Norah's Double Standard

Potty Training Report.

Yes. It's that time again. Now it's Norah's turn. Let me just say that I am REALLY looking forward to the day when I no longer have to mess with diapers. They have become such a mainstay of my life for the past FIVE YEARS that, honestly, I'm not sure how I'm going to process them going away.

I mean, I'm super happy about it. Not only will we save a gob of money every month, we'll also free up a cubby hole in our entertainment center where we've been storing diaper stuff for half a decade for . . . well, the kids' clothes probably because I am too lazy to take their clothes upstairs after each washing and have to go back upstairs two or three times a day whenever they need different clothes. It's one of my great failings, but there you have it. There's also a chance that we'll put entertainment related stuff in there. Who knows. Doors will open and we will have options.

But, on the other hand, it's also been a pretty major part of my household duties up to this point. I will lose one of my major bargaining chips in the family. I won't be able to say "But I've had to change thirty diapers this week, YOU do _____ (whatever I want to get out of doing)." And then there will be the sense of loss, the sense of something missing from my life. Even bad things have a way of becoming part of what's normal, and, when it's gone, its absence is felt.

Diapers signify babies, and not having to change them anymore is undeniable proof that we don't have babies anymore, we have big kids. Our sweet little baboos are getting big! Sometimes, it's all too much to take . . . .

Naw. I'm joking. I can't wait for them to be in school.  They're driving me crazy. And I will NEVER miss diapers or changing them. Sure watching them get old so fast is a bit tough. Most notably I am affected by how quickly they move from one favorite thing to the next. It's kind of depressing, really. Just when I'm getting the hang of Gabe loving Power Rangers or Star Wars or Norah loving her little people and animals (she was pretty obsessed with all things small for awhile there) or Polly Pockets, they couldn't care less about those things anymore and I'm left wondering how long it will be before I, too, am obsolete. It's a little sad.

But god I won't miss the diaper changing. Now I just need to get through a year or so of butt wiping and finally, dear god, I will only have my own waste disposal to worry about. It will be a blessed, glorious day.

Anyway, I should probably also address the whole boy vs. girl potty training truism--that girls are easier than boys to potty train. Honestly, I don't know. Gabe was awful, there's no denying that. It took forever (almost a year from the time we started trying to coax a toilet visit out of him until he finally was doing it on his own reliably enough that he didn't need to wear a pull-up to bed). And there were, of course, many disaster stories with him (refer back to that year long period of awful here on the blog). But I'm wondering if how bad we thought it went was just a product of how hypersensitive we were to him NEEDING to potty train and not really knowing what to expect from the process. Now, obviously, since we've been through it, we're just sort of letting it happen with Norah.

And it is just sort of happening now. Finally. The thing is, it's taken very nearly as long as it did with Gabe. We started her on the road to using the toilet last fall. We've been shifting her between pull-ups and diapers pretty much that whole time and trying, entirely in vain, to get her to use the toilet whenever she's had a pull-up on.

There haven't been many disasters.  Just one, really--last Friday, she had a pull-up on for nap time. When she came down, she said she needed to potty, so she went into the bathroom to use her little training toilet. She demanded that she could pull her pants down on her own, so I left her to it. About a minute later she called out, "I've got poop on my finger." Uh oh, I thought. So I went in and, sure enough, she had poop on her finger. And another finger. And pretty much all of her fingers. And her hand. And her leg. And her back. And her pants. And all over her training toilet. And on the floor. And in the trash can.  Apparently she had pooped during her nap. And despite that she poops just about every nap time now (ruining almost all of them), for some reason I didn't think to check her pants before she pulled them off. And when she pulled them off, poop pretty much went everywhere. To her credit, she tried to cover up the mess by cleaning it up as best she could, putting the pull-up and one of the big piles of poop in the trash. The rest of it, however, was everywhere.

But somewhere in the last four days or so, Norah has begun to take this potty training thing seriously. She's been good about getting in there when she needs to go (and we've been asking her every hour or so to make sure she hasn't forgotten). Today, though, I haven't even had to ask. The timer on the stove hasn't been able to go off to remind me to ask her (because I need these kinds of reminders to keep something at the front of my mind--but I've addressed the seriously addled state of my brain before, so no need to beat that dead horse). She keeps coming up, about once an hour, and tells me she needs to pee. So we do. There hasn't been any poop yet, and I'm putting her in a pull-up for nap time, just to make sure her bed doesn't end up smeared with it.

