I finally have a minute to sit down and post a blog and actually feel compelled to do so! It's the perfect storm, let me tell you.
So, August was a pretty busy month for us. My family came to visit, we had Garrett's birthday party and my cousin got married, all over the same weekend. Garrett did much better than I expected as a ring bearer. He also now thinks every day is his birthday and all packages that come in the mail are presents for him. It doesn't help that we celebrated a month early and then the 3 of us celebrated again on his actual birthday. We've also been to the Ringling Brothers Circus, Dallas Aquarium, saw 2 more movies in the theater, had a few play dates with friends, and started back to Mother's Day Out/Preschool (depending on the name you want to give that program. I say for 3 year olds it's MDO, but once he's 4/5 then I will call it Preschool.) This was all in the past 4 weeks, so it's been a busy, but productive, month for us.
Today we had the big 3 year doctor check-up. My child is very hot/cold. One minute he's crying and literally sliding down the back of his chair in the office when the doctor walks in and the next minute he's handing him a coloring sheet that he had been working on. He sat on the exam table and was very cooperative throughout the entire check up after his initial meltdown. At one point he even looked at me and said "I good boy, Momma!". Of course that might have had something to do with the icecream that I promised him if he behaved himself.
I'm sorry, did I just say that? I would never condone bribing a small child. It's just not done.
Thank goodness that we didn't have any shots this go around! Of course the doctor warned me that next year at the 4 year check up, it will not be pretty. He actually promoted bribery for that checkup, saying "Maybe you should have something special planned once you leave here." That does NOT sound good at all!
I'm not a political pundit, but I found myself watching the RNC the other night when Sarah Palin spoke. I had never before heard her name, so the speech was a good introduction to who she is and let me just say that I was really impressed. But first, I have to say that I want this teen pregnancy issue to be taken off the table. The choices that her 17 year old daughter makes cannot have any bearing on the type of person or parent that Palin is. I say that because, while I was a pretty good teenager, I would never have wanted anything that I did to reflect badly on my parents (namely my dad who is a pastor) because they did most everything right (of course all parents make mistakes, I know I sure do). I'm sure Bristol Palin does not want her choices to reflect badly on her mom. She's adult enough to know that having sex can sometimes result in pregnancy even if you take all the precautions that are available. She could have gone out and had an abortion without her parents ever knowing, but she didn't. That right there is what speaks volumes of the Palin's parenting.
Ok, so I said I wanted this issue taken off the table and then proceeded to talk about it, sorry. How many of you (ladies especially) squealed with delight and had a huge grin on your face when you saw the littlest Palin daughter lick her hand and slick down baby Palin's hair??! I loved it!! So cute and so real. What a little sweetheart, both of them! I would get a kick out of watching Sarah Palin reviewing that footage! Let me just say that seeing that precious little Down-syndrome baby squeezed my heart and choked me up. Could I love the Palin kids any more than I already do? I think I'm just a softy when it comes to big families. Of course those kids have no bearings on whether or not their mom (or McCain) are the ones to vote for so I hope nobody votes based on them. However they definitely made Palin more "real" to me. And Palin in turn made McCain more appealing. I had no plans to go out and vote for Obama, but now I feel actually compelled to vote for McCain/Palin rather than allow apathy to swallow me and keep me from the polls come November.
I've got to add that if Obama and Biden didn't consider McCain a real threat before, you can bet they do now. And I cannot wait for the VP debates! Yes, I realize that Palin was reading a teleprompter rather than thinking on her feet during the speech, but everyone should be in agreement with me if you watched McCain last night, teleprompter reading is not something that comes natural to most. Palin obviously knows how to atleast read with inflection and (I think) will hold her own just fine against Biden.
Yesterday morning I dropped my son off at MDO and came home to kill some time before my hair appointment. So I flicked on the TV and turned it to the only talk show that was on (no cable here!) at that time. Unfortunately for me it was "The View" and double unfortunately, Elisabeth Hasslebeck (the show's token Republican) wasn't there! You would think that those women would actually have been impressed with Palin. Women's rights and all that jazz, but apparently the Republican label trumps estrogen and those women ripped her to shreds.
From Palin's criticism of Obama's community service ("Obama graduated from Harvard and could have done many other things, but chose to 'give back' to his community instead. That's noble and not something to be made fun of." Yes, Sherri Shepard, it's noble, but not something that should go on the resume of a presidential hopeful. Hence Palin's point in bringing it up as something that does little to give Obama the experience he needs to be president.) to the pregnant teenage daughter (I won't go there again, promise!). I could only stomach about 10 minutes of it before I had to turn it off. Then I later heard on the radio someone say "Republicans are against teen pregnancy, but now that there's a candidate with a pregnant teen, they act as if there's nothing wrong with it." Umm, maybe I missed the Republican memo that came out saying we're "against" teen pregnancy. How is one against teen pregnancy exactly? Especially when the Republican party is against abortions. You can't be against abortion AND against pregnancy. Yes, Republicans preach and support abstinance and are usually against sex education in the schools, but I don't see how that equals being against pregnant teens. Yes, I know, we don't *want* girls to get pregnant at a young age. It's not good for them and a lot of the time can result in the babies being raised in a less than ideal environment. But it's very frustrating to hear all these appearingly uninformed people making statements that are certainly not based on facts.
