Go Potty Go Potty Go Potty Go

We've been working on Soren's potty training for the past week, which is a little hard to sustain at the moment because I don't feel like sitting around the house all day for a week, which is what it seems to require. But we'll have to deal with it eventually, so i figure I'll start off with a half-assed effort and see how that works out. So far, it's OK -- he seems to have the necessary control and awareness of the relevant processes, so he has used the potty successfully a number of times, and yet he does not have the ability to put his diaper back on, so there's nothing he can do about his (short-lived) antipathy toward Potty Time. Grammy sent us a couple potty training videos which are purported to be successful, and Soren certainly does enjoy watching them and singing along with the songs and claiming that, like Paige and Parker Panda, he wears big kid underwear every day. That last item is a lie. We bought him some Cars underwear, but he hasn't put it on yet.

Sigrid, meanwhile, is working on the essential skills of eating, sleeping, and not eating when she's supposed to be sleeping. She's being a little difficult about these things (I'd say she's being very difficult, but I know she's being easy on us in the grand scheme of things). I haven't even tried giving her a bottle lately, since I really seem to be getting nowhere with that, and have instead been giving her some solid food. You know, the basics -- rice cereal, mashed bananas, guacamole, that kind of thing. She digs it in theory, but is not very good at keeping the food in her mouth or swallowing it. She usually gets so excited about the food you put in her mouth that she screeches and sends it oozing into her neck folds. We should probably bathe her more often than we do.

She's also being a pill about going to sleep in her crib. She'll do it 5% of the time, although she'll sleep fine in there if she's already snoozing when you put her down. The rest of the time, she will only fall asleep in the swing. For whatever reason, I really want to pick a fight with her about this, so I keep putting her in the crib, and she keeps yelling for extended periods of time with no sign of stopping until we finally cave and put her in the swing. Chris thinks it's more important to get her used to sleeping 7-hour stretches at night than it is to get her to accept the crib, and I know he's right, but it still bugs me. Why don't children just do as they're told????? Punks.

Luckily, they're cute.




I'm excited because Soren has been writing letters and a couple names ("Soren" and "Ian")! It's so cool! He even drew a picture the other day, of "a cake and an animal that wants to eat the cake". He claims to have drawn the picture for his birthday. I scanned his renditions of his and Ian's names:


"Ian" reads from right to left.



"Soren" is written kind of in a circle; the S is sideways, middle right, and the rest of the letters read clockwise from there (the "N" went off the paper a bit).

I'm so proud!