Pretty major progress. And on the timeline, Norah is a few months ahead of where Gabe was at this age (it was July or August before Gabe really got the hang of it, after he turned 3, and it's still a month before Norah's 3rd birthday). That point alone would seem to suggest that girls are better at potty training than boys are. But I think there are also extenuating circumstances to consider. Gabe was the oldest, thus there were no older kids coaxing him on or being "big kids" for him to want to impress. He also didn't have any big kids to watch going regularly so he had a clear idea of what was expected. I think having an older sibling more than anything made the training process easier.

But we'll see. If Norah doesn't have an extended bout of unreliability like Gabe did--where he was, for instance, pooping while standing in the middle of the library--then I'll be willing to declare girls easier to train than boys. Secretly, I hope it's not true because, let's face it, girls don't need to be better than boys at anything else. They've already got pretty much every advantage in those formative years.

Oh, right. The title. Double standard. Kind of forgot about that.

Really, it's not the least bit worthy of a title for a post, but for some reason it's what I ran with.

Yesterday, Norah was sitting on the toilet in the bathroom and she kept insisting that I go away and give her privacy. Being not-quite 3, she failed to see the irony in this as, time and again, we ask her to leave us alone while we're in the bathroom and she, instead, insists that she should watch us closely (usually trying to stare between our legs into the toilet to watch as it happens, mortifying as that sounds) or do a dance for us. So, to demonstrate how annoying that can be when a nice bowel movement is all we want to have, I refused to leave her alone. And I did a dance for her while she went to the bathroom. She was not the least bit impressed. But, considering how I dance, I can't really blame her, I suppose.

Gabe Goes to War and Norah Keeps It Classy

Just a few quick uploads.

Gabe rediscovered his army guys the other day and set up some pretty impressive battles in the rock bed off our front porch.

And another . . .

Or maybe not yet . . . 

Blogger has updated. After, what, four years of using the same format, which has always sucked butt, they've finally changed it. Now, when I add a picture, it adds it to the place where I want it to go, it doesn't just dump the picture at the beginning and make me move it around. Which is nice. The video upload seemed a little bit faster and more reliable at first, too, then it refused to upload a second video for me. Great. So I'll move on then try to upload the second video later, I suppose. Glad Blogger is keeping on the cutting edge of sucky blog technology, though.

So, there's also this:

Norah's new floatation device. She decided that she needed to wear it around for a half hour or so after we gave it to her. And she refused to let us pull down her shirt for some reason, too, so we took a picture for posterity instead.

And Blogger is still refusing to let me upload the second video of Gabe playing with his armies. Stupid Blogger.  Oh well, I suppose it was just more of the same, but still. Eat it, Blogger!

Norah Gets Weirder

I like weird kids. Heck, I like weird people. They make the world go round. But there is a fine line between weird and too weird. I trying my best to encourage my kids to be the interesting kind of weird and not the destined-to-wear-a-cape-while-walking-around-town kind of weird, but it's difficult to know where the line needs to be drawn and how to keep from crossing it.

Norah has finally reached the age where kids get interesting. Babies and toddlers are all well and good, but let's face it. Most of their appeal comes from their cuteness and their "they're just like little PEOPLE" similarities and realizations. Once they can get around freely and start coming up with their own ideas and expressing them, that's when they start earning their entertainment chops. And their weirdness factor increases their entertainment value incredibly.

Norah is a hoot right now. But I just want to focus on two things that she's been doing that I find interesting.

The first is . . . I don't know. I'm not sure if I want to worry about it or find it encouraging. For the past month or two, Norah has been wandering from her bed somewhat and falling asleep in weird places. On the one hand, it's kind of annoying because it means we have to pick her up and put her to bed without waking her up (I don't get this concept and how some parents can carry their kids from the car or wherever and get them to bed without waking them up--we've NEVER been able to do that with either of the kids). On the other hand, it's encouraging because it means she's learning to fall asleep anywhere.

