parenting

The Week of Pee

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Evie has been potty trained for well over a year now, but still wearing a diaper at night. She quit wearing diapers for her nap a long time ago, but every morning her overnight diaper was soaked. Every once in a while she would have a dry diaper or two. For the longest time we told her that, if she had dry diapers for 7 nights in a row, she could switch to panties overnight. She was excited at the prospect, but it was never quite enough motivation to go for it. She also got to pick a prize from the prize bucket for dry diapers. Every now and again we would give a little push to try and get rid of the diapers (for example, having her go potty a 2nd time after her bath), but we weren’t really that concerned with it. We thought she could do it, but if she didn’t want to, we were fine with that.

Then, something happened that clued us in.

When she started back at daycare, she got a diaper at nap time. She hasn’t had a diaper for her nap in probably 6 months, and she never has an accident. However, when they put a diaper on her, she wet it. Ah ha! Having the diaper on made her feel like she didn’t really need to worry about it, almost like giving her permission.

So we decided to just go for it. No diaper at night, and if she wet the bed, she wet the bed. We’d try it for a week, if it worked it worked, if it didn’t, it didn’t. We even bought extra sheets in preparation.

It only took 2 nights.

After the second night of wet sheets she was done going overnight. She’s had one accident overnight since then, but that’s it. There’s nothing like quitting cold turkey! I have to say, it was WELL worth those two nights of extra laundry!

1st day of school

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Yesterday, Evie had her first day of preschool.

Everything was sort of disastrous. First off, it so happened that Sara and I both had dentist appointments scheduled for that day. We spoke to the dentist and I rescheduled my appointment and they promised to hurry Sara’s. However, because Sara had this appointment, she ended up having to leave this morning before everything was ready, meaning I had a lot of running around to do, and she didn’t get to take pictures like she wanted.

Finally, we got out the door and met Sara at the school on time. However, something was wrong, nobody else seemed to be there. It was a ghost town. I went inside to check, and it turns out that the first day (which is only an hour to sort of get her used to it) started at 10 instead of the regular 9. So we were an hour early! So much for all our hurrying. I could have gone to my dentist appointment.

So it was sort of anti-climactic because I had to leave for work, and Sara had to go kill some time. Evie was disappointed too, because she was excited to go to school and didn’t want to be told it wasn’t time yet. It was like we were building up for this big moment and then…nothing. Oh well.

It sounds like Evie took everything pretty well. She insisted that she wasn’t going to play with anything because she, “didn’t want to help pick anything up”. But when she saw the duplos, she just couldn’t help herself. So she ended up having a pretty good time.

This sending your kids to school thing is sort of a head trip. Obviously there are all the feelings about how your kid is growing up so fast, etc. But there’s more to it than that. When you’re old enough for preschool, your life starts happening. I met the best man from my wedding in preschool. I have memories of preschool.

It reminds me of a Louis CK bit I heard one time about how now that his daughter is in preschool, there are no do overs anymore because now she will remember things, the way he remembers things about preschool (EDIT: you can hear the bit here, from minute 3:00 to 3:32). As he says, they press record at age 5, nothing you do before that matters. You could punch her in the face before that and it doesn’t matter because they’re going to wipe the hard drive.

Not that I’m considering punching her in the face. I just mean that any mistakes I make now she could remember for the rest of her life. That’s heavy stuff! No more do-overs!

Milk

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When Evie was younger, the doctor wasn’t happy about her weight. This is well documented on this blog. The doctor insisted that she needed to be drinking more milk.

We tried everything we could think of to get her to drink milk, and she just wasn’t interested. However, we didn’t want to push it and force her to drink it, which would result in her hating it. No big deal, we thought. She likes drinking water and we didn’t want to discourage that. We just made sure she got calcium in other ways, such as vitamins morning and night and encouraging her 3 yogurt a day habit.

“Not good enough!” shouted the doctor, “She has to drink MILK! Milk, milk, MILK!” “You know, people haven’t really been drinking milk all that long in the grand scheme of things,” replied Sara, “What did they do before there was milk to drink?” The doctor replied sweetly, “They were all malnourished and died back then.”

Quite frankly, we didn’t buy it. And now our strategy has paid off. Evie chugs milk like it is going out of style. It’s gotten to the point that we get tired of filling her glass, and tell her she can’t have any more. That’s right, we’re actually restricting her from drinking milk! Whoever thought we’d get to the point that she would actually cry because she couldn’t have milk?

