Handy Dylie

I feel like a bad mom because I can't afford to put Dylan into any kind of extracurricular activities. I wish I could get him into karate, or football, or something. I think it would help to get his wiggles out, teach him valuable things, and give him exercise. We're just not in that place right now, which makes me sad. But at least we're not overscheduled, right? It's a relief not to have to drive him all over.

For awhile, Dylan would always ask if he could take Kung Fu lessons. I kept telling him the same thing - we can't afford it right now, but maybe someday. Then I read on my friend, Camille's, blog, about her kiddos going to this free Home Depot thing. I guess the Home Depot does these free classes for kids on the first Saturday of every month. They build something new every single month. I mentioned these classes to Dylan, and he latched right on to that idea. He loves putting things together and building things - this is right up his alley.

So Benji took him the first weekend in October. They built toy boats:

This is one of my all-time favorite Dylan faces:

Voila:

November's class was a spice rack, but we totally forgot to take him to it. I feel bad. And I had been looking forward to getting another spice rack. A girl can never have too many spice racks. That's how I feel about it. Seriously. I do a lot of cooking and have a LOT of spices.

But I swear I'm going to try to remember the December class. I'm not sure what they're making then - something Christmasey, probably?

He helper, too.

A couple of months ago, Mark, Megs' hubby, asked if he could borrow Ben's Something Saw. Ben has like ten different kinds of saws; I can't remember which kind Mark needed. Anyways. So Ben went over and helped Mark in the ways of sawing manliness:

What was Mark building, do you ask? Hark:

An old-fashioned arcade game!!! Cool idea, huh? It looks amazing - very professional. We're going to go over and play on it in a few days. Huzzah!

I helper.

Mikey loves to help me load and unload the dishwasher. The other day, he was handing me silverware to put away, and I said, "Thank you so much, Micah!" He looked at me and said, importantly, "I helper."

Well, I helper, too, Mikey. I helped Megs put a little garden area in her front yard. There was this corner with a bit-o-dead grass on it - this is where Megs wanted to dig the grass out and put in some prettiness:

So we dug and dug and pulled and pulled and dug and pulled, etc. etc. I think there once was a big bush there, because we kept digging up huge roots and woody branches. It was pretty hard work.

We mixed some gypsum and potting soil into the area - the soil was pretty clayish. Then we made a little trench so Megs could put this cool trim stuff in the ground. Brynnan was my little trench digger:

He helper.

Jonas was having fun just digging around. I know he was doing something specific, but I can't remember what...

I had to take off, so I didn't get to do the most fun part - putting in the plants. She put in some hyacinth bulbs (I'm so jealous. I really want some hyacinths. Maybe next fall I can buy some...), tulip bulbs, some of my iris starts, and then some cute little pansies that she got for like 10 cents each:

Cuteness, huh?? Those pansies had a good month of balmy weather before the Blizzards from Hell hit us last week. It was summer, and then it was winter. No fall. There's like a foot of snow out there right now. Sheesh. I'm so retiring to some place warm.

Our Potty Training Plight

Ohhhh this little boy. He is a killer. A cute killer. C.K.

So. At the beginning of September, we were at church, and Sadie had to go potty. So I went to take her, and Micah pitched a fit, so I took him along, too. We were all in the handicapped stall, because that's the only one that fit all three of us.

Micah watched Sadie pee, and then he was all, "Potty? Me? Potty?"

"You want to go potty?"

A nod.

"Are you sure??"

A nod.

"Okayyyyy..."

So I undid his pants and diapie, and put him on the toilet, fully expecting him to sit there for .2 seconds before screaming to get off, but he totally peed. Right then and there.

I was like, oh my gosh. He's ready for potty training! He's not even 2 1/2 yet! Sweet! Let's do this thing!!!

The next day, I took him to the bathroom every half an hour. He peed every time. It was awesome. I had him be naked from the waist down - this has worked magic with Dylan and Sadie. For some reason, they just didn't want to pee out in the open air. They had no problem peeing on undies or pullups or pants, but they didn't want their peeing exposed.

So we did this for two weeks with very few accidents. But Micah wouldn't ever tell me that he had to go, nor did he make any effort to head to the bathroom himself. I talked to Mom about it, and she was like, "He needs to have that urgency feeling. You need to take him less often so he can recognize the urgency feeling." So I started only taking him every two hours, and we still did the naked thing.

The kid peed all over my house. He obviously has NO problem peeing in the open air. No problem at all. He peed on my couch. My carpet. His bed. His carpet in his room. The kitchen chair. His sister's floor. It was so traumatic for me. I really, really hate cleaning up excrement. This is why I don't have a dog.