Being someone who can only fall asleep in very specific conditions, I have always hoped that I could engender in my kids an ability to not only get to sleep easily, but to get to sleep easily wherever they might be. By sticking with good sleep schedules through all these years, I THINK I'm getting the kids used to a healthy sleep schedule, and by continuing to make them take naps even when they don't want to, I hope I'm building their ability to lie down and go to sleep even when they might not want to or feel like they need to--something I have never been able to do myself. But I fear I have been neglecting the ability to fall asleep anywhere part. Pretty much, they've always slept in their beds and don't have much of a track record for being able to sleep anywhere else--not even in the car on long road trips anymore.

So, Norah's wandering sleep might be a good thing. Unless it's not.

Anyway, over the past four weeks or so, Norah has gotten out of bed several times--at night and at nap time--and then fallen asleep on the floor somewhere else.  I find it kind of weird, but I guess as long as she's playing quietly, not keeping Gabe awake at the same time, and eventually getting enough sleep, I suppose I don't care that she's getting out of bed and playing or messing around until she physically can't anymore and dozes off.

Most of the time I find her sleeping on the floor in their room, but the last time (earlier in the week), we found her here:

At the top of the stairs.

Kind of weird, right? She actually followed Gabe out of the bedroom when he came downstairs for something or other. But, for some reason, she didn't go back to bed, she decided to go to sleep at the top of the stairs. We didn't find her there until I thought I heard a weird snoring noise coming from somewhere (she has a cold--she doesn't usually snore). Our recently deceased cat Tsunami used to snore. She used to come sit at my feet wherever I was, fall asleep, then start lightly snoring. When I heard the noise, at first I thought it was her. Then I remembered she was, well, gone. Our other cat Typhoon WAS sleeping at my feet, but she doesn't snore. So I started tracking the sound until I found this scene.

The second kind of weird I want to discuss is her choice of clothing. Now, this one might cause us some problems in the future and lead directly to an it's-ok-to-wear-capes-in-public kind of mentality in her.

We like to let her pick the things that she's going to wear now. Partly because she loves the freedom to choose her own stuff (she is a bit on the fiercely independent side--she's already refusing to give me a hand so I can help her out of the van now, which Gabe still gladly accepts, for instance), but also because it's awfully amusing to see the things she picks to wear.  Here are some of the pictures we've gathered over the last few weeks.

This week was X week at pre-school. There's not a lot to do with the letter X, so they go with the hidden treasure/pirate theme. This is the hate she came home with yesterday, which she wore for a goodly portion of the day yesterday. That's her "arrrgh" face.

Libby found a tub of curlers a few days ago, and Norah really wanted them in her hair. Also, she's had a pretty terrible head/chest cold this week. Notice how she still closely resembles the little baby in those pictures over two years ago when she was sick. Yeah. Shes suffers through sickness about as well now still as she did then. She's a bit of a misery to be around when she's sick, still.

This is my favorite picture of the last few months, I think. First she insisted that she wanted to wear her new swimsuit. It was still kind of chilly out, so I insisted she wear the top over the shirt she had on (she refused to wear the bottoms over her pants, though--I'm not sure how she could make a fashion argument against it since she immediately ran to put on her rubber boots). Speaking of the boots, they are a staple in her fashion accessorizing right now. The yellow ones both of the kids had been wearing blew hour over the last month, so we had to buy her new ones. The lady bug boots were the only ones Libby could find that she thought Norah would find acceptable. But I agree with Libby's description. Norah looks like she's off to the roller derby.

And another one with the boots. And no pants. We actually have a fair number of pictures like this. There's just something adorable about a small child with rubber boots on even when they don't need to wear them. We can't help but document it. And I'm sure she'll really appreciate the fact that we did when she's older. Just sure.

So, I don't know. I love how weird our kids are right now. I just have to make sure I never buy them any capes, I guess.

Avast and Stuff

A little over a year ago, we cut down a couple of crappy elm trees in our yard. Branches were cut into firewood, but Libby requested that the trunks be left about six feet long. They were then stacked into a little pyramid in the yard that the kids were able to climb on. Last fall we put a slide (given to us and, eventually, a slide will be built into the side of the playhouse, if we ever get it done) on it, but it was such a shallow incline that the slide became a favorite place for mosquito larvae to breed a few days after a rain.

