People used to say that if you wait for a good time to get married, you'll end up alone. If you wait for a good time to have children, your childbearing years will pass you by in a blink.
There is no consensus on when is a good time to have a second child, either, because if you do it too early then for the love of God you have two small children in diapers and you have to toilet-train one while the other is learning to roll over and get into everything he shouldn't be stuffing into his mouth and it is amazing you have any sanity.
If you wait too long then you have finally gotten yourself to the point at which no one needs your help to use the bathroom and then you have to start all over, so don't you just want to get these diaper-wearing and peeing-on-the-carpet years out of the way as soon as possible?
Ahem.
You can see what's been going on around here lately.
But the point is that even once you have aforementioned husband and two children, there is still never a good time to do all the things that need to be done.
For example...just when you need to unswaddle the baby for sleeping because he has now figured out how to roll over onto his belly in the swaddle blanket, that is when he will get a raging head cold and will sneeze rivers of snot all over you, keeping you up half the night so that you too share in the delightful cold and snot river production, so the idea of unswaddling him sounds about as intelligent as the polar bear swim.
Or when you are in desperate need of the traveling toddler toilet to disappear, that is when the toddler will decide that he isn't going to use any toilet anymore for three days for no apparent reason, so that would probably NOT be a good time to switch to the insert that goes on the regular one. (Or let him out of the house.)
It is beginning to seem like there will always be a trip, a special event, a cold, a holiday, a new baby, or just some other bump on the developmental road that will derail my efforts to move forward.
And so...
That is the answer to why I decided to toilet-train the toddler right before going on a ten-day trip to Michigan.* Or why I unswaddled the baby when we're still recovering from colds. Because there was never going to be a good time, so I figured I might as well get it over with now.
Someday I will look back on all of this and laugh...right?
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*Yes, yes, I'm going to write the second part of Adventures in Toilet Training. It's a good story; you'll laugh (at me), you'll cry (maybe, from laughing so hard), but I've been waiting to get some sleep first. Of course if this post is true, I'd better not wait for a good time or I'll never write it. Ok, ok, you've convinced me. I'll write it this weekend.
Giving you my heart
For Valentine's Day I thought I'd put together some photos of my three favorite people, and as I started looking back through my enormous collection, I found myself drawn to these pictures. They're not the typical ones featuring some combination of us posed and smiling. Instead, I hope they show a glimmer of how in love I am with these people. Some of the photos are not ones I ever shared before, usually because I didn't like how I looked in them.
But somehow today, I'm able to recognize their beauty. They make me smile.
They remind me of how love is built on these ordinary moments made extraordinary by the person with whom you're sharing it.
Shooting out lights, hunting down dreams,
But somehow today, I'm able to recognize their beauty. They make me smile.
They remind me of how love is built on these ordinary moments made extraordinary by the person with whom you're sharing it.
Shooting out lights, hunting down dreams,
Figuring out what love really means
Baby, giving you my heart,
Is a real fine place to start.
~Sara Evans
Happy Valentine's Day to my three guys.
Happy Valentine's Day to my three guys.
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Thanks to my sister for recommending this song to me (and giving me the iTunes gift card to buy it)!
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Snapshots
Sebastian, age two and a half:
Milestone: toilet training
favorite pastime: counting and making jokes
favorite book: last month was Thomas' Christmas Delivery, but now loves any numbers book
best manners: "May I please have more yogurt please?"
favorite song: "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by the Beatles
favorite color: pink
favorite color to wear: navy blue
Theo, age 7 months
Milestones: rolling over, sitting up, getting his first three teeth
favorite activity: dancing the tango with Mama
what makes him laugh: tickles under his chubby chin
favorite food: baby oatmeal
sleep habit: two 2-hr naps, 1-2 wake-ups in his 12-hr night, still swaddled
favorite person: Sebastian
Milestone: toilet training
favorite pastime: counting and making jokes
favorite book: last month was Thomas' Christmas Delivery, but now loves any numbers book
best manners: "May I please have more yogurt please?"
favorite song: "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by the Beatles
favorite color: pink
favorite color to wear: navy blue
favorite food:
Me: What's your favorite food?
Sebastian: You like yogurt.
Me: Ok, yogurt.
Sebastian: Rolls, too.
Theo, age 7 months
Milestones: rolling over, sitting up, getting his first three teeth
favorite activity: dancing the tango with Mama
what makes him laugh: tickles under his chubby chin
favorite food: baby oatmeal
sleep habit: two 2-hr naps, 1-2 wake-ups in his 12-hr night, still swaddled
favorite person: Sebastian
Toddlerhood and the Traveling Toilet
Once upon a time, I carried only a backpack, filled with interesting books (and the occasional dull one).
Then I carried a messenger bag, usually overloaded with papers to grade and books of ideas for inspiring lessons. If I ventured out on weekends, everything I needed - and more - could be easily stashed in my purse.