I know that this goes both ways with Republicans making uninformed statements in reference to all-things Democrat. But all this is more reason behind my 'head-in-the-sand' mentality. The backbiting and namecalling grates on you after awhile. I just don't see how politicians can live in that world.
Ok, so in closing, please vote for me. No, that's not right. I promise I will attempt to post more frequently now that Garrett is back in MDO. I'm in the beginning stages of planning to start a blog elsewhere, so once that is a done deal, I will let you know where you can find me.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The Terrific, no, Terrifying Three's
Whoa, here I am writing a second post in less than 3 days time. It's a bloggy miracle.
My child has decided that he's going to show me that he is no longer 2, as in the terrible two's. (Technically, yes, he is still 2, but exactly 4 weeks from today that will not be the case.) In the past 24 hours he has made all terrible two's look appealing because apparently we are in for the terrifying three's. From the time he woke up yesterday till 5 minutes ago he has done the following:
1. Removed everything hanging on the walls in his bedroom, including the nails. Not once, not twice, but four times. I promise that after each offense he was punished, and the punishment increased exponentially, but apparently this is too much fun to be deterred by a little spanking.
2. Stuffed an entire roll of toilet paper down the toilet and then flushed. On two separate occasions. Needless to say if you come to our house, the toilet paper is now out of sight. And we have two plungers in the bathroom as a precaution.
3. Dumped an entire shaker of salt onto his plate of dinner last night. This has happened two different times over the past week.
4. Pooped in his pants and made a huge mess of it. (We've been really successful with potty training, apparently he wants to punish me now.)
I'm scared to consider what the upcoming year holds for us. I guess I just hope that my house is still standing and my sanity is intact. Though the latter is already questionable.
My child has decided that he's going to show me that he is no longer 2, as in the terrible two's. (Technically, yes, he is still 2, but exactly 4 weeks from today that will not be the case.) In the past 24 hours he has made all terrible two's look appealing because apparently we are in for the terrifying three's. From the time he woke up yesterday till 5 minutes ago he has done the following:
1. Removed everything hanging on the walls in his bedroom, including the nails. Not once, not twice, but four times. I promise that after each offense he was punished, and the punishment increased exponentially, but apparently this is too much fun to be deterred by a little spanking.
2. Stuffed an entire roll of toilet paper down the toilet and then flushed. On two separate occasions. Needless to say if you come to our house, the toilet paper is now out of sight. And we have two plungers in the bathroom as a precaution.
3. Dumped an entire shaker of salt onto his plate of dinner last night. This has happened two different times over the past week.
4. Pooped in his pants and made a huge mess of it. (We've been really successful with potty training, apparently he wants to punish me now.)
I'm scared to consider what the upcoming year holds for us. I guess I just hope that my house is still standing and my sanity is intact. Though the latter is already questionable.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Update
Apparently I'm unable to write a steady blog this summer. It's not as if I'm overwhelmingly busy or anything, I guess I just don't have much inspiration right now. I figured since it's been 20 days since I last posted I would give you all a random update which is obviously all I'm able to do lately if you read through my last few posts.
Today is Keith's birthday so we've had a fun weekend. Yesterday his parents came over and watched Garrett so that we could go out and celebrate. You know "celebrating" might mean more to some than others. But to a married couple with a (soon-to-be) 3 year old, it simply means to spend time away from your child(ren). You can't get much more celebratory than the lack of whining at dinner coupled with nobody screaming "I lost my shoe!" in the car. And celebrate we did.
Let's see... First we went to the movies (the number 1 place where we simply cannot go with our child unless we're seeing something with talking animals or living inanimate objects). We saw "The Dark Knight" which was really good. It lives up to its name and is definitely a "dark" movie as far as superhero movies go, but it's not depressingly so. After the movie we really lived it up and made a stop at Toys R Us. Garrett's birthday party is next weekend and we had yet to buy him anything and we needed to get some presents so he didn't try to emancipate himself from us. Dinner was next on the agenda so of course we hit up our favorite restaurant, I'm sure you can all repeat after me by now, Texas Roadhouse. It was yummy, as always. We then rounded out this kick-butt night by heading to the place where all couples go on their dates-Walmart. Yes, we're lame, please don't feel the need to point that out to me. I can assure you that we did not buy any groceries, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief. However we did buy baby wipes, along with vitamins, a magazine, a t-shirt for Garrett, and picked up a prescription. We were living large, let me tell you.
Today for the actual event we met up with some friends for lunch at the Spaghetti Warehouse. They have a 3 and a half year old son so we commisserate with each other while our boys yell and drop food and attempt to empty the salt shakers. After lunch the birthday boys (the husband of our couple friend had a birthday 3 days ago) got to spend some kid-free time by checking out some gun shops (their choice, not ours, the women would have went to Target if given the choice). We contemplated what to do but decided that the best choice was to take our 2 maniacs to her house so they could destroy the other kid's room while she and I visited in relative peace. The boys actually played well together and I enjoyed the company of my friend. I believe Keith has had a good birthday (minus my cake fiasco this morning. Let's just say that the recipe that I used does not allow for a cake to be baked in 2 small, round pans and now, 12 hours later, my house still smells like slightly burnt cake, yum.)
