Potty Training

At 18 months of age, my husband broke out the brand new Bjorn potty we bought in anticipation of potty training our eldest.  At first, the boy just looked at it with curiosity.  But as soon as he found it had no wheels to spin or buttons to push to make lights turn on, he discarded it as trash.

For months, my husband tirelessly jumped up and down like a giddy cheerleader whenever my son has pooped in the potty.  It has been a remarkable display of enthusiasm, considering the source.  The poop, by the way, is absolutely vile.  The smell is not unlike pure evil and will literally burn your face off like a chemical spill landed on you.  I can't possibly describe it aptly without offending most or all of you, so I won't go further.  Just know that solids make toddler diapers into deadly weapons.  If we just lobbed them at our enemies, there would be no war.

We can count on one hand the amount of times our son has gone #1 or #2 in the potty, which I think is pretty good, considering he isn't even 2 yet.  But the more impressive feat is the fact that now we can usually tell when he is about to go in his diaper just by looking at his face.  He will be playing at the table, with his cars, trains, whatever.  Then, quite suddenly, he will stop mid-step and just gaze off into the nothingness.  Occasionally, he'll look in my direction as if to say, "HERE IT COMES."

The times we have actually acted fast enough to get him into the toilet, he has managed a little tiny nugget.  Alas, it is not usually the case.  The husband hides a horrified grimace while he cleans the kid's bottom and dumps the offending diaper in the trash.

Our diaper pail smells like several things died inside.

Two Teething Tots

So big brother is teething.  His back molars are finally coming in, as all the books and Internet sites predicted they would around age two.  And now little brother has decided to cut a few teeth, too, at almost 4 months.  He's been drooling pretty crazily for about two months, however, so we believe his gums were bothering him far before now.  He regularly drenches at least 5 or 10 bibs a day, depending on how much he throws up after eating.  Sounds glamorous?  Totally is.

Big brother teethes at night, but chews on things during the day.  When he chews, we know he's feeling something unpleasant in his mouth, and he's trying to relieve that discomfort.  He gets tons of sympathy, as long as he doesn't turn into the Terrible Two Tot.  That gets very little sympathy from either of us.

However, at night, he's been waking up crying, usually looking for his pacifier.  (Yes, we still give him a pacifier at night.  He uses it to sleep, and we are unapologetic about it.  Without the pacifier, life would suck and suck hard.)

It's the crying at night that kills me. We have considered ourselves lucky with the baby, because his five hour stretches at night usually give us enough time to recharge our batteries.  But big brother waking at any given moment during his sleep has been killing us.  It's interrupting important REM sleep, and this old body is not having it.  In fact, it regularly tells me how displeased it is with me by giving me various bouts of illness, gastrointestinal issues, and a variety of unpleasant symptoms that are brought on by exhaustion.  That and my hair falling out in clumps due to the post-pregnancy "fall" is making me one hot MILF.

Oh, Lord, please give me some sleep.  Or hair.

Sleepless in the City

After reading a fellow mommy's blog, I realize what a slacker I have become when it comes to posting.  I remember fondly those days of one child and blogging, and I laugh at my past self for complaining relentlessly about not having time to do things on the Internet. Ha. Hahaha.

Now I have two little boys and it has not only become difficult to find a moment of time to myself, it has become downright impossible.  Without my fabulous husband, I fear I would never NOT have a child either clinging to my skirt or to my boob.  

At three and a half months, my newborn is no longer a newborn.  That reddish hue on his unsettled skin has become predictably soft and impossibly pink.  His sleeping patterns have become more consistent at three to five hour stretches a night...more than we could have possibly asked for at this point in his life.  Why are we so thankful for what seems like a pittance of sleep?  We remember our first born, that's why.  The wailing went on for hours...oh the wailing and screaming.  And it always happened around the same time every night, right before we tried to put him down for the night.  It was as if he thought he was never going to wake again.  Ugh, it was straight up awful for about four months solid.  We thought we might die from exhaustion.

However, our not-so-newborn took to sleep like a champ from the get go.  He slept three hours at a time, all through the day and night until he hit his stride at ten weeks or so when he began stretching his night time sleep to five hours.  Bliss, I tell you.  

The only problem with having a baby that sleeps is that I am tempted to stay up until midnight and watch what my Tivo has saved for me.  The urge to reconnect with the outside world is powerful and I never resist it for too long.  Sure, it feels great to go to sleep at eight or nine, but what fun would that be?  I'm missing good trash television and I need to be informed of the ins and outs of Brangelina.  This is important stuff, people.

Of course at 5:30 a.m. when both boys seems to wake within twenty minutes of one another I am rueing the moment I decided that Law and Order reruns were far more important than getting to bed.  It's torturous to pull my body into clothes and brush my hair...which is why my hair often looks like I have been hit repeatedly by a car.  I smell bad, too.  Shower?  What's that?  OH, THAT.  No, that doesn't happen every day, either.