Parenthood arrived, and I was most often seen with a diaper bag dangling off one shoulder and a baby off the other. The diaper bag often weighed more than the baby, but still, it was just one bag.
Flash forward two years, and there are still the diaper bag and baby in arms, but add to it a toddler being held by the hand and...
The Traveling Toilet.
Yes, I look like like the motherhood version of a circus act whenever I leave the house. But really it's not limited to outdoors. We go nowhere - not even up or downstairs - without bringing along the toilet.
You see, when the book titled Toilet Training in Less Than a Day shows up in your life, you think to yourself first that it's really possible that your child will suddenly switch from diapers to the bathroom in, you know, less than a day. Second, you think that means that he will use any toilet, which is great because they have them almost everywhere (except in parks...what is up with that?).
Yeah, neither of those things came true here at Chez Rasler. Admittedly, once I opened the book, it became clear that he'd be using a toddler toilet for the training and there was no mention of when you switch to the regular one. However, I was still pretty sure he'd learn how to do it in a day or two, and we'd figure out the big toilet soon afterward.
You can stop laughing now. It's just not nice to mock first-time parents.
All along, I'd been pretty honest about the fact that I was the one who wasn't ready for toilet training. I set my goal for January, figuring two and a half was pretty reasonable, especially since the current line of thinking is that boys train later and often not until they're after three. Seemed like Sebastian was ready and he was pretty willing to go along with the nightly ritual of sitting on the toilet before getting in his bath.
Then suddenly, he started refusing. There was no interest in using a toilet or being a big boy. From his perspective, the baby's life was the one to have. Theo got all the snuggle time and attention that Sebastian wanted, so Mr. Contrary would refuse to have anything to do with the toilet and its big boy status.
January rolled around, and I picked up the training book again. And it hit me. The Sentence. "Developmentally delayed children may not be ready for the training until 30 months." Umm...what was that? My son, at 30 months old, was in the same boat as the children who have developmental delays?
I think something snapped in my brain. I'd already been fed up with the diaper change battles and washing a load of diapers every single day from one boy or the other. But that sentence was the last straw. We were DONE with toddler diapers, and by we, I mean me.
So I gathered up my materials, drew my line in the sand, and prepared for Training Day. Little did I know then that three weeks later, the Traveling Toilet would still be a major part of my daily ensemble...
{This is the end of part one. Tune in next time to read about the training and its aftermath.}
Then I carried a messenger bag, usually overloaded with papers to grade and books of ideas for inspiring lessons. If I ventured out on weekends, everything I needed - and more - could be easily stashed in my purse.
Parenthood arrived, and I was most often seen with a diaper bag dangling off one shoulder and a baby off the other. The diaper bag often weighed more than the baby, but still, it was just one bag.
Flash forward two years, and there are still the diaper bag and baby in arms, but add to it a toddler being held by the hand and...
The Traveling Toilet.
Yes, I look like like the motherhood version of a circus act whenever I leave the house. But really it's not limited to outdoors. We go nowhere - not even up or downstairs - without bringing along the toilet.
You see, when the book titled Toilet Training in Less Than a Day shows up in your life, you think to yourself first that it's really possible that your child will suddenly switch from diapers to the bathroom in, you know, less than a day. Second, you think that means that he will use any toilet, which is great because they have them almost everywhere (except in parks...what is up with that?).
Yeah, neither of those things came true here at Chez Rasler. Admittedly, once I opened the book, it became clear that he'd be using a toddler toilet for the training and there was no mention of when you switch to the regular one. However, I was still pretty sure he'd learn how to do it in a day or two, and we'd figure out the big toilet soon afterward.
You can stop laughing now. It's just not nice to mock first-time parents.
All along, I'd been pretty honest about the fact that I was the one who wasn't ready for toilet training. I set my goal for January, figuring two and a half was pretty reasonable, especially since the current line of thinking is that boys train later and often not until they're after three. Seemed like Sebastian was ready and he was pretty willing to go along with the nightly ritual of sitting on the toilet before getting in his bath.
Then suddenly, he started refusing. There was no interest in using a toilet or being a big boy. From his perspective, the baby's life was the one to have. Theo got all the snuggle time and attention that Sebastian wanted, so Mr. Contrary would refuse to have anything to do with the toilet and its big boy status.
January rolled around, and I picked up the training book again. And it hit me. The Sentence. "Developmentally delayed children may not be ready for the training until 30 months." Umm...what was that? My son, at 30 months old, was in the same boat as the children who have developmental delays?
I think something snapped in my brain. I'd already been fed up with the diaper change battles and washing a load of diapers every single day from one boy or the other. But that sentence was the last straw. We were DONE with toddler diapers, and by we, I mean me.
So I gathered up my materials, drew my line in the sand, and prepared for Training Day. Little did I know then that three weeks later, the Traveling Toilet would still be a major part of my daily ensemble...
{This is the end of part one. Tune in next time to read about the training and its aftermath.}
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