So we move from celebrating Keith's birthday to celebrating Garrett's next weekend. We're partying a month early because my family will all be in town. I'm so excited to have them here for Garrett's birthday. It's the first party for him that they've been able to make it so I'm really happy that this is working out. This will actually be Garrett's first time to be around both sets of grandparents at the same time so it should be interesting. I've got the cake ordered, the party supplies waiting in the closet, and the gifts hidden. (Well, hidden better than they were earlier today. Garrett found them, drug them out and asked "Are these Garrett's?" I told him yes, but they were for his birthday so he had to wait to get them. Keith told him later that they were actually for his friend. I'm sure he's really confused, hopefully he'll forget he ever saw them until they're unwrapped on Friday. They've since been rehidden and I now have to rethink my usual hiding spot for gifts.)
The gifts were a debate this year. The past 2 birthdays I've just gone out and bought toys or clothes that Garrett needed. Obviously I know that no toys are actually "needed" but what boy should live his life without a mini basketball goal? I would classify that as a need. :) This year Keith wanted some input into the gifts and I know that his input will become more and more the older Garrett gets, which is completely fine with me. At first we planned to buy him one of those nice, wooden swingsets that will last for years and won't tip over when more than one child is swinging. Unfortunately when you buy one brand new you're basically buying a used car as far as the prices are concerned, so a brand new one is temporarily out of the question (we've since found a couple different options but none that would be here by Friday so we'll see...). We then went on to look at used ones for sale and some people think their swingsets are made from 24k gold apparently. I'm not paying $600 for a rotten piece of wood that probably wouldn't survive being moved 2 feet much less 50 miles. So we gave up that dream. We then thought about buying him one of those electric cars. But after looking at Toys R Us' inventory, that's not happening either. How do some of these families own those kinds of toys and not only do they own them, but they leave them to sit outside in the weather. You can't buy one for less than $300 and that just seems like an awful lot of money for a toy that my child will outgrow in a couple of years. But Daddy is still considering one for Christmas so we may end up with one despite my objections. I threw around the idea of buying him an easel because he really likes to color, but I couldn't find one so we settled on buying him a train set and a Spiderman action figure. I think he will really like those.
All right that's pretty much it, I guess. I should have a better way to wrap this thing up but I'm tired. Garrett hasn't been sleeping well the past couple of nights because we both have colds and his always result in a bad cough. Saturday morning he was up at 5 am hacking up a lung which lead to him staying up for the rest of the day. Which meant that I was up for the rest of the day. I do NOT miss the newborn stage, that's for sure.
Today is Keith's birthday so we've had a fun weekend. Yesterday his parents came over and watched Garrett so that we could go out and celebrate. You know "celebrating" might mean more to some than others. But to a married couple with a (soon-to-be) 3 year old, it simply means to spend time away from your child(ren). You can't get much more celebratory than the lack of whining at dinner coupled with nobody screaming "I lost my shoe!" in the car. And celebrate we did.
Let's see... First we went to the movies (the number 1 place where we simply cannot go with our child unless we're seeing something with talking animals or living inanimate objects). We saw "The Dark Knight" which was really good. It lives up to its name and is definitely a "dark" movie as far as superhero movies go, but it's not depressingly so. After the movie we really lived it up and made a stop at Toys R Us. Garrett's birthday party is next weekend and we had yet to buy him anything and we needed to get some presents so he didn't try to emancipate himself from us. Dinner was next on the agenda so of course we hit up our favorite restaurant, I'm sure you can all repeat after me by now, Texas Roadhouse. It was yummy, as always. We then rounded out this kick-butt night by heading to the place where all couples go on their dates-Walmart. Yes, we're lame, please don't feel the need to point that out to me. I can assure you that we did not buy any groceries, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief. However we did buy baby wipes, along with vitamins, a magazine, a t-shirt for Garrett, and picked up a prescription. We were living large, let me tell you.
Today for the actual event we met up with some friends for lunch at the Spaghetti Warehouse. They have a 3 and a half year old son so we commisserate with each other while our boys yell and drop food and attempt to empty the salt shakers. After lunch the birthday boys (the husband of our couple friend had a birthday 3 days ago) got to spend some kid-free time by checking out some gun shops (their choice, not ours, the women would have went to Target if given the choice). We contemplated what to do but decided that the best choice was to take our 2 maniacs to her house so they could destroy the other kid's room while she and I visited in relative peace. The boys actually played well together and I enjoyed the company of my friend. I believe Keith has had a good birthday (minus my cake fiasco this morning. Let's just say that the recipe that I used does not allow for a cake to be baked in 2 small, round pans and now, 12 hours later, my house still smells like slightly burnt cake, yum.)
So we move from celebrating Keith's birthday to celebrating Garrett's next weekend. We're partying a month early because my family will all be in town. I'm so excited to have them here for Garrett's birthday. It's the first party for him that they've been able to make it so I'm really happy that this is working out. This will actually be Garrett's first time to be around both sets of grandparents at the same time so it should be interesting. I've got the cake ordered, the party supplies waiting in the closet, and the gifts hidden. (Well, hidden better than they were earlier today. Garrett found them, drug them out and asked "Are these Garrett's?" I told him yes, but they were for his birthday so he had to wait to get them. Keith told him later that they were actually for his friend. I'm sure he's really confused, hopefully he'll forget he ever saw them until they're unwrapped on Friday. They've since been rehidden and I now have to rethink my usual hiding spot for gifts.)
