This is not the post you're looking for

This post is not for you. It's a video of the kids doing nothing and it's pretty boring.

It's for my younger sister, Mary. Also known as "Aunt Mary" or "Mar-Mar" to my little chickens. She was our allo-parent and our aunt-nanny and we used to see her almost every day. Now we never even Skype.

So here you go, Mary. Some kids sitting at a breakfast table. Because she asked for more video and we miss her so.

Teaching Manners

Conversation in our kitchen this morning:

Mela: Mama! I went pee pee in the potty. That means I get a treat!

Me: You're right, Mela. How about some nice fresh berries? (trying to phase out the awesome junk treats at this point ...)

Mela: Okay!

Me: Here you go, the last five raspberries. But I hear Nathan coming, so make sure to eat them quickly.

Mela: La la la. Yum, yum, raspberries. Five raspberries. La la la ...

Me: Mela, you need to eat the raspberries quickly. HE'S COMING!!!

(Nate enters kitchen and instantly senses presence of treat. Begins tracking prey.)

Me: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HIDE THE RASPBERRIES OR EAT THEM NOW!!!!

Mela: No, Mama. I'm going to share. Here you go, Nate. I share a raspberry with you.

Me: Oh. Yeah. That's right, we're supposed to share, aren't we? Good work, Mela.

Nothing like a lesson in manners from your two year old.

Like a rocket ship!

Mela's changing.

She can pretend things now. Today she put on Chris's belt and announced she was "Daddy" and was going to work. It's the first time she's done something like that. She gave me a kiss (still calling me Mama but with a low voice) and marched out the bedroom door.

She then "came home," put on slippers and said she had to go to hockey.

Hilarious.

She's also into catch phrases right now. As in, "like a rocket ship." For example:

Mela: I gave Nate his teddy 'cause he was soo grumpy.

Me: Great idea -he's not crying now!

Mela: Yeah! Nate not crying!

Me: That's right. You're such a great sister.

Mela: Yeah, I'm a good sister. Like a rocket ship!

In Nate news, he's learned to kiss (finally!) and is currently into saying, "Oh dear!" He sounds like a granny. Is this a new sensitive side?? His kisses still leave a lot to be desired (it's basically just an open mouth pressed on yours) and the grumpiness is in full effect these days (nap issues) but it's progress.

Speaking of naps, I'm still in full denial that Mela is dropping her nap. It's been four days straight without one but I can't accept it. It's just totally unacceptable, mostly because of the Mr. Hyde transformation that takes place at around 4 pm.

Luckily, I'm a genius.

A long time ago (when I found out I was pregnant with Nate and still thought having just one kid was hard), I asked a friend for advice on coping with two. She recommended having a teenager come in and babysit for a few hours a week so you can run errands, do chores or even just cook supper.

Almost two years later, I finally got the chance to take her advice. I now have a girl from our neighbourhood come in twice a week from 4-5 pm and play with the kids. Sounds simple but makes all the difference!

For example, had a nice day with the chickens today but by 4pm I was ready to lose it (a non-napping two year old continuously screaming over toys with a greedy, clingy one year old and a pork tenderloin that wasn't going to cook itself).

Then this girl came in, they all went to the basement and played quietly and I cooked a nice meal (and might have drunk some wine).

By the time she left, I had dinner on the table, a (mostly) clean kitchen and a much nicer outlook.

All this for $8!

Between Grammie, cheap babysitters and good (espresso-making) friends, we just might make it through.


Say Click:

We just bought a "temporary" table for our kitchen (supposed to just last until we rip some walls down) and we love it! Having an eat-in kitchen in awesome, especially when you can reach the counter from your seat. It's working so well, I'm actually rethinking the whole reno now.

What's better in the winter than sitting in the sun?

So the only pics I've taken lately are sitting at the new table ...

No pictures, Mama!
Sleepy breakfast:

"Oh dear ..."
The ham changes her mind ...

Report on Business

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a boy playing with dolls (I try to encourage it) ...

... it's just that when his favourite doll is blond and naked, it's hard not to laugh, you know?

In other news, potty training rocks!

I swear, I've organized major, successful events for work and felt less personal pride than I do when my two year old tells me she has to go potty.

We were at her music class today (called "Jump, Jiggle and Jive" but there is a distinct lack of jiving) and she was totally absorbed in playing with all the toys but then ran over and proclaimed, "I have'ta go potty, Mama!"

It was awesome.

The "accident" in her pants yesterday was less awesome ("I didn't wanna come inside to go poo in the potty, Mama!") but they're pretty few and far between.

It's great. It almost makes me think we should've done it sooner except I'm not sure when exactly that would've been. And maybe it wouldn't have gone so well.

