Evie Update

Did you miss me?

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Of course you didn’t, because you didn’t know I was gone.

It’s been a long week and a half or so. Evie and Sara were in MI all last week until Thursday when we met for camping. Always when Sara is going to be gone I think to myself, “I am going to have sooo much time to do whatever I want!” and then I end up being busier than I normally am trying to get all the stuff done I’m supposed to get done while they are gone. So I was actually staying up late every night trying to finish everything I needed to do and didn’t get a lot of free time.

I ain’t complain’ though, because Sara had it much worse. Evie has taken it into her head to have some real tantrums, screaming, kicking, the whole nine. I remember a particular phone call in which I could hear Evie in the background yelling gems like, “It is nice to bite mommy!” Most of these tantrums involve the potty in one way or another. She is very willful and doesn’t like being told what to do, therefore, every little thing becomes a battle of wills. I understand this is pretty typical of her age, so once we are through it, we’re hoping it will go dormant again until she is a teenager.

Many of the problems are exacerbated by being on vacation. First off, she doesn’t have her usual routine going on around her. Second off, she is getting less sleep since her sleep schedule is off and her naps are often shortened because of stuff that we’re doing. Third, she is having a really good time and doesn’t want to do the things she needs to do (like sleep). Finally, when we are busy trying to do things she has more power to disrupt our life and she knows it. And she does not use this power for good. All of this lead Sara to proclaim it the “worst week she’s ever had as a parent” and seriously think about canceling the vacation altogether.

All that unpleasantness aside, there have also been some bright spots on the potty training front. She doesn’t really have a lot of accidents and she is starting to stay dry through naps and even through the night sometimes, despite her diaper. One night she even got Sara to take her to the potty in the middle of the night so she could go.

The actual camping went really well. We were going to tent camp, but the prospect of a wet weekend caused us to upgrade to a cabin and I think it was a wise choice. We were basically unaffected by the rain. One of the highlights of the trip was going to a u-pick strawberry and cherry farm and picking our brains out. Each strawberry was better than the last and I probably ate a pound of cherries.  We may have overdone it a little bit on the strawberries; I don’t know how we can eat them all before they go bad. We’re doing what we can though and even as I write this I am eating fresh strawberries!

Evie also had a great time. When we got home she stayed in the car for about 15 minutes hysterically crying for us to get back in the car (right now!) and drive back to the camp site. She has also been asking to do some of the things we did while camping, such as “see the doggies” or “go swimming”.

So that’s about it, back home safe and sound, at least until the next vacation. I don’t have any quotes for you today, although I’m sure she said plenty of hilarious stuff over the long weekend.

Hopefully I used up all my bad luck for the month

/ Shane / 3 Comments

It seemed like one thing after another went wrong this weekend. I will hit some of the highlights.

First off, almost as soon as we left Chicago, we had troubles. I was driving and Sara wanted to go to sleep. “We just stay on this until we get to 196, right?” I asked. “Right,” she said and fell asleep. 45 minutes or so later I pulled off to get gas at an oasis on the highway and Sara woke up. “There’s not supposed to be an oasis on the correct highway,” she said. Sure enough, I was not in fact supposed to “stay on this” until 196, I was supposed to get off onto another highway.

Okay, no problem, there was another highway coming up we could take to get back on track. I thought Sara said the highway I should watch for was 30. Eventually an exit came up and it seemed like the one I should take, except it said highway 31. “Is this the exit?” I asked Sara. I don’t know what she said, because I thought she said, “No.” So I drove past it. About 5 miles after the exit, Sara said, “We still haven’t come to the exit yet?” I was like, “I don’t know, I guess not.” And she was like, “The one we saw the sign for?” “The one you told me not to take?” “No, the one that I said to take.” So sure enough, that was our exit after all and we missed it by quite a long shot. This forced us to take a detour through the lovely city of South Bend which appeared to be the construction capitol of Indiana.

