short walk in the NC Botanical Garden

Sorry, I didn't think to bring the camera.

This morning I suddenly got an urge to take Kevin for a walk at the NC Botanical Garden, which is just a few minutes away from our house. We had a nice time. It was getting a little hot and it was a little humid, but in the shade it wasn't too bad. We walked around on the paths, shook some trees, and examined a yellow centipede thing that rolled up when Kevin tried to touch it (I didn't have time to stop him). Kevin's favorite part was splashing in a puddle and putting his hands in the water in the big wooden things where they exhibit lily pads and lilies and goldfish. We also had a nice rest sitting on a bench, drinking water and talking while we watched some tractors and cars drive by through the trees. Kevin tried to join a kindergarten class that was visiting the garden (and he was almost tall enough that he would have fit in just fine). When we went back to the car I had to change Kevin's clothes because he was wet all down his front, but he had a good time. It took about an hour, which was enough time to see some nice things and get tired, but not so tired that I collapsed once we got home. I really love our short excursions like this. Now that I've realized that an outing doesn't have to take all morning, I feel like we can go whenever we want and have a good time without feeling like it's a burden to go.

"It's a double yolk."

Name that movie.

general update

Probably the most exciting news is that about a week ago we got a piano. Someone in our ward offered to give her piano to us, so I got a U-haul and a furniture dolly and some people to lift it. It's one of the smaller kinds of upright pianos. I really like the bright tone it has. It does need to be tuned, but other than that it's in great condition. I feel so blessed to have a piano, and I love the feeling we get in our house when it is played, even if it's just Kevin playing random keys. It just invites a nice spirit. It's been so nice to be able to practice the choir music on a real piano instead of the keyboard I've been using.

I just have a few more weeks left in the semester, and I can't wait to be done. I've learned a lot this semester, but it's been a lot harder than I expected. Both classes have been frustrating at times because the teachers are teaching the class for the first time, so they are still figuring out how to teach the material effectively and what to expect of the students. On top of that, I have been a lot more tired because of this pregnancy, so it's been hard to find time to study. During the times when I would normally study (meaning, when Kevin is asleep), I am often so tired that I can't stay awake to study. But I have still enjoyed learning the material. I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of the topic of geology. I've learned so much, and yet there is so much more than I don't know anything about yet.

I've been thinking about classes to take in the fall. We'll see how things are going after the baby is born, but right now I'm planning to keep taking two classes at a time. Right now I am signed up for a physics class and a chemistry class. There are several classes that I've been wanting to take, but I couldn't take them because I didn't have the physics and chemistry classes that are prerequisites. I feel like I'm probably crazy to be signed up for both of those at once, and I'm kind of hoping I'll think of a different class to replace chemistry, but at the same time I think I just need to get them out of the way so I can move on in my program. Then again, it will just get harder as Baby Girl gets older and mobile, so maybe it is better to get the hard stuff done as soon as I can. Anyway, we'll see what happens. I'm at least fortunate to be on very good terms with a good physics tutor. : )

Yesterday was our Stake's Great Day of Service. Last year I participated, so we decided that Ryan would take a turn this year. He helped with an eagle project at a nearby park. They built three benches and two wooden bridges. It was a good thing he went, because he brought his tools and they came in very handy. He was also able to help them get a more assembly-line method for putting the bridge together so that it would go faster, which was good because they had a lot to get done before a storm was expected to come in. We went and looked at the handy-work later that evening, and it looked really nice.

Our state was hit pretty hard by storms yesterday. Fortunately, we only got some heavy rain, but there were tornadoes in other areas that were the worst seen in the state since the 1980s. There were several fatalities and many buildings were ruined. We were grateful that we were safe and protected.

Baby Girl seems to be doing fine. She moves around a lot. Sometimes I think she's more active than Kevin was. I think she's still doing somersaults inside of me. I'm finding that my uterus is a lot more tender than it was when I was pregnant with Kevin. Sometimes Baby Girl likes to just sit with a foot or an elbow pushing outwards, and it hurts. Kevin is noticing that I'm growing, and he thinks my new belly button mountain is very interesting. I am excited to finally meet the baby and to bring her home to meet Kevin. We are pretty close to having everything ready for her to come. The main things I need to do are get a mattress for her crib and make some more flannel wipes (I already have the material). We already have lots of clothes, a car seat, and cloth diapers.

thoughts about Toilet Training in Less Than a Day

Several people I know have used the book Toilet Training in Less Than a Day, by Nathan Azrin, or similar methods. I've been starting to think about toilet training lately. I think it will still be a while before we take on that challenge, but I've been starting to notice signs that Kevin will be ready soon (which could mean weeks or months--who knows?), so I'm trying to put a lot of thought into how we will go about it because I want it to be successful and I know that it won't be easy. So I decided to read this book to see what it was all about, and I really liked the book. Even if the method doesn't lead to Kevin being potty trained quickly, I still feel that I have benefited from some of the parenting techniques the author wrote about. I'll let you know later if I end up using this book for potty training and how I liked it, but I did want to share some of the things I've learned from the book that are working in other areas of parenting.