The gifts were a debate this year. The past 2 birthdays I've just gone out and bought toys or clothes that Garrett needed. Obviously I know that no toys are actually "needed" but what boy should live his life without a mini basketball goal? I would classify that as a need. :) This year Keith wanted some input into the gifts and I know that his input will become more and more the older Garrett gets, which is completely fine with me. At first we planned to buy him one of those nice, wooden swingsets that will last for years and won't tip over when more than one child is swinging. Unfortunately when you buy one brand new you're basically buying a used car as far as the prices are concerned, so a brand new one is temporarily out of the question (we've since found a couple different options but none that would be here by Friday so we'll see...). We then went on to look at used ones for sale and some people think their swingsets are made from 24k gold apparently. I'm not paying $600 for a rotten piece of wood that probably wouldn't survive being moved 2 feet much less 50 miles. So we gave up that dream. We then thought about buying him one of those electric cars. But after looking at Toys R Us' inventory, that's not happening either. How do some of these families own those kinds of toys and not only do they own them, but they leave them to sit outside in the weather. You can't buy one for less than $300 and that just seems like an awful lot of money for a toy that my child will outgrow in a couple of years. But Daddy is still considering one for Christmas so we may end up with one despite my objections. I threw around the idea of buying him an easel because he really likes to color, but I couldn't find one so we settled on buying him a train set and a Spiderman action figure. I think he will really like those.
All right that's pretty much it, I guess. I should have a better way to wrap this thing up but I'm tired. Garrett hasn't been sleeping well the past couple of nights because we both have colds and his always result in a bad cough. Saturday morning he was up at 5 am hacking up a lung which lead to him staying up for the rest of the day. Which meant that I was up for the rest of the day. I do NOT miss the newborn stage, that's for sure.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Aimlessness
So it's been awhile since I've blogged and I figured I would do a random update of things going on here.
*Potty training is going pretty well. The accidents have been minimal, not even one a day. Though I'm still hesitant to go out of the house without a pull-up on (Garrett, not me), the rest of the time he's in underwear. The best part of it is that Garrett actually wants to go to the bathroom "all by myself!". Which means that he gets himself on and off the toilet and the only thing I have to do for him is wipe when necessary. That's so nice for me because sometimes he's going to the bathroom every 30 minutes. I can't always get right there to help him so it's nice to know that he isn't going to have an accident if I can't get into the bathroom with him.
*Our summer is going nicely. Garrett hasn't driven me insane yet, so that's a plus. We've gone to 2 movies so far. "Shrek the Third" (which was free at a local theater) and "Wall-E". I'm not a big Shrek fan, but Wall-E was cute.
*Garrett turns 3 next month, which is really hard to believe. We're doing his party a few weeks early because my parents will be in town for my cousin's wedding. It's going to be a "Toy Story" theme (the party, not the wedding.) Garrett is actually the ring bearer for the wedding so that should be interesting. He'll either shock me by totally cooperating and being the model child or he'll walk down the aisle with a few minor complications and then go wild once he gets down front at which point I will be waiting in the wings to grab him before my cousin breaks down in tears. I'm betting that the latter will probably be the scenerio that I'm dealing with. It should be fun!
*At the end of this month Keith will celebrate his birthday. He will be 32, which is just crazy. When we met he was only 22. I can't believe it's been that long! Maybe I'll do a "Toy Story" theme for his party too. I'm sure he would love that!
*Last night we watched the movie "Jumper". It's a pretty new release on DVD (we actually rented the Blue-ray version, but I don't want to rub it in). I liked the premise of the movie, but I felt like they could have taken the story line in a much different direction and it would have been a better movie and the ending was very abrupt. I really want to see the movie "Hancock". If anybody here has seen it, is it worth it to arrange a sitter so we can catch it in the theater or should we wait until it comes out on DVD?
*I just have to end this with praise being heaped upon the inventor of the iPod. Yes, I've had an iPod for a couple of years now, but I have found myself using it more and more. Initially I only had about 100 songs on it, but now I have over 1,000. Plus I have a few cartoons downloaded on it for Garrett when we're out in public and I don't want to hear another scream. So, my hat is off to you Apple people. You really know how to keep a mom sane and happy.
*Potty training is going pretty well. The accidents have been minimal, not even one a day. Though I'm still hesitant to go out of the house without a pull-up on (Garrett, not me), the rest of the time he's in underwear. The best part of it is that Garrett actually wants to go to the bathroom "all by myself!". Which means that he gets himself on and off the toilet and the only thing I have to do for him is wipe when necessary. That's so nice for me because sometimes he's going to the bathroom every 30 minutes. I can't always get right there to help him so it's nice to know that he isn't going to have an accident if I can't get into the bathroom with him.
