Tuesday, November 23, 2010

A quick update

Judging by which rooms I find myself in most often, it seems that I spend most of my time monitoring what goes into and what comes out of my children. I'd forgotten what it was like to spend most of my day shuttling between the kitchen, the bathroom and the diaper changing station. I've been spoiled. I've spent most of this week shoveling food into two kids who are eating like there's no tomorrow, chaperoning one in the bathroom and changing the stinky diapers of a 6 month old who is eating solid foods.

After Fiona's dismal potty statistics over the weekend (potty 1, pants, um, a lot), we decided to ditch the effort and try again later. After all, she's only 22 months old. However, Fiona has forced us to continue. During the week of Thanksgiving. With multiple outings and overnights planned starting tomorrow. Our timing around here, and especially with her, sucks. Last year at this time, we had just begun helping her sleep more soundly through the night. She was nine months old and 10 days into the operation we took a Thanksgiving trip to Maryland. So here we go again.

I tried to to deter her by putting her in a diaper Monday morning, but within 15 minutes of being downstairs, she was trying to take it off in favor of the potty. Fiona is obsessed with the bathroom. In fact, she thinks that she owns the toilet. She screams "MINE" when anyone else goes near it. She goes in and sits on it several times an hour. She flushes the toilet a dozen times a day whether she does anything in it or not. (I'm expecting a very high water bill.) And while I'm not trying to incentivize (is that even a word?) potty going with her yet, I am trying to disincentivize the toilet flushing by making it's use a reward for actually delivering something into it. 

About an hour after breakfast on Monday morning, I had a bare bum rebellion on my hands. Danny saw Fiona running around half naked (I can't keep undies on her either) and decided to join the party. There's been a lot of that since. This evening, we had naked time before bath. And somehow a potato landed in my chocolate cake amidst the shenanigans of two naked, giggling kiddos. In an effort to be super efficient and a super cool mom who lets her kid help in the kitchen, Danny and I made the Hershey's chocolate cake recipe this afternoon in many different configurations—mini cupcakes for us, regular cupcakes for his preschool class (next week is his birthday) and the rest poured into a round pan. It's not like I really had plans for the cake—I was just going to slowly and secretly devour it in the hall closet over the next few days. I'm not sure what became of the potato.


I have, however, enjoyed the slowed pace that comes along with potty training. We haven't had anywhere to go. There was no preschool this week. No play dates planned. We've been outside a lot jumping in the leaves—nature's answer to the plastic ball pit. The kids have been jumping off the picnic table and careening down the slide head first into huge leaf piles. Heck, even I have been laying around in the leaves. And Owen, of course, has been shoving as many of them in his mouth as he possibly can.

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