For example, if we had've tried before Christmas, Mela would not yet have seen her best friend Nuala use the potty at Pizza Hut, which turned into a major selling point.

Peer pressure. Starts young, never ends.

Say click:

All this peeing in the potty (and not napping) has me tired out ....
Nate keeps Mela company on the couch. And works on his gut.

Please don't let the phone ring ...

So one unexpected complication from the potty training is the whole nap time.

Until now, we've been locking Mela in her room for naptime (haha, we don't "lock" her in ... we just put something on the doorknob so she can't get out).

This has worked very smoothly and was much better than the "chase her out of the bathroom 50 times while she never sleeps" approach that was in place for a while.

However ...

can't do that if she's wearing underpants (needs access to the potty) but it seems weird to put a diaper on her for the nap (basically saying it's okay to pee in your pants sometimes?). And putting the potty in her room just seems like a recipe for a very gross disaster.

So I've been trying the leave-the-door-open-a-bit approach. And we're on day three with no nap.

Which is like saying day three of living with a rabid, feral, crazed animal. On speed.

I finally just turned on a video, switched off all the lights and surrounded Nathan with a pile of trains in the kitchen. Five minutes later and ...

Nate and I are now barricaded in the basement and there is no dinner on the stove. But if you've ever seen a kid miss a couple days worth of naps (especially after all the excitement around here lately), you know it's worth it.

Now if only I could have pizza delivered to my basement.

The great potty miracle

One of the sweetest moments of parenting I've ever had happened yesterday. I was sitting in the living room and heard a little tune.

It meant success. Sweet, overwhelmingly triumphant success.

It was the sound of Mela peeing in her (musical) potty.

Over the last few years, there are a lot of things that we've done wrong or, more often, just muddled our way through.

This time, we finally got one right.

You hear a lot about potty training and how miserable it can be. Apparently the average kid takes about three to six months to train, with some taking a lot longer than that, and often tons of frustration, stress and even tears.

Not us. We waited. One by one, other kids her age shed their diapers and while we envied their stink-free houses, we looked at our cautious little girl and said, not yet. We watched for signs of readiness and concerned ourselves with packing, and moving, and guest-ing, and then moving and unpacking, etc.

Finally this weekend seemed right. Mela actually said, "I don't want to wear diapers anymore. I want to wear underwear."

That's about as good as it gets for readiness.

So we followed my mom's advice, which after having trained four kids of her own, comes down to: take off their pants and let them run around (outside in the summer, if possible). This has also been called the "bare bottom and 75 bucks technique (the money is for dry cleaning your carpets).

Luckily, I also found a book last week ("Toilet training in less than a day"), which sounded ridiculous but laid out a really clear method for success with the bare-butt approach.

It's not really one day of work, because it takes some real preparation (take your child shopping and buy a musical potty, get a peeing doll, have them pick out nice underpants, talk about the whole thing leading up to it, etc). By the way, it seemed a little weird to spend money on something like this but in our case, it was totally worth it.

The thing I liked best was that you start the day by having the child teach the (slightly disturbing) doll the potty technique first. And at one point, the doll even "has an accident" and the child sees the consequence (over-correction by repeated practice runs to the potty and having to clean the mess, plus lots of talking about important people in the child's life who "don't like wet pants.")

So when it's the child's turn to learn, they've already seen the whole sequence and they know what to expect. And they already have a couple treats in their belly (dolly earns treats when she pees in the potty but the kid gets to eat them - awesome), so they're feeling pretty positive about the world and a little more ready to try something new.

It's still tough, though. The book's authors totally ignore the situation where your child is dancing naked around the house, refusing to wear the underwear or do a single "practice run" that they make sound so easy.

And you have to totally clear your schedule, evacuate the house (the boys had an adventure together!) and it takes almost every minute of the whole day.

But we took a kid who had never used a potty before and by the afternoon, as I was sitting (exhausted) in the living room, she stopped playing, ran to the potty BY HERSELF, got her pants down, and made that little potty play its musical tune.

It made my heart sing.

The best part was the bonding time we had together. We've had some rocky times over the past few months, most of it just because she's two and that's what two year olds are all about (god help them). Most days consist of her doing stuff just to annoy me (I swear) or being overlooked compared to her "squeaky wheel" brother. We have some laughs together but nothing like yesterday. Yesterday I HAD to devote my attention solely to her all day and we had something positive to focus on and we both loved it. We laughed and played and celebrated each full potty like she'd won the lottery.

I have to say again, I couldn't believe how fast she got it! At one point in the afternoon, I was cooking and she ran past me, whipped down her pants, sat down and said, "Phew! That was close!" Again, this is the kid that until yesterday had never worn underwear.