*Our summer is going nicely. Garrett hasn't driven me insane yet, so that's a plus. We've gone to 2 movies so far. "Shrek the Third" (which was free at a local theater) and "Wall-E". I'm not a big Shrek fan, but Wall-E was cute.
*Garrett turns 3 next month, which is really hard to believe. We're doing his party a few weeks early because my parents will be in town for my cousin's wedding. It's going to be a "Toy Story" theme (the party, not the wedding.) Garrett is actually the ring bearer for the wedding so that should be interesting. He'll either shock me by totally cooperating and being the model child or he'll walk down the aisle with a few minor complications and then go wild once he gets down front at which point I will be waiting in the wings to grab him before my cousin breaks down in tears. I'm betting that the latter will probably be the scenerio that I'm dealing with. It should be fun!
*At the end of this month Keith will celebrate his birthday. He will be 32, which is just crazy. When we met he was only 22. I can't believe it's been that long! Maybe I'll do a "Toy Story" theme for his party too. I'm sure he would love that!
*Last night we watched the movie "Jumper". It's a pretty new release on DVD (we actually rented the Blue-ray version, but I don't want to rub it in). I liked the premise of the movie, but I felt like they could have taken the story line in a much different direction and it would have been a better movie and the ending was very abrupt. I really want to see the movie "Hancock". If anybody here has seen it, is it worth it to arrange a sitter so we can catch it in the theater or should we wait until it comes out on DVD?
*I just have to end this with praise being heaped upon the inventor of the iPod. Yes, I've had an iPod for a couple of years now, but I have found myself using it more and more. Initially I only had about 100 songs on it, but now I have over 1,000. Plus I have a few cartoons downloaded on it for Garrett when we're out in public and I don't want to hear another scream. So, my hat is off to you Apple people. You really know how to keep a mom sane and happy.
Friday, June 20, 2008
The Life and Times of Pottytraining
Potty training 2008 was kicked off at our house yesterday morning.
Garrett has been showing a lot of interest in the potty for several months now. He wanted to sit on it and occasionally things would happen, but most of the time he just sat there. I guess that's a hurdle in and of itself since he didn't mind sitting on the toilet, I knew I wasn't going to have to force him to do it when the time came to actually potty train. Yes, I know I could have started this back when he first started showing interest, but I knew that we had our trip to Indiana coming up and there was no way in the world that I wanted to drive 14 hours with a newly potty training 2 year old.
So I put it off until we were back in Texas.
In the past 30 hours I have cleaned pee off of the floor (hardwood and carpet) about 4 times. I'm not sure if that's good or not, considering that a good chunk of that time was spent sleeping and of course when he's sleeping he's wearing a diaper or pull up. I've tried to encourage him to stand up and pee thinking this would be a lot more fun but he only wants to stand and pee while in the bathtub (with his cousins!) or taking a shower. So sitting it is. I have to say that he looks awfully cute sitting on that big toilet with his underwear around his knees. :) But I know that's just the mom in me talking. I'm really struggling to keep myself from calling his underwear, panties. Keith will slap me down if he hears such nonsense. I've caught myself saying it enough times that I've heard Garrett refer to them as "pants", but I think that would be acceptable to dad.
I guess I should be thankful that no poop has been found on my floors. He seems to have it down as to wear that goes and hasn't had a problem with an accident in that department.
I just hope that he figures out the other somewhat quickly. I don't want my house to smell as if a cat has been in here marking it's territory.
If anyone has any suggestions as to special methods for potty training a boy, please feel free to pass those along. Just as an fyi, I am doing candy as a motivational tool for any time he does do something successfully in the bathroom. He's not to the point of understanding any sort of sticker chart or money incentive either.
If he's day time potty trained by the time he turns 3 in August, I will be happy. I'll keep you posted.
Garrett has been showing a lot of interest in the potty for several months now. He wanted to sit on it and occasionally things would happen, but most of the time he just sat there. I guess that's a hurdle in and of itself since he didn't mind sitting on the toilet, I knew I wasn't going to have to force him to do it when the time came to actually potty train. Yes, I know I could have started this back when he first started showing interest, but I knew that we had our trip to Indiana coming up and there was no way in the world that I wanted to drive 14 hours with a newly potty training 2 year old.
So I put it off until we were back in Texas.
In the past 30 hours I have cleaned pee off of the floor (hardwood and carpet) about 4 times. I'm not sure if that's good or not, considering that a good chunk of that time was spent sleeping and of course when he's sleeping he's wearing a diaper or pull up. I've tried to encourage him to stand up and pee thinking this would be a lot more fun but he only wants to stand and pee while in the bathtub (with his cousins!) or taking a shower. So sitting it is. I have to say that he looks awfully cute sitting on that big toilet with his underwear around his knees. :) But I know that's just the mom in me talking. I'm really struggling to keep myself from calling his underwear, panties. Keith will slap me down if he hears such nonsense. I've caught myself saying it enough times that I've heard Garrett refer to them as "pants", but I think that would be acceptable to dad.
I guess I should be thankful that no poop has been found on my floors. He seems to have it down as to wear that goes and hasn't had a problem with an accident in that department.
I just hope that he figures out the other somewhat quickly. I don't want my house to smell as if a cat has been in here marking it's territory.