To top this off, Evie woke up while I was getting gas after only 45 minutes of napping. We had hoped she would sleep the entire trip, about 3 hours. So we had to deal with keeping her happy for almost 3 hours (since our little detours made the trip take quite a bit longer). And of course, this meant her shouting, “I’m going pee pee and poo poo!” (she’s learned that this is the phrasing that gets the most immediate reaction) every 15 minutes, forcing us to pull over and go into a bathroom, only to have her decide, “Nope!” and not go. She quickly realized the power she had over us, and used this tool to get whatever she wanted, such as the sock she threw up in the back window and couldn’t quite reach, because we had to put her socks and shoes on for a bathroom break.

That has to be it, right? As Evie would say, “nope!”

When we finally got there, we went to Festival and Evie had to use a port-a-potty. Apparently, someone stuck gum in there somewhere and I got it on my pants. Later, I was crouching down and the gum got stuck between my upper thigh and my calf so that when I stood up it stretched out like a big, gummy, extraneous leg tendon. So I had to walk around the rest of the time in this big crowd with bright green gum on my pants.

The next day, we were getting ready to go to a graduation party and Tom stopped me and said, “Your tire looks really low.” This didn’t come as too much of a surprise since my two front tires have been slowly leaking and needing air every couple of months. Luckily, Tom had a mini air compressor in his trunk, which was absolutely amazing, and we filled up the tires. However, as we were filling them, we noticed that A) they were completely bald, and B) there was an ugly bulge on one of the tires that looked like it was going to explode at any second. So before we left the graduation party, we switched the tires around so that the time-bomb tire was in the back instead of the front, so that when it inevitably blew out I would have a better chance at controlling the car. Luckily it did NOT blow out, but I had to drop some serious cash on a new pair of tires.

Add this to the general aggravation of getting Evie to put all her pee pees in the potty, and you have a lovely weekend! Actually, despite all the troubles, the weekend was pretty enjoyable. I guess we can chalk that up to not getting too stressed out about the little things in life!

The Zoo

/ Shane / 3 Comments

On Saturday, we met a friend from college and went to the zoo. Going into it, Evie had some pretty high expectations: she wanted a lion to “roar at her” and to have a monkey “give her a stick”. 50% of those expectations were met.

The highlight of the trip for Evie was riding on the carousel, seeing the monkeys, and seeing a llama “pee-pee and poo-poo outside”. She was a little frightened on her first trip on the carousel, but by the 3rd rotation or so, she was loving it. “More music!” she demanded when the ride was stopping. She wanted to go right back on as soon as it stopped, but we did some other stuff and then came back. As we were nearing the carousel she was straining ahead so hard and bouncing with excitement, I was afraid she would hurt herself! As for the monkeys, I knew she was enjoying them at the time, but I didn’t realize how much until she was recounting to us what she had seen and every other thing was “More monkeys!” Like, “Monkeys, a lion, more monkeys, a carousel, more monkeys, etc.” As for Sara and I, we were just thrilled that a gorilla was sitting just a few feet away obviously enjoying a big piece of broccoli. Looks like we have a good tool to use to get her to eat her broccoli!

Now, the highlight of the zoo for me was the lion exhibit. Normally the lions just sit around doing nothing. You could easily replace them with a fake lion or at least an animatronic one and nobody would even notice. Well, not this time! As we watched, the male lion picked a fight with a female lion including rolling around on the ground and roaring.  It was AWESOME! And Evie didn’t seem to care much, even though roaring was something she specifically wanted to see. She was more interested in sitting on a bench. I guess she’s not old enough to realize that seeing lions fighting isn’t something you see everyday. The tiger was pretty rad too as he ran and jumped all around and trying to fish his toy out of the water. On a whole, way more active than I have ever seen these big cats.

As far as the potty training, it has been going great. We were pretty worried about the zoo, since we would be gone from the house for so long, but she had NO accidents. This even included us running from the monkey house and searching for a bathroom, and she held it the entire time. We were very impressed.

