Archive for the 'potty training' Category

Labor Day Indeed

Published
by
Melissa
on September 9, 2009
in bed time, being in the moment, expectations, grace, letting go, potty training, social life, stuck at home with a child, too much to do, trust, vacation and you can't control everything
.
1 Comment

As you may or may not know, Labor Day is a celebration of workers — a “yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country,” according to the Department of Labor.

What I want to know is who figured giving people a day off from work was a break from their labor.  More particularly, I would like to invite anyone who thinks Labor Day is a nifty holiday to spend it with me.  Especially Mike’s bosses, who deemed that he had to actually go to work on Labor Day, thereby increasing my parental labor exponentially.

Yes, yes, yes, I know that my children’s caregivers deserve a day off from their work.  I’d deserve a day off too, if I actually had the kind of work where I had to wait for a day off to not work.

Nor do I mean to undermine the ideological underpinnings of the holiday, even though a good 80% of the country — including some recent Presidents — would if they knew it was created by the nineteenth century labor movement, which owed more than a little bit to socialism.

All I’m saying is that sometimes, when you have young children, a day off from work ends up being far more work than a day on.  Toss in an Apple Festival and the last day the JCC pool is open for the summer, and you have just the right elements to reduce a mother to a puddle of tears.

Continue reading ‘Labor Day Indeed’

Sometimes You’ve Just Gotta Cry (Especially at Four O’Clock in the Morning)

Published
by
Melissa
on September 3, 2009
in Mommy time, change, forgiveness, gratitude, letting go, potty training, sleep, structure and the bigger picture
.
0 Comments

There are times — many, many times in the life of a mother of two children under three — when you know that whatever it is that is making you cry is a normal part of parenthood.  The incident that has driven you to tears of despair is, you could easily tell yourself, a positive sign that your child is developing properly.  No other parent has ever cried in similar circumstances, you may even lie to yourself, so buck up.

But you will cry anyhow, and you will feel good and sorry for yourself as you do it.

By all rights, my latest bout of tears should not have been induced by the simple fact of Lily awakening twice in one night.  Because who would cry over something most other mothers of infants I know take as a fact of life?  And what sort of ingrate would not be able to take a few days out of the five-and-a-half months of her daughter’s life when she loses a little more than a little sleep?

By all rights, in other words, I should instead have been crying when I was sitting on the dirty floor of a Target bathroom at eight o’clock last night, my baby strapped to me in the Ergo, the toilet paper dispenser empty, and my son’s brand-new Big Boy underpants, shall we say, soiled.

But I didn’t cry then.  In that moment, I could find quite a lot of humor in just watching myself.  It’s in the middle of the night that my outlook on life is more than a little bit less inclined toward laughter.

Continue reading ‘Sometimes You’ve Just Gotta Cry (Especially at Four O’Clock in the Morning)’

Poop, Pee, and a Port-a-Potty: A Parent’s Life

Published
by
Melissa
on July 23, 2009
in Mama instinct, Mommy time, awareness, being in the moment, discomfort verus pain, expectations, grace, letting go, potty training, practice, social life, toddler tantrums and too much to do
.
3 Comments

Frequently, in child rearing, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does.

Take the day my son pooped on my foot.

We’ve been doing a gentle form of potty training in our house, the kind that does not require us to abandon the four-month-old for an entire weekend spent running around after our naked son with his potty in our hands.  Instead, we cajole him into hanging around the house naked for an hour or two at times when we can be bothered to ask, “Do you need to sit on the potty?” at five-minute intervals.

This was one of those mornings when he was happily naked.  Happily, that is, until he noticed the package of pull-ups I rather unwisely bought a couple of months ago.  I thought they were a plausible step toward potty training until Mike pointed out in rather strident terms that they do not work so conveniently when there is poop involved.

Based on this information, I tried to dissuade Jake from his fixation on the pull-ups by promising him he could wear one once he had pooped on the potty.

“I want a pull-up!”  Jake responded.

“When you poop on the potty,” I repeated patiently.

“I DO WANT A PULL-UP!” Jake insisted in that way of his that reflects his conviction that if you say “no” you must not understand what it is he is saying.

“When you poop on the potty,” I said in a firm, motherly tone designed to mask a fury of impatience with a two-year-old’s reasoning skills.  And I walked out of the bathroom.

The tantrum that followed bordered on the epic.

After a few minutes that felt like years of abandoning my poor, beknighted, sobbing child, I sat on the floor next to him and asked him if he wanted a hug.  Drawing ragged breaths around the thumb in his mouth, my beautiful, pants-less boy snuggled close in my lap.

Unbeknownst to me, this was the moment he pooped on my foot.

Continue reading ‘Poop, Pee, and a Port-a-Potty: A Parent’s Life’

Sharks and Bunnies: A Potty Primer

Published
by
Melissa
on June 16, 2009
in Mama instinct, aging, being in the moment, change, daycare, opening your heart and potty training
.
2 Comments

It’s been a big week for growing up in the Jake-and-Lily household. And, not surprisingly, I have mixed feelings about it.

