One giant poop for mankind

Funny: She doesn't eat her veggies like this.

It's official: This morning we achieved poop. Something must have clicked since my last post because she started peeing on the potty on a regular basis. Then this morning... she dropped the big deuce. Of course, she drove a hard bargain in the process. She was sitting on the john listening to me tell her that if she pooped she'd get to sleep upstairs with Soen. Then she asked if she could also have two jellybeans. "Deal," I said. Apparently that was all she needed to hear. To top it all off she went to school in her underwear (instead of her diaper) and when we last checked she was still dry. I thought this day would never come.

BTW, Friday I will officially make the transition to being a stay at home dad (working part-time), which at the very least will ensure some good material for the blog. Wish me luck.

Sleep vs Poop

Who needs toys?

So, we've been trying to potty train Sadie for a while now. She basically shows no interest in it. I've tried to bribe her with toys, candy, and ice cream. Nothing works. With Soen, it was much easier. Wave a dinosaur toy in front of him and he'd do anything. Sadie wants nothing. As much as I admire this about her, it leaves me with no bargaining power. Or at least that was true until Monday night.

A little while ago we bought a bunk bed so the kids could sleep together in Soen's room. Both kids loved it and it made night time easier because we could put them to bed at the same time. But then the kids started staying up later and later. They'd just lie there, chatting away. We'd have to make several trips up there to quiet them down. Sometimes that worked. But when it didn't work, we'd have to take Sadie downstairs back to her room, which always resulted in her having a screaming fit and Soen crying uncontrollably. It would be an hour before everything was calm again, which usually meant that the kids weren't asleep until almost 10:00--two to three hours after the whole nighttime process began. Not exactly how we want to spend our evenings. Eventually this started happening every night, so this past Monday Wife finally pulled the plug on the whole bunk bed experience. Peace is once again restored.

But now we have something that Sadie wants. I told her that if she poops on the potty she can sleep upstairs again. Suddenly she's interested. I'm just concerned this may be too high a price to pay. We'll see how it goes.

My son the anarchist

Sadie rocks out.
Not sure where she learned that these are the poses you're supposed to make when you're holding an axe, but with those moves and that hair we could be looking at a hair-metal revival. For better or worse.

Soen came up to me yesterday and said, "Daddy, wouldn't it be cool if the world had no rules?" I'm thinking, cool! Now I can start reading him some Rudolph Rocker and Mikhail Bakunin. "Yeah Soen, we call that anarchy." But he didn't seem to have Libertarian Socialism in mind... "If we had no rules we could go to school and watch movies all day! And if I had a knife..." now, I wasn't quite sure where he was going with this... "I could do this." And he started swinging his imaginary knife around like an uncoordinated ninja. "Wouldn't that be cool? And I could eat ice cream and candy all the time!"

So, two things cracked me up about this. One was that he had obviously given this some thought. This wasn't an idea that just popped into his head. Wife told me she had had a similar conversation with him earlier. Previously this kind of long-term planning was mostly centered around getting toys. Now, he seemed to be taking a look at the bigger picture, which is progress.

The second part was the knife. The movies and ice cream... that's a no brainer. But I'm not quite sure where the knife fantasy came from. I do know this, however: I'll be sleeping with one eye open.

P.S. Oh, Soen scored two goals last week. He was very excited. Not as excited as his parents, though.