One of the main things about the method is that the child needs to learn to do all of the steps of using the toilet by himself. At first you help him by giving clear and detailed instructions and by guiding his hands to do the steps, but eventually he needs to learn to do it all himself. This includes cleaning up after an accident. The child wipes up the mess, and the child changes his own underwear and puts it in the hamper. Reading about this helped me realize that I can start expecting Kevin to take more responsibility for certain things. For example, a couple of weeks ago he spilled a box of paper clips, and the next morning he dumped some milk because he was mad about something. Normally I would just clean it up and be upset with him, but it occurred to me that Kevin is capable of taking responsibility for those messes. So I had him pick up all the paper clips and put them back in their box, and I gave him instructions to get a towel and wipe up the milk himself. It took a lot longer than if I had just done it myself, but I realized that now that he's bigger it's important for me to teach him that if he spills things he has to clean up after himself. (I did go back and do a better job of wiping up the milk when he wasn't looking, but he actually did get most of it.)

I also have been finding it useful to follow the author's suggestion to guide the child manually if he doesn't follow an instruction rather than just doing it for him or getting upset. For example, I remember one day I was picking up the living room, and when Kevin didn't respond when I asked him to help me to pick up his blocks, I gently took his hand and guided it to a block, and then he got the general idea and helped me (a little). It's made me realize that there are actually a lot of fine-motor things that he could do if I would guide his hands at first, but I had just been assuming he wasn't ready, so I didn't try that hard. During conference I pulled out one of his wooden puzzles and tried again to help him put the pieces in. He hadn't been too successful with it before, but I didn't try that hard with him either, so I thought I'd try gently guiding him by the hand for a few pieces until he realized how to move them around until they fit. He started to figure it out, although he lost interest after a couple of minutes. So with just a little gentle encouragement he can actually learn to do a lot of things himself.

One of the things I like about the method is that it is so positive. The child is praised and rewarded by doing things right. If he has an accident he is not punished or yelled at or shamed, but rather there is a consequence--he has to clean up and he also has to practice several times in a row to get it right. When this happens you explain to the child that you still love him, but you are having him clean up and practice because it is important for him to learn to stay dry and clean because that is part of growing up. It's something that I want to try to implement in other ways of parenting. If he is doing something he shouldn't, I want to learn to be patient and loving while still explaining that there has to be a consequence for bad behavior, rather than just losing my temper. I find that if I lose my temper it doesn't do either of us any good because there's a bad feeling, and it makes it difficult to give reprimands that are constructive. I would like to learn how to be patient and loving when I correct my children for a bad behavior.

The authors of this book noticed that potty training put a strain on the relationship between the mother and child if it became too negative of a process. It's understandable for a mother to get frustrated. For one thing, diaper changing takes up a lot of time (they calculated it out and figured that the average mother spends 9 hours per week changing one child's diapers) and it's pretty gross. And there's also the social pressure to get the child potty trained, so if the child is older and still having accidents or refusing to learn, it's often a reflection on the mother, or at least she will often view it that way. So every time she changes a diaper it's a reminder that she feels like she's not a competent mother because she can't even teach the child to use the toilet, even though in reality it's largely up to the child and shouldn't be a reflection on the mother's parenting. I really appreciate that I have so many good friends who do not judge each other's parenting unkindly. I can't think of any time when I've heard one of these friends criticize another mother for the way she does things with her kids. I hope that wherever I go I will be able to show my friends that I respect them as mothers and they don't need to worry about me thinking less of them because their kids are wiggly during sacrament meeting or their baby doesn't sleep through the night or their child doesn't know the ABC's yet. I also will need to keep in mind that as long as I have done my best to teach my children what is right, it's not my fault and it doesn't mean I'm a bad mother if they don't choose to do the right thing. They have their agency and I can't force them to make a certain choice.

growing . . . we do it every day

Kevin is getting taller. His pants are getting too short (I just bought some of them and thought they were long enough they would last till summer!) and he can reach things that used to be too high. A couple of months ago I moved all the knives from the drawer to a corner of the cupboard because he always managed to get them if I let him in the kitchen, but I left some of the longer knives in one drawer because he couldn't reach them yet. Now he can reach them. And I can't just leave a knife on a cutting board on the counter for a minute anymore because he can reach that high, and does. I don't especially fancy the thought of my child playing with knives, so I'm going to have to do some rearranging to keep the knives away from him. He can also reach over the top of the washing machine and open the lid a little, so sometimes he will get into the laundry closet and open it slightly to stop the wash cycle and then start it again.