Since then, however, we seemed to suffer a setback. She just doesn’t want to go on the potty. She knows she has to go, she asks to go, but when she gets there and sees the potty, she changes her mind. This is repeated over and over because she knows she has to go, so she keeps asking to go. After a while of not going, she will have an accident. She really can’t help it, she just has to go so bad. I’m not sure what happened to cause this backlash of her not wanting to sit on the potty and therefore I don’t really know what to do about it. I’m hoping we can just get through until we pass this phase and then it will get better. Any suggestions?

She has the concepts down, the rest is details

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Evie has been using numbers and concepts lately that are sort of surprising. She doesn’t use them correctly, but she uses them and that’s something:

“And what did you buy at the rummage sale?”
“Uncle Nathan!”
“Oh yeah, how much did he cost?”
“Fifty dollars.”

“Did you have a good night’s sleep last night?”
“Yes, thirty hours.”

“How old are you?”
“Two months of five. And E starts with Evie.”

“What’s the opposite of up?”
“Down!”
“What’s the opposite of left?”
“Right!”
“What’s the opposite of sleeping?”
“…”
“If you’re not asleep, you’re a…”
“An Owl!”

She also said probably the most heartbreaking thing ever:

“Mommy loves me and Nala loves me.”
“And Daddy loves you.”
“No, Mommy is the only one. Daddy works.”

Just to show how things change as you get used to parenting, I forgot to mention on the blog that Evie fell down the stairs at my grandma’s last weekend! When she was little and she fell over, it was a big, big deal. Now she falls down like 10 stairs and I don’t even remember about it! She was fine, she just had some marks from where her sun glasses smashed into her face. But we knew she was okay because when Sara took off Evie’s glasses to see if she was alright, Evie was more upset about not wearing her glasses than she was about the fall. So I had forgotten all about this until Evie reminded me that it was “scary” to fall down the stairs. I asked her what else she was afraid of and she said, “Crocodiles.”

In totally other news, we got some beautiful lettuce from the garden, and it was delicious!

Potty Training

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Let me just start by saying WHAT a weekend. I had no idea that potty training was so exhausting!

A lot of parenting books talk about potty training when your child is “ready”. These days a lot of kids don’t potty train until they are 3 or even 4. Obviously every kid is different, but it was very clear that Evie was ready, even though she’s not even 2. We bought a potty ages ago and encouraged her to sit on it whenever she wanted to. She went a few times by coincidence right away, but it had been a long time since she has done anything. Mostly she just sits and has us read books to her. However, she recently went on the potty intentionally, so that was one indicator. She also began telling us when she went or was going poo poo in her diaper so we could change her right away, which was another pretty clear sign. So, we decided not to make any plans for the long weekend and just see how it went.

We approached it the same way we’ve approached every aspect of parenting; like hardcore researchers. Sara read everything she could find on the subject including webpages, discussion groups, books from the library, etc. She can tell you the pros and cons of any potty video, type of potty seat, books about potties as well as the various methods of potty training. After reading extensively, she gives me maybe the top 5 or 6 books and webpages and then I read those. This system works well for us because I think there are all kinds of viewpoints on this stuff, some of them conflicting, and I think you need to have all the information available so that you can pick and choose what makes sense for you and your family. If you just pick one method and stick with it, you never know A) if there is a better system out there and B) if it is going poorly, you have nothing else to try, no plan B.

So, Sara was home with her on Thursday, but the plan was that I would start it on Friday so that we would have one of us (me) that was with her continuously the entire time, Friday through Monday, for consistency’s sake. So we began talking it up to her, saying things like, “On Friday, we won’t be wearing diapers anymore!” and “On Friday you can wear your new Elmo underwear!” etc. However, all the talk must have sunk in because on Thursday evening she demanded to go on the potty. I guess we were right about her being ready, because she had 4 pee pees and 1 poo poo vs. only 1 accident! Most of our success was due to Evie’s instant love of M&Ms which were reward enough to make her do *anything* including pee pee on command. When we went to bed on Thursday we were really riding high! We never expected so much success and we just couldn’t believe how easy everything had gone. 

Never count your chickens before they’re hatched.