Then, over the last few weeks, Libby has been moving the logs to create something else. A pirate ship. After restacking the logs and attaching whatever scrap plywood we had left from the playhouse, she had created a serviceable platform. The additions of a few things from the yard gave it a bit more flare. Then they ran to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart doesn't carry pirate flags--in case anyone might need this information for future reference. But they did have the scarf they mounted like a flag. All in all, a pretty great play area for the kids to jump around on!

Norah, it's worth saying, has a cold or some nasty allergies or something right now, too. She kind of just sat there and moped (keeping in mind how well she suffers) most of the time.

I'm not sure if he had it out at this point or not, but the stick Gabe was using as a sword he was storing in his shorts. Stuck down through the waistband and coming out through the leg hole. It's also worth mentioning that he often doesn't get around to putting underwear on. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, but what do I know.

I said, "Look piratey." This is what I got.

That's Norah's "classy pose."

And some video. I can't remember what they were doing now (because it's been almost twelve hours since it happened), but I'm sure it's worth sharing.

Happy Zombie Jesus Day

Took the kids out to "the farm" Easter Sunday. They had a great time with the fam.

We started the day at home. To date, we've really struggled with motivation to hide eggs--or do much of anything, really--for Easter here at home. But this year we figured Gabe was going to be old enough to actually kind of remember if we did anything or not, so we broke down and bought some baskets. Libby filled them and left them on the porch. We got a couple videos of them discovering their buckets.


Easter just isn't a holiday I get excited about. Don't get me wrong, I love easter candy. It's my favorite. But since they start selling it the day after Valentine's Day, it's not like it's tough to come by or something special that I only get if I appropriately love the actual holiday. So, until this year, we'd just sort of relied on taking the kids out to Nana and Poppa's to fulfill their egg hunting quota for the year and called it good at that. But we don't want to short our kids somehow, so this year we put forth a token effort here at the house before going out to the farm.

Because no Easter is complete without Gabe wearing his basket/bucket like a hat. Pretty sure we have four years of pictures of him doing this, now.

Norah's Easter outfit. The boots add that touch of respect for the meaning of the season, I think.

Norah wasn't afraid to wear the bucket, either. Must be a universal kid thing.

Real eggs were hidden outside and plastic eggs were hidden inside. Here's the outside hunt. We got some video of the inside hunt, too, but it went by so fast and involved the kids running around at such speed that it wasn't a very good video.

Norah hunting eggs.

I got a bit out of order here but I can't be bothered to move these pictures up a few pegs. This was the group picture we managed to get the kids to pose for before they started their outside hunt. I'm not sure what the face is that Gabe is making.

But he more or less held the face the entire time he was on the porch--long enough for us to get three or four pictures with him doing it. Kids are weird.

Mom and Dad have a dog now. Suzie. Or Susie? Not sure how they spell it. Anyway, Suzie eats things. Dad warned us that we would need to watch her or she'd raid all the kids baskets and eat EVERYTHING in them (as she had already eaten quite a bit of chocolate and the wrappers they came in the night before). To keep us from having to pay attention to one more thing, Jon and I put Suzie outside and went about our business of hiding all the eggs, both inside and out. We figured she would leave the outside eggs alone because what self-respecting dog would eat a hard-boiled egg? Turns out Suzie would. As we looked around for the eggs, it became quickly apparent that there weren't as many as Jon and I had hidden a half hour earlier. In fact, we were six eggs short. A quick scan of the rest of the yard turned up remains like these above--the leftover shells that Suzie managed to not eat (we found a few very small piles, too, suggesting that she ate most of the shells for at least three of the six eggs she found). Throughout the rest of the day, Suzie would also eat about four hot dogs, several leftover spoonfuls of the kids sides of beans and potatoes, and who knows what else. She couldn't have felt very good afterwards, and I'm glad I'm not the one that has to clean up her shit today.

The Easter Bunny brought each of the kids a bubble gun. So, after the egg hunting, we batteried up the guns and they decided to go up to Grandma Albers' house (to visit, but she was gone) and proceeded to have a bubble war in her back yard.