He has also really picked up on the concept of stepping stools. He can reach the light switches without help now, but for a while he was bringing toys over to the light switches so that he could turn them on and off. The other day he was pushing his umbrella stroller around trying to use it to reach things, and he also was using an upside down laundry basket so he could reach the thermostat. When I checked it later, he had turned it down to 55 degrees! He keeps trying to use things to reach the hooks we used to look the doors, and also the bolt on the front door, but thankfully he's not quite tall enough to do that yet. Around the outside of our kitchen, we have a counter that is about chest high, and pretty often we use that counter to put things that we don't want Kevin to have. But now he is tall enough that he can push a chair underneath and then can reach whatever is on the counter and throw it in the sink, which he thinks is a very funny game. I guess it will be good motivation to keep the clutter off the counter now.

Kevin is much more aware of his state of cleanliness lately. He notices when his hands are sticky or dirty and asks to wash them, and he can tell when his diaper needs changing and will ask to have it changed. If there's a washcloth nearby while he's eating, he will wipe his hands between every bite.

Kevin likes to blow the seeds off of dandelions.

A phrase he has picked up recently is "Oh, dear."

Kevin is getting better and better at jumping. He always has a grin on his face as he does it.

Recently we've been working on teaching Kevin to clean up his own messes. If he spills a drink or some crackers or something, then we tell him to get a towel and wipe it up or to pick up whatever he spills. I was thinking about it recently and realized that he's big enough now that it's not unreasonable for me to expect him to do that. It takes more time than if I did it myself, and sometimes I have to be patient or keep reminding him to finish cleaning up, but I feel good about it. The only problem is that sometimes it backfires because he thinks wiping up spilled milk is such a fun game, so he does it on purpose. It's also difficult if he spilled something out of anger because then he tries to refuse to clean up the mess he made. Sometimes I just have to take his hand and manually have him pick up every cracker, or it also seems to help to be enthusiastic and tell him what a big boy he is because he can clean up after himself. Many of these ideas came from things I read from Toilet Train Your Child in Less than a Day (more on that in a separate post).

4th haircut

Kevin's hair was getting nice and long and I really liked it, but it was a little shaggy in the back and around the ears, so I just wanted to trim those parts up a little bit and keep it longer. It didn't seem like it would be that hard, but once I started working on it I realized it was a little harder than I thought and I lost confidence, plus Kevin was wiggling too much for me to have enough control to use the scissors the way I needed to. By that point I had already done enough cutting that I had to do something to finish it up, so I gave up and got out the clippers and did #8 all over his head like I always do. Maybe later I'll get around to doing the back a little shorter. I'm a little sad about his hair, although it does look nice.

Here is what his hair looked like before:

And here is after the haircut:

He looks older, too.

light sabers

The latest craze among the 5-7 year old boys in our apartment complex is to play with toy light sabers. I know that it's quite possible that someday my son will be the one out playing with the light sabers, but right now I find myself wishing most evenings that they would find a new game. They tend to get pretty rough and they don't notice much about their surroundings, which isn't a great situation when you also have small children at the playground who want to try to join in the fun. I've seen several boys get shunned from the group because they don't have a light saber of their own, despite the fact that some boys have more than one light saber and could share. I don't know if they realize how hurtful it is or if they notice that their friend went away holding back tears. I hate to see a little boy hurt just because he doesn't have a plastic stick. And then when they get tired of the game (or start arguing with each other too much) they set aside their light sabers, but Heaven forbid that some other kid gets ahold of their light saber and tries to play with it. I don't mind distracting Kevin with other things, because I know that it's frustrating for the boys to have a little baby in the way when they're trying to play, but I still groan inwardly every time we go outside to play and the light saber boys are out again, because I know I'm going to be struggling to keep Kevin from grabbing abandoned light sabers or trying to play with the big boys and also it's pretty much guaranteed that at some point an argument is going to break out over who is the Jedi Master. At least I've learned from this experience how important it is to teach Kevin to be kind to his friends. I would hate for my child to be the one saying someone can't play just because he doesn't have a light saber.