Cream of Potato Soup

As the title suggests, this is another potty entry. Not for the faint of heart or stomach. Proceed with caution.

I am so frustrated! We have been doing the potty thing when Ev wants to for a few days now with little success, so I figured that today we'd go whole hog. After breakfast (and the usual morning crap) I made Evan take off his diaper and put on training pants (cloth, like regular underpants, but "quilted" to give some extra protection to my rug should we have an accident). Ev was okay with these, but after taking them off to sit on the pot a few times he just abandoned them altogether.

This was fine by me, because he stayed naked all morning and dry all morning. From 8:30 until 11:30 there was nakedness with no accidents. I made him sit on the toilet a few times, but he never went, so I figured he was okay and just didn't have to go. He then asked to put the training pants back on, and that was good, until he promptly wet them.

So that's accident #1. Fine, no big deal, we cleaned up, tried the potty again, went back into a fresh pair of training pants. I asked him every ten minutes if he had to use the potty, and praised him for staying dry. Then the phone rang, and just seconds after I answered it I noticed Evan standing in a puddle. Accident #2, complete with ball of poop. Fantastic.

What it looks like to me is that he's good at holding it, and knows when he has to go. He feels free to go when he has something covering his butt, whether that's underpants or diaper or what have you. So if we could leave him naked all the time, he would never have an accident. And he's stubborn, so he'll wait until I put something on him so he can crap in peace.

That's what's so frustrating. It's obvious that he knows what to do and how to do it--he just won't. I'm tempted to take a few days off from this and try again later, but I'm not sure if that will help either. He's won for the moment--he's back in a Pull Up. But that's just because I have to do a load of laundry so he'll have training pants to wear again.

Posted by jenny at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

No news on the potty training front. We'll have one good day and two bad ones to make up for it, so we're just plugging along. Evan is just one stubborn kid, that's all there is to it.

Today we took advantage of the nice weather to visit Aidan and Logan. We spent the afternoon in their backyard, swimming and jumping and riding around. Everyone had a pretty good time--Evan's always glad to visit his buddies. And among the three boys, we only had one near drowning and two near strangulations, so I guess it was a pretty good day.

We also got to visit Grandma while we were in town. We joined her for dinner and then played some ball in her yard and helped water her plants. Evan was having so much fun there that he didn't want to leave. We sneaked in another quick stop at Uncle Steve and Aunt Stacey's before we headed out of town. It was a busy day, but Ev and I both really enjoyed ourselves.

Now we're home, and Evan's overtired ass is down for the count, with mine soon to follow. Running around is all well and good, but bed is still the best.

Posted by jenny at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a potty entry, so if you don't want to know all about that aspect of our lives, please look away.

It seems we're finally making some progress here. Yesterday I was able to get Ev over his fear of sitting on the toilet (we're using the real toilet, because I figured using a potty chair would just create more work in the end). He sat on it five different times, and each time I'd count a little higher until he was entirely comfortable sitting there. Step one, down.

Today Evan sat on the toilet whenever he wanted, and I would read him a book. Eventually he peed, and was highly praised. He also initiated wiping on his own, which let me know that he has been paying very close attention to me and Mike! For the next day or so, I think I'm just going to let him sit on the pot whenever he asks, and let him get used to the routine. Then this weekend we'll make the push, underpants and all. We don't have any plans, and I figure if we can get a few days of potty work down when we're all home, we'll be in good shape.

God I hope this works. Please think good toilet thoughts for us over the next few days.

Posted by jenny at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Evan had preschool today, and during craft time the kids made binoculars. These lovely binoculars were made of two toilet paper rolls, painted yellow and tied together with yarn. Evan has been stalking prey with them since he got home from school. Look out.