First, Lily received glowing reviews of her first afternoon in daycare yesterday and spent last night and this morning grinning and babbling at me.  Plainly, she approves.  Or so I am telling myself as I shift anxiously in my seat pretending I’m totally okay with leaving her for her second day.  (Has the novelty worn off?  Will she be able to successfully communicate her dislike of the play mat on which I fear she will be left when the caregivers necessarily have to tend to other babies than mine? Just how much does she cry when set off by those other kids who, with several months on her, really ought to be old enough to control their emotions?)

Then — perhaps as a reaction to the news that his baby sister is now attending the same “school” he used to go to — Jake announced this morning that he wished to sit on the potty.  And peed in it.

Continue reading ‘Sharks and Bunnies: A Potty Primer’

The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions

Published
by
Melissa
on February 11, 2009
in Mama instinct, bath time, bed time, change, expectations, feeding my child, letting go, letting instead of making, potty training, practice, school, sleep, surrender, toddler tantrums, trust and you can't control everything
.
0 Comments

Potty training is a big subject in our house these days.

Not because Mike or I have decided it’s time — Jake’s just 25 months old, after all.  But because Jake has shown an interest in it.  At least, he’s shown an interest in: getting our hopes up, testing my theory that all I have to do to raise him is follow his cues, and making his very pregnant mommy sit down on the floor to check the diaper he says needs changing many, many, many more times a day than a very, very pregnant mommy should have to do.  (It’s not the getting down on the floor that’s the problem, of course.  It’s the getting up off the floor again — which requires the help of the tub, a sink, the washing machine, and any other solid, immovable object I can use to hoist myself vertical-ward.)

What I find most interesting — and even of possible interest to those of you who have absolutely no interest in the subject of potty training — is that it’s turning out to be the greatest lesson in surrendering control Jake’s given me yet.

Potty training does not, for example, involve utter and crushing-depression-inducing exhaustion like the sleep thing.  It does not wrap me up in a deluge of hormones so great that often the only choice I had was curling up on the green armchair in a puddle of my own failure as a mother, the way breastfeeding did.  And the whole toddler tantrum experience — I sure like to turn the incidents into stories that become more amusing to me as I write about them, but Mike reminded me the other day just how trying they are when he said, “It’s hard for me to read about Jake’s tantrums.  I just want to let them go once they’re over.  You need to process them.”

Yep, processing is what I do, and the potty training process, while still a challenge, is proving to be a bit of an adventure as well.  I have no preconceived notions of how it will go — possibly because  Jake’s is the first diaper I ever changed and so perhaps I was, until a couple of years ago, completely uninitiated in the scatological functions of young children.  It is not too exhausting (other than the hauling myself up off the floor part) because it generally does not take place while I am trying to sleep.  And hormones, well, they’re all about the next baby at this point.

Instead, I can remind myself to take a step back, stop wondering why two kids in Jake’s class are potty trained but he’s not (okay, I do attribute it to them having older brothers), and let Jake lead me through the changes that will take place in his life no matter how I might try to bend them to my will.  Which, in this case, is not even so much as an impulse.

A few episodes to illustrate:

Continue reading ‘The Road to Potty Training Is Paved with Good Intentions’

Acronis Universal Restore for True Image Echo Workstation 9.5 AcroPlot Pro 2008 2.13 Actify SpinFire Professional 8.3 Actinic Ecommerce 7.0.6 Actinic Ecommerce UK 8.5 Actinic Ecommerce USA 8.5 Active Alarm Clock 3.6 Active Boot Disk Suite 4.0 Active Desktop Calendar v7.32 Active Fax Server 4 Active File Recovery 7.3 for Windows Active Lock 1.4 Active Lock 2.0 Active Lock 3.0 Active MediaMagnet 5.6 Active Partition Recovery 5.3 Active Screen Saver DevKit 3.0 Active ScreenSaver Builder 4.6 Active To-Do List 1.4 Active UNDELETE 7.0 Active WebCam v9.9 ActiveAT Data CD DVD Burner 2.1 ActiveAT File Recovery 7.3 ActiveAT ISO File Manager 2.0 ActiveAT UNDELETE 7.3 Enterprise Edition ActiveAT ZDelete 5.7 ActiveState Komodo IDE 4.2 ActiveState Komodo IDE 5.0 Actual Virtual Desktops 1.1 Actual Window Guard 5.2 Actual Window Manager 5.2 Actual Window Minimizer 5.2 ActualTools Actual Window Minimizer 5.2 Actysoft Global Downloader 1.4 Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 4 AcuteFinder 3.0 AD Sound Recorder 3.5 AD Sound Recorder 4.2 AD Stream Recorder 2.5 Ada Email Address Search XP 5.28 Ada Email Extractor XP v2.8 Ada email Search XP Gold Bundle 2.2 Adapt Builder Abi 2009 Adarian Money for Windows 5.0 Addendum Batch Convert For Adobe Acrobat 5.0 Final Addendum Batch-Print 4.1 for Adobe Acrobat Addintools Assist for Microsoft Excel 1.5 Addintools Create for Microsoft Excel 3.0 AddNewFriends MySpace FriendBlasterPro 10.4 Unlimited AdeptTracker Professional 3.1