Mom's BFF, Cheryl, was like, "Just give it 72 hours. I call it the 72 hour/72 dollar training. It will only take 72 hours, and then when he's trained, you pay $72 to get your carpets cleaned." I fought the good fight, but after two weeks of Pee Mania, I had HAD it.

I was talking to Megs, and she was like, "Put him in undies and pants. That will provide more of a barrier between him and your couches and carpets, yet he'll still get that uncomfortable wet feeling and the urgency feeling." Good call, Megs.

So we did that. At first, he would be wet for a long time and not tell me, nor have any problems with it. But slowly, as the weeks have passed, he has been telling me that he is wet - after he has already wet his pants, of course. Still no telling me BEFORE the fact.

Here's the thing. He doesn't have that many pants and undies, compared to how often he has accidents. Quite often, we run out of clothing for him to wear. Which turns into a problem if we have to go anywhere. So here's what we do now. We do the he-pees-all-over-his-undies-and-pants thing, going through several sets of undies and pants in the day. When there's only one pair of clean, dry pants left, I put him in a diaper for the rest of the day while I catch up on laundry. I still take him to the potty every two hours, and he pees on demand. But there's a diaper there to catch any more accidents until we have more clean pants available.

He has obviously pooped in his undies a few times, which makes me sooo mad. It's the grossest thing ever. Two-year-old poop is like man poop. None of this cute, baby, mustard-seed poop. We're talking hard-core, nasty, adult-sized poop. One time, I was so upset about it that I took him outside (this is when it was still really warm outside) and sprayed his bare butt with the hose. That traumatized him, but not enough for him to stop doing it. I tried doing cold showers for awhile on him, too, but it's too hard for me to wrestle him in to the shower, and he fights so hard that he gets poop pieces on me. Which is really horrible. Plus, I've heard that if you make it a traumatizing thing, they won't successfully potty train.

So I'm trying to make it a pleasant experience. I give him a piece of candy every time he goes pee for me. He tries to pull a fast one on me all the time. He'll ask for the candy first, and then not pee. So now I don't give him the candy until he pees.

Lately, he'll do this thing where he'll pee a little bit, and I'm like, "Are you done?"

And he's like, "Yeah." So then I give him a candy. And then he's like, "Oh. Finish. Finish."

I'm like, "You need to finish?"

"Yeah." So he'll get on, pee a little bit more, and then go, "Candy?" Like, "I peed again. I should get a candy every time."

I'm like, "No, dude. You get one candy for this whole series of small pees." He screams at me and tries to hit me, and I tell him not to hit, and he tries again, and I put him in time out for two minutes, and he screams the whole time....

Life is special with him.

We've basically plateaued. We sure aren't moving forward, but I'm also not interested in going backwards, you know? He can pee on demand. So we'll do this system for now, until I'm ready to be more hard core. I hardly have time to pee myself, much less teach Micah how. I'm still really busy with all of these kiddos. So that's that. He really is still so young. He's 2 1/2 years old today, actually. And he's a bit immature for his age. So I won't get really mad about this until he's older. I guess. I have a friend whose four-year-old is still not training. Yikes. Bikes. And I have a couple of other friends whose kids took an entire year to potty train. I feel a little bit better when I hear these things.

Alaskan Alms

My folks went on a cruise to Alaska a few months ago. They brought me back some cool stuff. A very modern, cool-looking watch from a shop on the boat:

And an ulu:

You're supposed to be able to chop stuff with it - nuts, veggies, anything. I've been too chicken to try it out, though. And I'm usually in such a hurry when I'm cooking that I'm like, "I'll just use my regular knife. I'll try the ulu out later." I feel guilty. I really need to give it a shot.

Thanks for thinking of me, Mom and Pops. I LOVE getting gifts and souvenirs.

I am NOT going down this road again...

We had Failing to Thrive issues with Micah. It was a nightmare. You can read about it here. Basically, he had weak cheeks. No, I'm not making that up. So he wouldn't drink very much, because he would get tired. But then he was still hungry, but too tired to suck. And then he wouldn't nap, because he was hungry. So no naps and no food for four months. He was a skeleton. An occupational therapist finally figured out what was going on and got me some specialized bottle nipples. She also had me do this thing where I fed Micah for ten minutes, and he rested for half an hour. Then fed for ten minutes, then rested for half an hour. Around the clock. It was exhausting, but it bulked him right up. However, because of those first nightmarish four months, he is still approximately four months behind in every milestone. He's had occupational and developmental therapy ever since he was four months old. And he still struggles with certain kinds of foods. Stuff that is crunchy (a.k.a. carrots, celery, etc.) or exceedingly chewy (licorice, beef jerky) is difficult for him. He often pockets those kinds of foods in his cheeks.