If anyone has any suggestions as to special methods for potty training a boy, please feel free to pass those along. Just as an fyi, I am doing candy as a motivational tool for any time he does do something successfully in the bathroom. He's not to the point of understanding any sort of sticker chart or money incentive either.
If he's day time potty trained by the time he turns 3 in August, I will be happy. I'll keep you posted.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Livin' La Vida Loca
The past 3 weeks we have been crazy busy.
First a road trip to Indiana where we watched my youngest brother graduate from high school. While we were there, Keith and I celebrated our 6th anniversary. Well, I use the word "celebrate" loosely. We said "Happy Anniversary" to each other and it was acknowledged by my family (including my dad while preaching that Sunday morning) and that was the extent of our celebration on the actual day. At some point we'll get around to atleast going out to dinner and a movie in celebration of surviving 6 years of marriage to each other.
Second we survived driving 14 hours all in one day on our way home from Indiana. (Going up there we broke it up into 2 days.) Surprisingly, Garrett was excellent during that long day in the car. Not one single tantrum was thrown. To say I was shocked by this good behavior would be an understatement.
Once we got home I started in with cleaning my house thoroughly. Because...
Third, my mom, my sister Grace, and my niece and nephew all came to my house a week after we got home from visiting them. No, it wasn't because they were just desperate to see us again, but my mom had a family reunion in Hurst, Texas the following weekend so they came down a few days early to hang out at my house. We spent several days stuffing our faces with food that they don't have up in Indiana. Yummy Double Dave's pizza (mostly their dessert pizza, I wish you could order one of those to go) and Mexican food from Posado's. Our all-time favorite Mexican food restaurant is Mercado's in Tyler, Texas. Tyler is just too far to drive with 3 kids under the age of 6 just for some good eatin'. So we settled for second best. We did some outlet mall shopping and some Target shopping as well. Then we headed over to Hurst for the big family reunion. My mom is the middle child of 5 kids. Her family is really big. There's 5 kids, 4 in-laws, 16 grandkids, 9 grandkid-in-laws, and 7 great grandkids. Her siblings and her parents haven't all been together in about 8 years so we were past due for a reunion.
My cousin Andrea and I did all the planning for the reunion so that also kept me busy leading up to our Indiana trip. Reunions are more work than I realized. But it was totally worth it. Some of the work, I brought on myself because I decided we needed a family cookbook with a compilation of all our favorite recipes. It turned out great and we have approximately 60 pages of family recipes shared amongst everyone. I also put together a video slide show as a surprise for my grandparents. I think they really liked it. The reunion went well. We had a great number of the family come and we enjoyed getting to spend time visiting with each other. My brother and sister-in-law came up from Houston which was great. We hadn't seen them since last December. The family that wins the "who traveled the farthest" award would be my cousin and her family who flew in from Massachusetts. It was decided that we would have another reunion in two years. And any family member who doesn't come will be kicked out of the family. Let's hope I can make it.
Third, this isn't really anything to do with being busy, but it's a good story to share and wrap up the blog. Since Garrett is almost 3, I figured this summer needs to have more activities than the previous summers. He's not content to be at home like he used to be so I've been coming up with some cheap things that we could do that would get us out of the house and keep him entertained. One of the local theaters is showing free kid movies on Tuesday mornings so we went there today for the first showing. The movie was "Shrek the Third". I've never seen any of the Shrek movies and this one really didn't impress me, but it was a free movie and Garrett seemed to enjoy sitting in the theater next to one of his friends, chowing down on popcorn and watching the movie on a big TV (atleast that's what he called it). With about 10 minutes left in the movie (I'm totally assuming that, it seemed like it was almost over) it shut off. My friend and I figured they were having technical difficulties and decided to go ahead and gather our things and head out. Before we got to the door, two movie employees walk in and say that the electricity just went out in the theater due to a bad storm in the area. I have to say that when we got to the theater not even 2 hours earlier, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so I found that odd. But when we came out of the theater there was a really bad storm outside. It was actually raining and blowing so hard that water was coming into the lobby. There was no way anyone could go outside, in fact one of the high school guys who worked there had trouble even opening the door because the wind was blowing so hard. And he was a pretty big guy. So my friend and I decided to hang out and play some of the arcade games. I mean, let our sons play some of the arcade games. :) Ten minutes later the manager comes into the lobby and says that a tornado has touched down roughly 5 miles from the theater and we all needed to get into the hallway as a precaution. Lovely. Just where you want to be when a tornado strikes. With your 2 year old son in the middle of a theater. My friend and I called our husbands (who work together) to tell them what was going on and have them check the weather. Keith didn't see anywhere that said there was a tornado warning for our area. A few minutes later that same theater manager comes out and says they called the police department and were told that there wasn't a tornado. I would love to know who told them about the tornado in the first place since there wasn't anything about it online (the weather channel website and some local news websites) and obviously they didn't hear about it from the police. Anyway, it was still too bad outside to attempt to go to our cars so we threw more quarters into the arcade money pit before it let up. We initially were happy about the free movie, but I'm sure we spent the equivalent of a movie ticket on those games while we were passing time. Thankfully the storm let up before we were broke and we headed home. Hopefully Garrett doesn't expect that kind of excitement the next time we go to the movies.
