I have been a bad, bad blogger. When I started teaching last year, I just kind of gave up trying to keep up with this thing, and in so doing lost a great opportunity to document all of MJ's amazing milestones. Now, there is a second Baby Rhodes on the scene, and nothing from his first precious four months have been recorded.
Oh, to add a few more hours onto every day.
MJ has become a toddler right before my very eyes. It happened overnight, just as I suspected it would, and now she is possibly the most brilliant, talkative, observant, friendly, hyperactive little person ever created.
Check out those curls. LOVE.
photo credit: Kristin Moore Photography
Our most recent venture has been (drumroll) potty training.
It's one of those funny things about being a mom, that you get excited about things that other, possibly more normal, people would never get excited about. One of these things is encouraging another person, through exultant celebration and the giving of stickers, to pee and poop in a specific location. I decided that I wasn't going to really sweat it. If it was time, I would know, and she would just figure it out. But the more I thought about potty training, and the more I researched it, I realized that deciding to no longer just "go" whenever the urge struck wasn't going to be something she just did on her own. We ultimately chose to follow a specific method, detailed in a book called Three Day Potty Training by Lora Jensen. Mike's cousin and his wife used this method, and their daughter was potty trained, in three days, at age 18 months. Their son was also trained the same way, and dropped his diapers in a mere four days at age 19 months (boys take longer, you know).
This information was enough to sell me on it, and I was certainly tired of having two in diapers, so we bought the book (with purchase, you also get one-on-one mentoring with the author, online). The way it works is that you have to devote an entire three-day period to exclusive potty training. This means you actually throw away the diapers, so that you can't cheat and go back when it gets hard. And it does get hard. You can't leave the house. You really can't do chores. You can't nap, or watch TV, or check your Facebook page. You spend the three days glued to your child's side, so that you can "catch them in the act" of having an accident, scoop them up and run them to the potty. The method utilizes positive reinforcement, which means that when they go, even a little bit, in the potty, they get a prize. The idea is that by the end of the three days, the child is done with diapers, and (hooray!) so are you! So, we started on a Saturday and Mike took off work on Monday so that we could devote the full three days to MJ's potty training. Honestly, I expected her to be trained within the first hour.
For us, the three-day method took eight days.
For all her 22-month-old brilliance, MJ was much happier to let go mid-sprint than actually stop what she was doing to let us know she needed to go to the potty. There were a LOT of accidents (hers) and a lot of crying (mine). Some even advised us that she was too young to be potty trained, which I knew couldn't be true, since so many other children have been trained at even younger ages. We changed the sheets on her crib, on average, three times a night. After six days, I was ready to get a refund on my investment! Then, suddenly, she started telling me "I potty?" when she needed to go. She dropped to two accidents a day, then one. As of today, she has been accident-free since Sunday morning.
Too young. Ha.
(Knock on wood.)
We are, however, doing Pull-Ups at night, which is not part of the method, but I don't think that will last much longer since she has started calling out to go potty when she wakes up and has to pee. Sigh. My little girl really is growing up.
Being a mommy of two is so much harder than being a mommy of one. When it was just MJ and me, I could devote every second of my waking hours (and many that were supposed to be non-waking, unfortunately) to her every need, wish, or whim.
Sometimes I feel guilty, that Alex is getting the short end of the stick somehow.
MJ is, without a doubt, an extremely precocious child. She is interested in everything, from what happens when she sticks her hands into the water of a flushing toilet to what Mommy might do if her colored pencils drag on the kitchen wall. Meanwhile, Alex has to be fed, which is approximately twenty minutes of time for MJ to get into something, which means that instead of lovingly staring into his gorgeous blue eyes while he eats I am constantly putting him on the floor to chase after his sister, to intercept whatever she's gotten her hands on from flying through the screen door, or rescue my (NEW!) blinds/carpet/kitchen appliances/leather sofa/curtains/walls/pantry contents/etc. from certain ruin in her destructive (I mean curious) hands. When MJ was a baby, we spent her hour of wake-time between meals and naps engaged in witty banter, staring at stimulating black and white pictures, practicing holding her head up via tummy time, and listening to a variety of brain-developing music. Alex usually spends his wake-time staring at the ceiling fan, listening to Mommy reprimand MJ for whatever she's spilled, broken, or bitten, or chewing on his hands out of sheer boredom.
What happens if there's ever a third?
I distinctly remember watching a series of home-videos with my best friend, Kristen. They belonged to her family, and had captured some of the milestones of her and her two younger brothers. The first video was of Kristen, maybe a year-old or so, taking her first steps. Family members hovered over and around her. Toys and furniture were cleared out of the way as her chubby little legs wobbled through someone's living room. Collective gasps were heard as she nearly fell, although she wasn't actually near anything that could have caused her any harm. Her dad manned the video camera and narrated every move. Soon, the video fast-forwarded several years, and showed Kristen and her brother, the second child, climbing a tree as the baby, just within the screen and not really the focus of this particular video, munched happily on some leaves he'd managed to collect in his chubby little hands.
That's what happens. The subsequent children become the independent ones, I guess, left to their own devices and to entertain themselves, at least while they aren't yet mobile. Austin certainly figured out a way to feed himself. ;) (I'm sure someone was watching him, even if from afar.) But really, people used to have way bigger families than they do now, and somehow managed to keep everyone alive, well-fed, and well-nurtured. I think about Memaw, who is a mom of five kids. Or Mike's mom, mother to six. Or Michelle Duggar, mother to nineteen.
Maybe Alex won't be too damaged after all.
Really, he does have special time with Mommy. Usually I try to get both babies to nap at the same time, so that I can get some things done (or sometimes just take a nap myself), but Alex has figured out that MJ's naptime is a great time to be awake. He also gets solo time with me in the evenings, when Mike is giving MJ her bath and putting her down for the night.
While Mommy feeds me, she looks at me, and talks to me, and makes me smile. She doesn't keep tossing me on the floor and running away. She sings to just me. She snuggles me. She dances with me. She tickles that goofy spot on my neck that makes me chortle. She kisses my cheeks and strokes my forehead. Sometimes, she nestles me under her chin and I can hear her familiar heart beat as we drift off to sleep.
I know what he's thinking: MJ should sleep more often.
photo credit: griffin photography