Gage and I had a WIC appointment on Friday. He was supposed to be measured and weighed, and I was totally excited. I thought, Oh, I can totally tell he's grown. No more failure to thrive business for us, no siree.

They weighed him, and he weighs one pound less than he should right now. (He weighs nine pounds, 13 ounces. He's three months old.)

Sigh. Not again...

Here's what I think is going on. He was always a bit of a spitter-upper, but he wasn't projectile vomiting like Dylan had as a baby, so I thought it wasn't that bad. He got the flu a month ago, and he had diarrhea and more spitting up that week. His diarrhea cleared up, but his spit-up has been crazy bad ever since that week. He was soaking like three burp cloths per feeding, but I thought, "Oh, it always looks like way more milk coming up than it really is."

Well, apparently, more is coming up than is being kept in. I know this time it's not a weak suck - he sucks those bottles down in fifteen minutes flat. So that's a relief. The WIC lady asked how many ounces I'm giving Gage, and how many feedings in a 24-hour period, so I told her, and she said that should be plenty of food for him. She suggested that we try that specialized formula that Similac makes, called Alimentum. I told her that Dylan drank that, and that it really helped him with his projectile vomiting. She gave us some checks to get one month's worth of Alimentum, to see if it helps. If it seems to be helping, we need to get a note from Gage's pediatrician saying that Alimentum is a medical necessity, and then WIC will continue to pay for it. Which is a dang good thing, because one teeny tiny little can of Alimentum is $25, my friends.

We are going to nip this thing in the bud. No more skeleton babies. Operation Chub Up Gage is underway.

And so far, the Alimentum seems to be helping A LOT. He hardly spits up at all anymore. He stinks now, though, which is sad. His breath and face and body smell like instant potato flakes. And his poop... ugh. Don't even get me started. Toxic. Nasty. I don't remember Dylan being so stinky on that stuff. But today, when I asked Nat and Pete if Dylan had been stinky, they said, without hesitation, "Oh yeah. He stunk." Sad. But I'll take a stinky chubby baby over a sweet-smelling, failure-to-thrive skeleton baby any day.

So that's our situation right now. Let's move on to something more pleasant. Pictures of him! He's soooo cute.

Gage with my momma:

Deep Thoughts by Gage:

He has the best smile ever. It looks just like Dylan's smile:

He is such a lover:

Look at those luscious lips:

His big barrel chest. All of my kids are barrel-chested:

Could he be any cuter? Nope.

Old Trusty

When Ben and I got married, we received a really pretty red stand-up counter mixer. It died like three months later. We've used our hand mixer ever since, and it's been fine. It could do anything that a stand-up could do, and more.

But then, a couple of months ago, our hand mixer died. Mom offered her old stand-up mixer to us (she only uses her hand mixer), and I jumped at the chance to adopt it. I love this thing:

It's older than me. For reals, yo. It's amazing. I mixed many, many batches of cookies with that thing.

Along with the mixer, we got an attachment for blending, one for food processing, one for kneading bread, and one for grinding meat. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to use that attachment. Unless we're in the apocalypse or something, only have roasts, and have a hankering for hamburgers instead. I'm not sure I'd even use it then. I'd be like, "We'll just have to go without hamburgers until the millenium starts, m'kay?"

It comes with two glass mixing bowls, one small, and one large. We had the mixer one week before I accidentally dropped the large mixing bowl, shattering it into a million pieces. That bowl lasted 34 years with my mom. It lasted one week with me. Jeez. I am such a dropper. ("She's one of those Droppers!!") I drop stuff, like, daily. I dropped and shattered my boys' light fixture thingey. So they have a bare bulb hanging from their ceiling that blinds everyone. I also dropped our entry way fixture. So we have a bare bulb there, too. We're painfully short on drinking glasses, because I've dropped and shattered so many. (I keep telling Ben to only buy plastic drinking glasses, but he says they're cheesy.) Just call me Butterfingers.

Here's the crazy/awesome thing. My large metal bowl that came with the mixer we got for our wedding (I kept it for all these years, because it works just fine as a normal bowl) actually fits in the grooves of this mixer, like it came with the mixer and was meant for it all along. A little miracle.

I'm still really mad about that glass bowl, though.