe start running again. And get plastic surgery for stretch marks, and, here’s the real amazing thing, get put under the charge of a dentist who would fix all my teeth and make them all white and straight and beautiful (because what middle-aged person doesn’t fantasize about having a fortune to pour into their teeth??) And of course there would be a beach nearby that I would walk on regularly until I had achieved complete inner peace. And then, after all that process was finished, and I now looked like one of those people out of magazines that you always secretly ooh and ahhh over, then I would go home to my loving family who somehow managed to be completely happy while I was away. And I would say Surprise! And they would be awed and amazed at this New Esther.

And then somewhere around there my fantasy fades out, because, in reality, my family doesn’t care a hoot what I look like, or how straight my teeth are, or whether I have stretch marks or not. And really, they wouldn’t be happy if I went away for any length of time. My family can hardly make it if I leave for the day.

But it’s fun to dream.

I think it’s funny what I fantasize about these days. Let’s see. I fantasize about having a housekeeper who lives with us and takes care of all the cleaning chores in the house (especially laundry and dishes!). In fact, I would take care of the grocery shopping and cooking, so I wouldn’t be considered completely lazy, just so I don’t have to clean.

How about this one? Enough money to take summer-long vacations with the family to exotic places all over the world.

Or, my toddler potty-training himself, in one day.

Here’s a good one. My husband handing me a large chunk of money and telling me he wants me to go to the beach by myself for a week, since I seem a little stressed lately. 🙂

How about hair that doesn’t turn grey and remains as thick and full as when I was 20?

My favorite one, children who never fight, always do their chores cheerfully, and love to help around the house.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work this way. Usually, I can accept that with a philosophical shrug. Then I have days like today when I’m just unusually tired and really all I want to do is climb into bed and nap and read and eat take-out. But instead, I clean the house, bathe toddlers who rolled around in the mud, cook a healthy supper, and plan to be up till late at night as I divvy up my attention between all my kids.

Reality. It’s actually more fantastic that my fantasies. Who wouldn’t enjoy a long trip to a spa? Who wouldn’t flourish under that kind of care? The real amazing thing is being able to flourish and enjoy a day of hard work under less-than-ideal working conditions. To end the day satisfied and content despite the fact that I wasn’t pampered or given special consideration. That kind of reality can only come from the daily grace Jesus gives me. I’m so thankful for that grace and I’m clinging hard to it today. May I end the day thankful. That’s a fantasy worth pursuing.

9 Down 1 to Go

So, this is all about potty-training. Not super-interesting to the general populace, but I’m a mom, it comes up, and it’s my blog. So I get to have a day where I pontificate about potty-training. 🙂 

I am feeling the need to celebrate. I believe that I have now successfully potty trained my 9th child. There is nothing more delightful than to see your potty-training child stop playing with his toys and run for the bathroom…without you saying a word.

I have potty trained 9 children. This is proof that practice does not make perfect, the more you do something, the better you get is not true, and repeating an activity over and over again does not make it more bearable. I extremely dislike potty-training. I’m horrible at it. It requires a level of calm and patience and kindness over a prolonged period of time that I find really hard to muster.

All of my kids have potty-trained later than their peers. But this is because, in my mind, potty training is all about me, not the kid. I am not willing to engage in potty-training unless I know that I am looking at a couple weeks where I’m going to be relatively unstressed, and where I know that I can make myself be sweet and patient, even while I’m cleaning up the 20th potty accident in one day. I had hoped to potty-train David when he was about 2 ½. He is now 3 ½.  It’s a good indicator of my mental state this past year that it is only in the past couple weeks that I’ve been willing to tackle the job. Even then, when he had pooped his pants for the 5th time I finally lost it and heard the words coming out of my mouth, “If you poop in these pants again I’m going to spank you!” My oldest daughter was walking by and heard me. She raised an eyebrow and said, “Don’t children respond a lot better to positive reinforcement?” Umm..Yes. So I went to the store, bought a bag of chocolate and told him he could have some every time he successfully pooped in the potty. And that was that. We haven’t had another accident. (Because my kids seem to really respond to treats!)(Probably because I’m the mom who never buys candy and who gives them watermelon for dessert.)

All of that to say, when I finish potty-training a child, I feel like celebrating. I’m not really celebrating my child’s achievement. My kids are smart and awesome, and with a different mom they probably would have been potty-trained at 2 yrs old. No, what I’m celebrating is that I somehow managed to achieve a level of maturity that enabled me to love my kids and to show them grace while they conquered this milestone. Even when they peed on my shoes or pooped on my couch. Hurray for me.