Don't get me wrong ... we're not out of the woods yet. Today we had to take the next step and learn how to do it all while wearing pants. And with distractions around, like playing with friends. She had one little accident but did great all day. The next step will be to ease off the treats (Reese's Pieces!), which are really the main reason she did any of it in the first place.

And we haven't left the house yet - I have no idea how that's going to happen.

But we travelled a great distance in one single day. And we had fun doing it.

It was about time we had a win!

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Say click:

Nate & the gate:
I have a new strategy for keeping the kids occupied while I try to do the breakfast sprint: they "cook" breakfast for me!
Nate is FINALLY getting to the age when we can skip eating at the table and have a "picnic" once in a while (i.e. sit on the couch and watch TV). It's not often but it's a great break for the Mama from the endless drudgery of up and down and bibs and boosters and the whole routine. Check out the cuties eating their scrambled eggs:
My precious baby:
Mela checks her potty progress:
She decides all is well and goes back to eating her tuna fish sandwich:

And finally ... I have friends who read this blog and think Nathan does nothing but smile all day long. Which he sometimes does. But he also sometimes cries all afternoon. Today I was trying to cook dinner and get Mela to get some sleep and Nate was a wreck. He'd had an awesome nap and a good snack but has a bit of a cold right now and was just plain out of sorts.

Here's a small taste of unhappy Nate (context: he was mad at me 'cause I wouldn't let him go upstairs to see his exhausted, non-napping sister):


Five minutes later, he's crying again, but at least his sister's downstairs and happy now:

Stinky house + Walking with two toddlers in the winter

Imagine this covered in ice and snow ...

Am I the only one whose house smells like poo?

Just wondering. Because it does. And it bugs me.

It's not like we don't try hard, either. I change the diaper pails about every three days (far before they're full, which is when I used to change them, back when I only had one pooper). I usually spray the pails with disinfectant and wipe them out and when Chris comes home, he takes the bags outside.

But still. Constant reek.

And the worst part is, if it smells bad to me, what does it smell like to people who don't live here all the time (I'm sure my brain has habituated to it at least a little). Are they like, "Let's not go visit that house today ... it stinks."?

I'm not sure what else to do, other than potty train (tried that for about 1/2 a day yesterday and was exhausted). Nate's room is the worst (he is a stink machine) but I can't exactly open a window to air things out, not in the dead of winter.

So if you come visit my house, consider yourself warned.

Speaking of winter, actually made it out of the house this morning. We were getting a little "shack wacky" (as my friend Mel calls it) and decided to venture to the library.

Which is supposed to be close. When we were house hunting, I was insistent (some would call it stubborn) that our home be within walking distance of the "downtown" amenities (library, bridge, grocery, sportsplex, etc).

When we found this place, we could actually see the bridge from our driveway and Google Maps told me it was only a 15 min walk to the library. Hooray!

It's not true. Not in a winter snowstorm with two young toddlers and a vicious hill in between. (I have take to calling our city, "Lil 'Frisco" because of the insane hills. Seriously!)

Because of this, I've decided that Google Maps needs to have a sub-feature under Walking called "Walking with two toddlers in the winter."

This feature would automatically add 20 minutes of prep time for dressing them (e.g. chasing, pining down, wrapping in various articles of clothing, more chasing, boy crying, searching for a soother to end the crying, searching for various articles of clothing that have been removed and strewn throughout the house by girl while grownup was looking for soother, lugging gigantic double jogging stroller up from basement, treating wounds suffered from lugging pointy stroller up from basement, stuffing two marshmallowed, thrashing kids into restraints within stroller, chugging cold coffee to boost morale, etc).

It would then add extra time depending on wind. For example, the wind speed is 35 km today. Which meant every time a big gust came, it became twice as hard to push the gigantic stroller, not to mention having to constantly stop to reassure the little chickens squawking inside that they weren't actually going to DIE from a bit of cold air.

And the hill. My own personal Everest. I think at one point, the incline is actually 45 degrees. Which may not sound that bad but when combined with pushing almost 100 lbs of weight (32 lb stroller + about 60 lbs of little piglets) in front of you, it's madness.

I actually made Mela yell "Go Mama!" the whole way up the damn hill, both to keep her awake (not that she's napping now) and help me survive. The only good thing I can say about it is that maybe I'll get really ripped from living here.

So anyway, the "15 minute walk" is actually half an hour. Of torture. Not including getting-out-of-the-house time. Didn't tell me that, did you, oh mighty Google??!

But at least we got out. I may have pulled both hamstrings and fed my children nothing but lemon scones from a (awesome) coffee shop for lunch but we have new books to read and we got out.

I'm staying inside tomorrow.

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Say click:

Today's photo series is called, "Nate the Vampire." The good news is, he likes my beet soup. The bad news is, well, it can look pretty gruesome: