It all started when I decided I wanted to try making latte art and we gave some of the leftover milk to Dylan.
Ever since that evening, whenever he hears the espresso machine warming up, he starts chanting “teeeem melk! teeem melk!”
Sometimes he just likes to request it. But, usually, he slurps it up!
I know, I know. The potty talk must be getting to be a real bore to read about. I’m sure it’s more exciting for us than it is for anybody else!!!
We’ll keep it brief
Dylan is now wearing pull-ups. Taliana wears them, so he’s pretty ok with them, especially when we refer to them as “underwear”.
For several nights in a row now, the only way we’ve been able to convince him to cover his hiney is by telling him pull-ups were undies.
During the day, he’s still using a combination of cloth diapers and disposables…and now with some pull-ups thrown in.
He’ll usually agree to a diaper change — and has even gotten on the changing mat himself — after he’s pooped in the diaper.
It seems he’s having trouble pooping in the potty. Today, a tiny turd was all he could muster. Then, he agreed to put on a pull-up and then he let loose.
We figure it’s all good!
He is getting simultaneously more charming and more challenging! He talks a lot, but this also means, he expresses his opinions more and they don’t always agree with ours!
Aside from the potty successes, we had another huge, huge success — Dylan napped at daycare for two whopping hours, on a cot with all of the other toddlers!!! This is such a wondrous thing, I’m considering putting him in for a full day on Thursdays (my full in-the-office work day)!
Well, Dylan has actually been doing pretty well with the potty. He seems to be better able to make it to the potty before he does his business (usually pee pee) and, at times, he is now getting super duper upset whenever even one tiny drop of urine hits his diaper.
His sensitivity to the moisture in his diaper has gotten to the point where Tom and I decided to just use disposables at night to keep him from waking up at 3am. This strategy has worked and he’s now sleeping through the night, but now we’ve run into the growing problem of Dylan not wanting to get back into a diaper. So, he gets a choice: sit on the potty or get back into a diaper and get on with other things.
Resourceful fellow that he is, Dylan has discovered he can kind of do both — thanks to the wonders of newly acquired (via the holidays) remote control vehicles. He sits on his potty for minutes and minutes and minutes and makes his cars go (he has two of them), claiming all the while that more is coming. He does in fact pee within a few minutes of first sitting down, but these cars keep things interesting enough for him to delay getting a new diaper so he can move on to playing!
The caption pretty much sums it up: Tom’s hair is shorter and Dylan’s continues to grow…at an alarmingly fast pace (so it seems)!
Also, Dylan dropped another poop in the potty today. This time, it was mostly luck. He was chanting, “cokkee, cokkee, cokkee” and, in the midst of this display, I noticed he started to bear down and grimace a little. So up I sprang, hurriedly asking if he wanted to sit on the potty while I ripped off his diaper shell, then the diaper, etc. He was in the middle of a protest, when suddenly: “bye bye!”
He shot up from the potty and there was a poop. Just fantastic! Even better: Taliana and Auntie Heather were here to shower him with extra kudos!
Dylan is now addicted to The Potty Movie (a DVD we got in his potty book package from Costco). He requests “Henry” all morning long and we’re all stuck hearing the “Bye Bye Diapers” song loop for hours.
We know we’re still a long way off from him being fully potty-trained, but we sure hope all of this will pay off with him being potty trained sooner rather than later…!
Dylan likes miso soup, buckwheat pancakes, beans and steamed milk.
Tonight, he has gas.
Also, he just started an 8-week session of toddler gymnastics. He was so excited to be there, he could barely wait for me to finish signing waivers, enrollment papers, etc.!
He’s very cute. And, he has a couple of canines coming in.
Back Log: Good gracious! At this time last year, Dylan’s very first teeth were just coming in!
Happy New Year (or, in Tagalog, Manigong Bagong Taon!!)
We took Jason, Tyler and Dylan to the Children’s Discovery Museum for the Countdown to Noon and the Noon balloon drop then headed to Cindy’s house for a whole lot of Guitar Hero, food, and a couple of games of Buzz.
While waiting for the countdown to midnight, many fell asleep, one for a short while and two others for the rest of 2007!
At midnight, we all clinked champagne glasses and said “cheers!” to each other and to Dylan who was shockingly still awake and cheery and enthusiastically clinking his plastic sippy cup of apple juice against our glasses!
So the featured picture in this post is of Dylan helping the doll go pee pee on her potty. Clearly, he’s continued to have an interest in this.
Using the potty in the morning has become routine now as is the periodic sitting on the potty during the day. But until today, he hadn’t successfully pooped in it. At times, he’ll say “pee pee pee pee” in a distressed voice while passing gas and promptly removing himself from the potty. Then, when asked if he wanted to remain on the potty, he’d answer with a firm “NO”, so we’d slap a diaper back on him only to have him poop mere minutes later.
But this evening, we sat him on the potty after dinner (at his request) and, once he finished, we let him wander around sans diaper figuring there was no immediate threat of an accident. We both turned to do something else when we suddenly heard Dylan say “bye bye”. We turned back to him and saw him standing next to his potty waving and saying bye bye to his POO POO!
Well, we are just so pleased by the little guy! He did it all on his own, with no prompting or help from either of us!
Way to start the new year little D.!!!
Dylan surprised us a couple of days ago by climbing on a dining room and chair and singing patty cake to himself, complete with his versions of “rolling” and “patting” and marking with a “D”!
He is very interested in his potty — sits on it every morning (has pee peed in it 4/5 days so far) and, throughout the day, he wants to sit on it and read books, cut food, play games, etc.
His manual dexterity continues to improve! He got some threading beads from Auntie Cindy yesterday and he was pretty easily threading them on a red string today!
He also knows so much more about plugs now, too. He loved the train set at Auntie Cindy’s house and knew we needed to plug it in to make it go. So, he’d pick up the plug and say, “plug” to me or Tom to have us plug it in.
The train was obsession for Dylan this holiday. When it stopped working, he went to his Lola and said, “daddy. Fix it!!!”
Which brings us to Dylan’s ever-growing vocabulary and his ability to more clearly enunciate his words — broccoli, Rocky, game, jackeeeeeet, abre, backpack, etc…and he surprised us by saying and pointing out Santa on a tree!! It’s now difficult to recall just all of the words Dylan is saying these days; he is repeating so much of what we say!
As to the holidays themselves, he just loved playing with his cousins (and by himself!)
We spent Christmas Eve at Jeff’s aunt’s house here in Santa Cruz. He loved his sweater from Janice so much (he got many compliments on it), he didn’t even want to take it off!!!
On Christmas Day, we headed to Cindy’s house. Dylan missed his nap (even though when I asked him if he wanted to nap, he would nod yes and put his head down, but too many distractions abounded and he’d eventually succumb to his curiousity) but he remained good-natured and jolly until 9pm, when he fell off the bottom step and finally sacked out on my shoulder while I was comforting him!
Overall, we had a really nice celebration, made all the merrier by the existence of this little man who brings fresh perspective to all that we do!
Many more pictures are on flickr.
At long last, here are the pictures for Chanukah, including pictures from our trip to LA!
Rocky made such an impression on Dylan that he now says “Rocky” whenever he sees her picture!!
Since our return from our wonderful trip to LA, it’s been sheer madness, getting out holiday cards, meeting work deadlines, and cooking and baking and holiday-preppin’! The major highlight of the week, though, is Dylan peeing in the potty THREE times in the past two days, once yesterday morning and twice today (once in the AM and once before bedtime)! Of course, he got lots of kudos from both of us, but he was especially pleased when Taliana just hurrayed like crazy upon hearing the news!
We’re not really pushing the potty training hard, but since we’ve introduced it, we’re now trying to stick to the new routine of at least sitting on the potty first thing in the morning.
I’m terribly behind in posts and pics, but I’ll update with both as soon as I can….
No latke party this year, owing to a severe lack of time, but we did have Taliana and Heather over for a mini-celebration!
We did a little present-opening, made some sugar cookies, sampled them (!), lit the menorah, and had latkes.
We just did classic latkes and this year’s batch was the best EVER!
We thought they looked pretty good, too….