I'm sad to say that all of our big summer plans are now over and it's not even officially summer! Of course Garrett and I will do a variety of things in order to pass the time but no more trips are planned for the next few months and no more visits with my family. In fact we won't be seeing them again until Christmas. I'm sad. But that's just life when you don't live close to your family. Hopefully these last 3 weeks haven't given Garrett high expectations for the next few months. Long trips in the car and stays in nice hotels with indoor pools just aren't on the agenda. Maybe the occasional free movie at the theater combined with running in the sprinkle will be good compensation.
Yeah, I don't think so either.
First a road trip to Indiana where we watched my youngest brother graduate from high school. While we were there, Keith and I celebrated our 6th anniversary. Well, I use the word "celebrate" loosely. We said "Happy Anniversary" to each other and it was acknowledged by my family (including my dad while preaching that Sunday morning) and that was the extent of our celebration on the actual day. At some point we'll get around to atleast going out to dinner and a movie in celebration of surviving 6 years of marriage to each other.
Second we survived driving 14 hours all in one day on our way home from Indiana. (Going up there we broke it up into 2 days.) Surprisingly, Garrett was excellent during that long day in the car. Not one single tantrum was thrown. To say I was shocked by this good behavior would be an understatement.
Once we got home I started in with cleaning my house thoroughly. Because...
Third, my mom, my sister Grace, and my niece and nephew all came to my house a week after we got home from visiting them. No, it wasn't because they were just desperate to see us again, but my mom had a family reunion in Hurst, Texas the following weekend so they came down a few days early to hang out at my house. We spent several days stuffing our faces with food that they don't have up in Indiana. Yummy Double Dave's pizza (mostly their dessert pizza, I wish you could order one of those to go) and Mexican food from Posado's. Our all-time favorite Mexican food restaurant is Mercado's in Tyler, Texas. Tyler is just too far to drive with 3 kids under the age of 6 just for some good eatin'. So we settled for second best. We did some outlet mall shopping and some Target shopping as well. Then we headed over to Hurst for the big family reunion. My mom is the middle child of 5 kids. Her family is really big. There's 5 kids, 4 in-laws, 16 grandkids, 9 grandkid-in-laws, and 7 great grandkids. Her siblings and her parents haven't all been together in about 8 years so we were past due for a reunion.
My cousin Andrea and I did all the planning for the reunion so that also kept me busy leading up to our Indiana trip. Reunions are more work than I realized. But it was totally worth it. Some of the work, I brought on myself because I decided we needed a family cookbook with a compilation of all our favorite recipes. It turned out great and we have approximately 60 pages of family recipes shared amongst everyone. I also put together a video slide show as a surprise for my grandparents. I think they really liked it. The reunion went well. We had a great number of the family come and we enjoyed getting to spend time visiting with each other. My brother and sister-in-law came up from Houston which was great. We hadn't seen them since last December. The family that wins the "who traveled the farthest" award would be my cousin and her family who flew in from Massachusetts. It was decided that we would have another reunion in two years. And any family member who doesn't come will be kicked out of the family. Let's hope I can make it.
Third, this isn't really anything to do with being busy, but it's a good story to share and wrap up the blog. Since Garrett is almost 3, I figured this summer needs to have more activities than the previous summers. He's not content to be at home like he used to be so I've been coming up with some cheap things that we could do that would get us out of the house and keep him entertained. One of the local theaters is showing free kid movies on Tuesday mornings so we went there today for the first showing. The movie was "Shrek the Third". I've never seen any of the Shrek movies and this one really didn't impress me, but it was a free movie and Garrett seemed to enjoy sitting in the theater next to one of his friends, chowing down on popcorn and watching the movie on a big TV (atleast that's what he called it). With about 10 minutes left in the movie (I'm totally assuming that, it seemed like it was almost over) it shut off. My friend and I figured they were having technical difficulties and decided to go ahead and gather our things and head out. Before we got to the door, two movie employees walk in and say that the electricity just went out in the theater due to a bad storm in the area. I have to say that when we got to the theater not even 2 hours earlier, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so I found that odd. But when we came out of the theater there was a really bad storm outside. It was actually raining and blowing so hard that water was coming into the lobby. There was no way anyone could go outside, in fact one of the high school guys who worked there had trouble even opening the door because the wind was blowing so hard. And he was a pretty big guy. So my friend and I decided to hang out and play some of the arcade games. I mean, let our sons play some of the arcade games. :) Ten minutes later the manager comes into the lobby and says that a tornado has touched down roughly 5 miles from the theater and we all needed to get into the hallway as a precaution. Lovely. Just where you want to be when a tornado strikes. With your 2 year old son in the middle of a theater. My friend and I called our husbands (who work together) to tell them what was going on and have them check the weather. Keith didn't see anywhere that said there was a tornado warning for our area. A few minutes later that same theater manager comes out and says they called the police department and were told that there wasn't a tornado. I would love to know who told them about the tornado in the first place since there wasn't anything about it online (the weather channel website and some local news websites) and obviously they didn't hear about it from the police. Anyway, it was still too bad outside to attempt to go to our cars so we threw more quarters into the arcade money pit before it let up. We initially were happy about the free movie, but I'm sure we spent the equivalent of a movie ticket on those games while we were passing time. Thankfully the storm let up before we were broke and we headed home. Hopefully Garrett doesn't expect that kind of excitement the next time we go to the movies.