Posted by jenny at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there:

to Evan's daddy, a great playmate and therapist and cuddler, and all around fantastic pop

to my daddy (and Jerry, Steve and Timmy's too), who always makes us laugh and gives us a place to come home to

to Mike and Jo's dad, king of the slide and Mr. Fixit

to Cole's dad and Aidan and Logan's dad, for making my girlfriends mothers so we could become even closer

to Isaiah's dad, who is helping to raise such a sweet little boy

to Wesley and Marcella's dad, who I'm sure is so proud today to have a beautiful new baby girl

and to all the dads to be, new dads, old dads, and any dads I forgot--enjoy your day, and thanks for being wonderful fathers and role models to your children.

Posted by jenny at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No potty progress has been made, but at least the carpets have been cleaned. I'm going to go buy a book Cara recommended this weekend, and maybe that will help. I appreciate all the advice too--keep it coming, please! I'm ready to try anything.

Last night Mike and I were in a bit of a funk. Most of the time, we handle everything that gets thrown our way with no problem. Therapy setbacks, diagnosis changes, whatever--we've been able to roll with it. But last night we were just both hit kind of hard with things. Nothing changed with Evan, but we got to talking a little bit, and we're both at this point of frustration. With behavior, with potty training, with speech. Progress is so slow these days in all areas that we're feeling like we'll never see the sun. Usually, when one of us feels this way, the other will step in with encouraging words and bring everything back up. But yesterday, we both felt so down, and there wasn't anything we could say to get back up there.

We both love Evan so much, and he's such a bright and beautiful child, but it just breaks our hearts to see how hard things are for him. Other kids learn a bunch of new words and sounds every day--ours gets crippled trying to put a vowel sound behind a consonant. He just can't do it, and you can see how much he wants to. The frustration is evident in his eyes, and there's no way we can take that away from him. He's even started growling when he gets upset this way--it's not pretty, but it's the only sound he can make without a struggle.

I'm his mom. I want to make it all better, and I can't. I don't know if it will ever be better for him. Knowing that, and being powerless against it, is so very hard.

Posted by jenny at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's poop everywhere.

We've been starting to try potty training this week. It's not going well. Evan won't sit on the potty, he screams for his diapers, he pees on the floor. And this morning, totally unrelated to potty training, he pooped out the side of his diaper and down his legs and then rolled around on the carpet a little before coming to show me. Oh what a lucky girl am I.

Part of the problem here is that I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know how to potty train a kid. Everything I read says not to push, he'll do it when he's ready, but Evan's almost 3 1/2 and showing no signs of ever getting there. He wants his diapers changed, sure, but that's about the extent of it. His preschool teachers insist that this is our summer and we need to go for it, but no one will tell me how to go about getting him trained.

Evan understands the potty thing, he's interested when we use it, but as far as his own involvement, you can forget it. And I don't know how to get past that. Not to mention the fact that Ev can't or won't tell us when he needs to go. He won't use the sign for potty, and goodness knows we couldn't get him to say it. I don't want to wait much longer to start, but I really don't know what to do next. Help!

Posted by jenny at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Steven and Stacey are married, the wedding was awesome, and we all had a great time.

Okay, so that's glossing over a lot of things. I know you are curious about how Evan did. Well, let's just say he did as well as can be expected under the circumstances. It was 90 degrees yesterday, and the church wasn't air conditioned, so everyone was sweating their butts off during and after the ceremony.

Ev was pretty good about putting his tux on, and he didn't complain too much. He was good natured through most of the getting ready, but once it came time to go down the aisle, that wasn't happening. I gave him a ten second window to decide if he was going to walk down himself, but he took one look at the sea of faces in the church and decided to park himself on the floor. So I just scooped him up, grabbed the pillow, and walked down the aisle myself. It wasn't the cute entrance we were looking for, but it did the job.

Unfortunately, there was no way we could behave during the actual ceremony, so I ended up taking Ev outside to play ball while things were happening. I intended to have him back in the church for the end, so he could walk out with the wedding party, but things ended quicker than I thought they would. Yes, I missed my brother's entire wedding ceremony. I feel terrible about it, and I hope I get to see the video sometime. But then we spent a good hour trying to wrangle Evan into various picture poses, and all was forgotten.