I like this Annie Oakley thing she's got going on here. Kind of awesome.

"In a world where bubbles are the law, one little girl has decided to take the law into her own hands. This summer, Bubble Girl will pop all of your preconceived notions about soapy spheres."

Kansas wind sucks for taking cute videos of children roaming through the wheat. The wheat, incidentally, is already heading out--a full month earlier than it should be. I'm not sure how that will bode, but I'm guessing very badly in the minds of most farmers (everything bodes very poorly in the minds of farmers, though--they are a "hard times" kind of people).

According to the kids, this was some kind of Star Wars reenactment. Gabe is Luke and Norah is Leia.

I don't remember the scene, but it made for a cute picture, I guess.

A couple weeks back I went ahead and caved in completely to my baser instincts of bad parenting and gave Gabe the gameboy I bought about a decade ago. I don't particularly like that I have come to rely on these kinds of distractions to keep my kids occupied long enough for my throat to rest between bouts of frustrated shouts to the heavens, but they have also returned a modicum of sanity to my life. I have a weapon at my disposal that will take one of the kids out of the fight. And, usually, that's all I need to do. On their own, our kids are awesome. They play well, they use their imaginations, and they rarely do anything that causes great destruction or angst. Together, though, they are constantly at each others' throats. They bicker and fight and tease and cry and whine and spill everything everywhere and generally make life pretty unpleasant most of the time. It's a phase, I know, but it's an UGLY phase and one that has nearly broken me.

Anyway, I found a used copy of a Star Wars Lego game on ebay and Gabe gets to earn time on it by doing chores or taking naps or doing anything else that is bribe-worthy. The nice thing, right now at least, is that it's pretty easy to spot when he is trying to sneak some playing time on the gameboy because these are the noises he makes whenever he is playing.

And, finally, One Man and Two Man. Saturday night, Norah created this song about two dude she saw walking on the street. It's become an instant hit in our household (in the way that, if played often and long enough, just about any song will become so familiar that you can't help but have it in your head all the time). It's kind of interesting how differently our kids process music. Gabe likes music. He's been around it his whole life and I think he has an appreciation for it, but making music doesn't seem to come very easily to him. He's only just sort of started recognizing pitch and rhythm, but still tends to mostly sing in a kind of monotone, not-quite-speaking voice. Norah, on the other hand, is already finding pitches. Sort of (not quite so much in this video, but she'd been singing this song all day already, so I don't think she was putting forth much effort).

When we got home, we decided to go to McDonalds to get the kids something to eat. It was coming close to bed time and they had managed to get through the day without eating anything of substance since breakfast--preferring, obviously, to eat only candy. It was getting late and we were too tired to think about making something at home, so we got them happy meals. While driving through, Libby spotted this. You can't really see from the angle of the picture, but this rascal is parked in a parking spot outside, like a car. For some reason, it struck us as funny.

Then, finally at home, Libby went out to put the chickens up and gather their eggs. This is what she found in their roost. We haven't discovered which friends left us the surprise, but we're reasonably sure we know.

Norah's Shoe Show

Last night, Norah decided to do two things: strip herself down to her diaper and try on a bunch of pairs of shoes. The stripping down part is something fairly new, and it's a bit annoying. While I appreciate the fact that she is about as good at getting herself undressed as Gabe is now--Gabe still can't reliably get his shirt off--it's not great fun having to redress her a couple times every day just because.

I managed to get some pictures of the show, though not as many as I'd hoped. She was changing in and out of the shoes so fast at the beginning that I couldn't get the camera around in time. Still.







Two other things worth noting here. None of these are her shoes. She wasn't the least bit interested in wearing her own shoes. She started with Gabe's mud boots, which would have made the best pictures, but refused to put them back on after I got the camera because she'd already worn them. Second, all of these poses were her own doing. I asked her to smile for the camera, and she decided to try out a few poses along the way. Of course, she had to look at each picture to see if the pose worked right after I took the picture. She decided the crossed arm thing was her best look and worked with that from then on. I'm pretty sure I'm creating some kinds of monsters with all these pictures, but at least my kids know how to smile for the camera, right?