On Friday, we began in earnest the plan we had worked out. Evie would wear her “big girl” Elmo underwear all day except for her nap. In addition to lots of praise and excitement, Evie could pick  prize from the prize bucket every time she went on the potty. Concurrently, we would set a timer for 15 minutes. If she was dry when the timer went off, she could have an M&M. If not, no biggie, but she would have to wait another 15 minutes for an M&M. I thought this last piece was especially brilliant because, yes you want her to go in the potty, but you also want to teach her about keeping herself dry and holding it in.

The plan looked great on paper, but it quickly went south. She wouldn’t sit on the potty for anything. You read these different methods for potty training and people say, “Oh I sit her on the potty every 20 minutes until he goes.” Sounds good, but this is not an infant, if she doesn’t want to sit somewhere she ain’t sitting. It’s like trying to hold a weasel in a sweater. And because she wouldn’t sit, the whole reward system we worked out was nullified. I wasn’t going to force her down on the potty with her screaming bloody murder because I didn’t want to give her toilet issues or something. (Side note, do you think there was ever a point in history when it was common for people to yell, “Bloody murder! Bloody murder!” The phrase has to come from somewhere.) The 15 minute timer went okay except that she wanted those M&Ms so bad that she would demand them before the timer was up. When I didn’t give them to her, she would have an absolute tantrum. There was also an incident where the timer went off and when I got the bowl down she snatched two M&Ms and stuffed them in her mouth instead of just one. I made her give one back and that was the fit to end all fits. So, by the time Sara got home we had many screaming fits and about 6 consecutive accidents on the floor, vs. zero pee pees in the potty. I was not only worn out from fighting with her all day (and the fact that she gets up at 5:30 every morning) but also, it takes a surprising amount of energy to shadow her all day long and watch for signs that she has to go. Evie was worn out too. The only part that could be considered a success about the whole day is that none of her accidents were on the carpet!

Now the interesting thing is that, once Sara came home Evie had a couple of successful potty runs. This was quite perplexing, not to mention deeply depressing in terms of my parenting skills! We’ve rehashed the disastrous Friday a couple of times and we have a number of theories. First off, there are a lot of things she will do for Sara that she just won’t do for me. She is a definite mama’s girl. Second off, it could be that Friday was just an adjustment period and it had to happen like that no matter who was home with her; it just happened to be me. Third, many of the things we tried that day we ended up ditching going forward, such as the timer and M&Ms. It just seemed to cause trouble and not really gain us much. So it could be that the techniques we tried on Friday didn’t work well for her. In other words, it was a learning day for us as much as for her. Or Fourth, maybe I just wasn’t very good at it. Who knows.

Not that it mattered very much, because on Saturday we turned it all around. I’d say she went in the potty about 30 times vs. about 3 accidents (really only 1 that went on the floor). Maybe it was because Sara was there, maybe it wasn’t, but I was just so happy that it didn’t turn out like Friday that I didn’t care! It was a huge rousing success, even if she was going the teeny tiniest amounts about every 45 minutes.

Like I said, we dropped the timer and M&Ms and we focused more on, “What is your body telling you?” We still had to follow her around and watch her like a hawk and throw in a couple of, “are you still dry?”‘s now and again. Also, we sort of let her take the lead on what kind of reward she wanted the next time she went. Sometimes it was an M&M, sometimes it was a sticker, sometimes it was to water the plants. Whatever works! It seemed more motivating to her when she got to pick.

Sunday went even better. We still had a lot of success, but she was going every couple of hours instead of every 45 minutes. We even made a couple of ventures out of the house, to the garden and the close park, and she was okay. Sara wanted to try her nap without a diaper, but that didn’t go so well, so we’ll stick with the diaper for her nap for a while. I think she went something like 26 hours in between accidents.

Today we ventured even further out of the house. She had an accident at the garden, but she went 3 times on the regular potty at the museum! We were pretty worried about that, but it actually worked out okay. She was really excited about it and is looking forward to more potties to try.

::Whew:: This is a long post, but believe me, the actual experience seemed longer still. I have to say though, it went relatively smoothly and it could have been a lot, lot worse. I’m knocking on wood, but I think at this point we have this one in the bag!