It's a Potty Party

Today marked our first official foray into the world known as potty training. While I worked in several day care two year old rooms in college, potty training your own children is quite the different task. In the daycare setting, it seemed as if one simply followed the other, and there always seemed to be someone who knew what they were doing. Up until today, Luke has already been pretty consistent about peeing in the potty in the mornings and at various times during the day. He's a very reward driven child and loves getting a sticker for his efforts. Brody, on the other hand, could care less about stickers and has not been going potty at all.

It is for this reason and for the fact that I am over changing poopy diapers and spending money on Pull Ups that I threw the boys a Potty Party today. After lots of research (aka time browsing google), I tried a mixture of some different methods I had read about. We started the day with their taking off their diapers and throwing them in the trash on their own. For the party, I basically loaded them up on junk food and juice. This tactic seemed to work for Brody, for he loved the fact that he got to have chips for breakfast. And, he did indeed go to the potty about 8 times today. Unfortunately, all of the juice also resulted in a few accidents as well. As the accidents happened, I could see this look on his face that seemed to say, "Ooops, I don't think that's how that is supposed to happen." Luke had just one accident, and this occurred when he was in time out, so I can't really fault him on that one. The biggest accomplishment for Luke was that he actually pooped in the potty! Up until today, he had not done this.

After each time they went potty, I gave them a choice of getting some candy or a small trinket (think plastic dinosaur, army men, and slinky). They could also choose a balloon. Once again, Brody seemed very lured by the promise of a "PRIZE!" I also set a timer to go off every 20 minutes as a reminder that they needed to try to go to the potty.

All in all, I would classify today as a success. What is it they say about success? Something about beginning with a single step? Well for the boys, the journey to potty success started with a party and lots--and I mean LOTS-- of bribes. Hey--whatever works works!

Apples to Apples

Tonight I hosted my first official function as the "CO's Wife" aka COW. Ok--those who know me well know that I'm not a big entertainer. It's a rare thing for me to have large groups of people over to the house AND cook, let alone do both of those things on the same night. I decided that since I'm missing NC and the fall weather I'd go with a fall theme, so I went with apples. I made a super easy apple crumble, some spiced (and a little spiked) apple cider, and caramel covered candy coated apples! I really didn't expect the apples to go over as well as they did, but everyone seemed to like them, and folks were not shy about chomping into them either. The apples were relatively easy to make and turned out to be a fun addition. I would recommend, however, to those wanting to make such apples not get the caramel that requires you to open fifty individual pieces in order to melt them. It was fun to be able to use all of my Southern Living stuff and the new glasses I got when Tom's mom was here. All in all, it was a fun night. Everyone is very nice, and I am really looking forward to the next 18 months of getting to know them and their families. There are lots of little ones the boys age, so it will be good to have ready made friends for the boys to play with. The boys were super excited when "the peoples" started showing up and didn't quite understand why they had to stay downstairs and watch Star Wars with daddy. Any other night, they would have been all over the Star "Horse," as they call it. When everyone left, they were still wriggling in bed. We'll see how this 10 p.m. bedtime plays out in the morning!

New Blog

Ok--so I know I have a blog with my Mac account, but I want to be able to take that blog and make it into a book. With all of the cool things you can do on a Mac, you'd think that iPhoto and iWeb would somehow be linked and allow you to do so. Since that can't happen--or I don't know how to do it--I'm going to try playing around with this site as well. Like all things, I start out with the best of intentions... The problem is that I don't generally follow through on my intentions. So, we shall see how this goes. Consider this my first official test message. I plan to play around with this over the next few days to see how it goes and to see if I can figure it out. iWeb is so much easier, but it lacks the ability to use non iWeb templates and to be made into a book. Thus, it seems as if a "blogger" I may become.