I'm sad to say that all of our big summer plans are now over and it's not even officially summer! Of course Garrett and I will do a variety of things in order to pass the time but no more trips are planned for the next few months and no more visits with my family. In fact we won't be seeing them again until Christmas. I'm sad. But that's just life when you don't live close to your family. Hopefully these last 3 weeks haven't given Garrett high expectations for the next few months. Long trips in the car and stays in nice hotels with indoor pools just aren't on the agenda. Maybe the occasional free movie at the theater combined with running in the sprinkle will be good compensation.
Yeah, I don't think so either.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Away From Her
Yesterday I finally watched my Blockbuster rental that has been floating around my house for a month. This is one of the positives to doing online movie rentals because there are no due dates so you can hold on to the movies until you get a chance to watch them.
The movie was "Away From Her". Not a typical movie choice for me, but I had read several reviews for this movie because it was nominated for an Oscar. I normally shy away from the Oscar-nominated movies. They always seem to be too "artsy" for me and I feel that they're nominated solely based on who the Academy knows in the little known movies that come out each year. But after reading a synopsis on this movie I felt that it would be worth watching.
I wish I could say that was true, but I really don't know how I felt after watching it. The first half of the movie I cried pretty much non-stop, the second half of the movie I was irritated and annoyed. I guess I should explain.
The movie is about a woman with Alzheimer's. I loved the beginning because it showed some of the things that she was doing that made her and her husband think that she was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. It was so sad to see her slowly being ravaged by that disease and how her husband dealt with it.
My great-grandpa died with Alzheimer's and I can vividly remember how he behaved in the late stages with that disease. Up until this movie I have never given much thought to how he felt while in the early stages, nor how my Grandma dealt with it. In this movie, the couple makes the decision to put the woman in a home where she is cared for, but in my Grandpa's case, my Grandma took care of him until he passed away. I don't know how she did it. One of the reasons that this woman gave in the movie for why she wanted to go to a home was because she didn't want her husband to become her caretaker. I have to say that I would agree with her. After watching the movie, Keith and I have discussed this some. Unfortunately he also had his Grandma die with Alzheimer's, so it runs in both of our families and because of that I want us both to be prepared for the possibility that this could be our situation one day.
So I wish I could say "You should definitely go out and rent this movie" or "Don't ever watch this movie, ever", but I'm stuck in the middle. The first half was so touching and thought-provoking. I don't know if it makes up for the frustration of the second half, but I will say that if this is a movie you've been considering or if you're looking for a movie that portrays Alzheimer's, then you should check this one out. Be prepared for a couple of things. There is some language in this movie, more specifically the use of the F-word. There's also some sex involved, not descriptive sex scenes, but the implication is there. Of course old people are involved so I can't say that it's really steamy, but if you don't want to see an old woman's naked shoulders then this movie isn't for you.
I will say that if I look half as good as Julie Christie does when I'm her age, I will be one happy woman.
The movie was "Away From Her". Not a typical movie choice for me, but I had read several reviews for this movie because it was nominated for an Oscar. I normally shy away from the Oscar-nominated movies. They always seem to be too "artsy" for me and I feel that they're nominated solely based on who the Academy knows in the little known movies that come out each year. But after reading a synopsis on this movie I felt that it would be worth watching.
I wish I could say that was true, but I really don't know how I felt after watching it. The first half of the movie I cried pretty much non-stop, the second half of the movie I was irritated and annoyed. I guess I should explain.
The movie is about a woman with Alzheimer's. I loved the beginning because it showed some of the things that she was doing that made her and her husband think that she was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. It was so sad to see her slowly being ravaged by that disease and how her husband dealt with it.
My great-grandpa died with Alzheimer's and I can vividly remember how he behaved in the late stages with that disease. Up until this movie I have never given much thought to how he felt while in the early stages, nor how my Grandma dealt with it. In this movie, the couple makes the decision to put the woman in a home where she is cared for, but in my Grandpa's case, my Grandma took care of him until he passed away. I don't know how she did it. One of the reasons that this woman gave in the movie for why she wanted to go to a home was because she didn't want her husband to become her caretaker. I have to say that I would agree with her. After watching the movie, Keith and I have discussed this some. Unfortunately he also had his Grandma die with Alzheimer's, so it runs in both of our families and because of that I want us both to be prepared for the possibility that this could be our situation one day.
So I wish I could say "You should definitely go out and rent this movie" or "Don't ever watch this movie, ever", but I'm stuck in the middle. The first half was so touching and thought-provoking. I don't know if it makes up for the frustration of the second half, but I will say that if this is a movie you've been considering or if you're looking for a movie that portrays Alzheimer's, then you should check this one out. Be prepared for a couple of things. There is some language in this movie, more specifically the use of the F-word. There's also some sex involved, not descriptive sex scenes, but the implication is there. Of course old people are involved so I can't say that it's really steamy, but if you don't want to see an old woman's naked shoulders then this movie isn't for you.
I will say that if I look half as good as Julie Christie does when I'm her age, I will be one happy woman.
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