It can be hard as a parent to do what you feel is the right thing to do, especially in the face of opposition from your doctor. However, I feel (in this one case at least) completely vindicated by this turn of events. A short-term weight gain does not out weigh a long-term childhood love of milk.

Take that modern medicine!

(By the way, she still calls it Outback Milk)

First Day Flying Solo

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I haven’t spent much time alone watching the kids. Or really any time whatsoever. So as last Friday approached, I began to get a little nervous.

I wasn’t completely nervous. I remember being a lot more nervous about the first day I spent alone with Evie, back when she was a baby. I was so afraid I would forget to feed her or change her diaper that I kept meticulous notes, with times down to the minute, that I could refer to. But that ultimately worked out okay, and became second nature before too long, so I was a little more confident with that experience under my belt. I should also mention that Sara manages the two of them all the time, every day, so obviously I knew it was theoretically possible to deal with the two of them with only one parent.

So this time around I wasn’t worried about that sort of thing, but I was still worried about being able to take care of Ollie with the distraction of Evie. The main thing I was worried about though was not being able to calm Ollie down if he got upset.

With Evie I was pretty good at soothing her. I had all the skills down, and I knew what to do in certain circumstances. I knew what she would respond to. I realized that I didn’t have the same set of skills with Oliver. The things that worked for Evie don’t necessarily work for him.

The problem is that we tend to pair off; it is usually easier for Sara to take Oliver and for me to take Evie. As we started to do this more and more it sort of reinforced itself, because all the extra practice meant that Sara got better at dealing with Oliver, and I got better at dealing with Evie. Which meant that it became even more obvious for Sara to take Oliver and me to take Evie, etc.

Sometimes in the evening I would take care of Oliver while Sara made supper, and those times often did NOT go well. Sometimes he would sob the entire time until she was ready to take him back.

So basically, I was a little nervous about not having good Oliver-skillz, but I was also confident that I would develop them in time. It’s just that the first few weeks could be sort of disastrous until this happened.

So Thursday morning Sara was out for about 2 hours, so I had a bit of a trial run. It went more or less okay, but there was a little bit of a rough patch for about 1/2 an hour. Oliver was laying in the gym and smiling. Whenever he would turn his head and look at me, he would get this terrible, sad, pouty look on his face and start quietly sobbing to himself. Then he would turn his head away and look at something else and be all smiles again for a while. This wasn’t sobbing cries, he just looked very, very sad. It was like looking at me reminded him that his momma wasn’t home, and he missed her. This did eventually devolve into sobs that I had a lot of trouble getting rid of, which was more or less what I had experienced in the evenings.

So this trial run didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence going into the first full day. However, I am happy to report, the day actually went great!

We had a play date in the morning (with someone I had never met no less!) but that went really good and helped break up the day some. Sara is of the opinion that the kids are easier to manage out of the house than in, and I am inclined to agree. Oliver was all smiles all day. He didn’t really sleep hardly at all, but despite that, he was still in a good mood when Sara got home.

So all of my worries were for nothing! I’m sure we will still have some bad days, but the more good days we have, the easier it will be to get through the bad days.

Hamburger Sausage

/ Shane / Leave a comment

As is often the case when manipulating raising children, it all comes down to how you phrase things.

As any parent of a toddler knows, getting them to eat things is tricky at best. Especially when it is something new. I don’t know how many times we’ve had something that I *know* she’d like, if only she’d try it. But getting her to even try it is a huge chore.

Well, one of the obvious tricks is to change the name of something to sound more toddler friendly. For example, Evie would not try hamburger. What kid doesn’t like hamburgers? On top of that, she loves ketchup and anything with ketchup on it. So we knew she would like it, but she would never try it. Never, that is, until Sara got the brilliant idea to form the hamburger into “sausage links” instead of patties (like when you make a snake with play doh). Evie loves breakfast sausage, so when we served her “hamburger sausage” one night, and told her she could dip it in ketchup, she was hooked. Now she LOVES hamburger sausage and chows down like crazy on it.

The same thing worked for falafel. Of course, falafel is not even meat, but it does kind of look like sausage. Call it falafel sausage and you’re in business.

I could go on and on with examples. It’s so funny how framing a thing properly changes her attitude entirely.