The reception was a blast. Evan was there through the first half hour, and then Mike's folks came and rescued him (I've never seen a kid so relieved to change into shorts and a t-shirt). Mike and I stayed had a great time with our friends and family--the best man's toast was excellent, the food was good, we had so much fun just dancing and laughing with everyone. We got some nice pictures (some I uploaded to Flickr) and will have some wonderful memories of the day.

Posted by jenny at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you had been walking down the Burlington concourse at the Millcreek Mall last night, you would have heard screaming and crying echoing through the halls. The shrieking may have led you to believe that someone was being murdered, right there in front of the Payless Shoes. But no, that was my son, in a dressing room at the Tuxedo Junction. He was being forced by his evil mother to put on his tux to make sure it fit. It did, but it took a lot of carrying on by dear Evan to find that out.

I have much fear for the wedding tomorrow--much fear indeed.

Posted by jenny at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've noticed something about Evan recently. He's a faddish kid. He goes through phases--the spiral notebook phase, the Tony Hawk phase, the no pants phase. Now he's in the middle of his baseball phase. He wants to watch baseball, play baseball, he even finds baseball games on the computer. It's fun, and we're usually willing to indulge him when he shows an interest in something. We want to be encouraging, and help him find things he really enjoys.

But the odd thing about these phases is how they burn out and fade away. You think he's going to be in one forever, then you realize one day that he doesn't do a certain thing anymore. Like the notebook thing. For weeks on end he had a thing for spiral notebooks. He had to color in a spiral notebook, and we had a bunch of them on hand for him to scribble through. And now we've had this one spiral notebook on the dining room table for a while, and it hasn't been touched. It's like Ev woke up one morning, decided he'd outgrown the notebook thing, and moved on. It takes us a couple of days to catch on that he's stopped doing something, but once he does, he never looks back.

I guess it's part of growing up, but it seems so strange. Now we look back and remember these old bits of Evan that don't really exist anymore, but they helped make him the boy he is now. And he's only three. How many more phases will we see in the coming years?

Posted by jenny at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love the way Evan's mind works. He's curious, he's interested, and he loves to learn about the world around him. I get such a kick out of watching him figure something out for the first time. The first time he notices a bug, or realizes he can hit the ball. His eyes light up, he laughs with delight. It's really an amazing thing.

But there's another part of his mind, the irrational part. The "I'm three and I want it my way" part. This is the part that doesn't understand why he can't run out into the street, or why on a 68 degree night he's not allowed to wear fleece pajamas. The part that is terrified of the shower head. These things that make no sense to adult minds, but somehow must make perfect sense to him.

These are the times I wish he could talk to me. I wish he could tell me that he wants the red cup instead of the green one. Instead, we play exhausting rounds of 20 questions to get where he wants to go. I ask and ask and get "neh neh" until I ask the right question--then I'm treated to "yeah!". It can be rather time consuming, but it's how we get through the day.

I just wish I could know more of him, how he thinks. I want to know it all.

Posted by jenny at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's me, I'm the dumbass.

Evan's thing lately has been playing in the car. He wants to pretend he's driving, and play with the seatbelts, and all that other fun stuff. He wants to play every time we get in the car, and he won't get in his seat to go somewhere until we've started the engine and he knows we mean business. This was the case yesterday afternoon, when we were going to pick Mike up from work.

Ev played in the drivers seat, then I said it was time to go. I started the car, he climbed into his seat, and I buckled him in. I then swung the passenger door shut, just as I noticed that Ev had hit the lock doors button while he was playing in the front. Too late! The door had slammed shut, and Ev was locked in the running car.

I told you I was a dumbass.

Luckily, the neighbor was home and I used her phone to call Mike at work. He told me he could catch a ride home with a coworker, and would be there momentarily with his set of keys. So I spent about ten minutes just leaning against the car, trying to entertain Evan through the window. He was very patient, I'll give him that, but we were both very happy when Mike showed up with the keys.

I'm never shutting that door again without checking twice.

Posted by jenny at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)