Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Updates: The Good, The Bad, and The Meh

Look at that, my husband ends his vagabond ways and comes home, and I can't eek out a blog post in over a week. I think it's pretty clear what's holding me back from being a wildly popular blogger with ad revenue and freelance jobs up the wazoo.

Time to update on a few issues.

The Good: I mentioned that we are attempting to potty train Lucy. This is (knock on copious amounts of wood) going very, very well. Last week we stuck her in pull ups all week, and she did a decent job keeping them dry for much of the day. Over the weekend we tried her in underwear each morning as we hung around the house. This girl is CRAZY for her Hello Kitty and Tinker Bell underwear, let me tell you. Absolutely LOVES it. And as a result, she insisted on wearing her underwear on Monday morning. In an effort to keep moving forward rather than forcing her to stay reliant on diapers/pull-ups, I agreed. And brought in 4 extra outfits to daycare.

Surprisingly, she managed to stay dry all day at school until a pee accident at around 3:30, where she apparently got a bit too engrossed in playing and realized too late that she had to use the potty - she basically peed down her leg as she informed her teacher that she needed to go potty. She wore a diaper at nap time, but kept it dry.

Since then, she has kept her underwear dry all day long (still wearing a diaper at nap, but keeping it dry). She is waking up wet in the morning, but I know that night-training can happen a lot later, and frankly, I am so incredibly astounded with how well she has taken to potty training. I am blown away! And now grappling with how to handle her new-but-still-tenuous skill when we travel up to Maine next week for vacation. I have a feeling that a 27-month-old in underwear is not exactly an awesome idea for an airplane ride, but I don't want to give her the wrong idea about what's appropriate or inadvertently discourage her. Maybe I'll just subtly stick a waterproof pad under her butt to protect her airplane seat?

The Bad: With two children, it's a miracle that they don't both drive us crazy more often. I am sure that will come, but for now, they seem to be alternating with each other in phases of easy and hard. And if Lucy is being pretty pleasant (for a two-year-old) and easy with this whole potty-training thing, well, that leaves Finn to take up the "hard" torch. Which he is doing with gusto!

You may recall a blog post or two (or fourteen) talking about Finn's, um, lack of listening skills. And some sheer bratitude thrown in. Well, for a time, he was showing some improvements. In the daycare behavior scale of green-yellow-red, he was earning a fair number of green circles for his good behavior. But that lasted about 3 weeks, and then his teachers were switched up, and then switched back again, and the system wasn't used consistently during the confusion. Now that it's back, he's basically scoring reds all around. And for those that don't know, red = BAD. Not bad as in "my child is beating all the other children up," but bad as in "my child refuses to control his impulses and listen to a damn thing his teachers tell him to do." It is so, so frustrating. So I've devised a new reward chart, with a brand new reward system, to try to get Finn to STRIVE. EARNESTLY. For good behavior (green circles). We'll see how it works. Finn is now officially the oldest kid in his classroom, and I think that is a bit of a disadvantage in terms of behavior. He is leaps ahead of some of the younger kids in terms of academic ability, so he gets a little bored during circle/class time. And he rules the roost, so to speak - he is finally turning into a bit of a leader instead of a follower, but he isn't necessarily using his influence for GOOD.

Though he's pretty good at making mischief all by himself, too.

He has also been more emotional lately, more prone to resorting to whining, shouting, and crying immediately, rather than trying to first ASK NICELY for something that he wants. I think he needs some intense positive attention from M. and me, and I just hope we can do that for him without losing our shit on a regular basis. Oh, FIVE! May you have better things in store for us than FOUR has had! Which was, admittedly, better than THREE (I think? It's possible I blocked the worst memories out). Let's try to roll with this "each year gets better" thing, eh?

The Meh: So, I received the bathing suits I ordered from Lands End, and it actually turned out very well. The one piece suit requires a LOT of shimmying to get into, but once it's on, it makes my torso look like a curvy, jiggle-free body part. Which it decidedly is not (curvy - yes; jiggle-free - no). So that's great. Unfortunately, it doesn't do the same for my thighs, which lie directly below the edge of the bathing suit. The contrast is bothersome for me, but hopefully only me, as we ladies are all our own worst critics. The two-piece is mostly flattering, but still has the dreaded waistline of the panty portion, which (unless you have some ungodly low percentage of body fat, which I do not) creates a love-handle effect unless you Urkel the panties in a fashion that would cause death by mortification if anyone found out. But it will be my mission to make sure no one actually finds out (with the exception of the 8 of you that read this blog, of course). So, I am keeping both suits, and am pretty pleased with the purchases. Especially given that they were on sale. I only really included them as "Meh" in this blog post because I made Smore's Brownies on Sunday, and have systematically been working my way through the pan with M. in a decidedly non-Weight Watchers' friendly fashion. So it's very possible that by this weekend, the suits will no longer fit.

Time to go run a few extra miles?? :-)

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