Dexter is potty trained!

Or "potty learned," as the progressive moms would say (I think).

It has been 8 days (and nights!) since his last accident, and today he even used a public potty. Stopped playing and everything to tell me he needed to go.

We've been rewarding potty usage for months - 2 m&ms for pee, 5 for poop. (The first time we told him "you get an m&m!" he heard that as "two Ms." So yeah, we gave him 2 Ms and had to up the ante for poop somehow. 5 is Dexter's go-to number for anything.)

Still, the rewards weren't helping all that much. It was still all coincidence, and he was still perfectly content to use his diaper most of the time. He was also not at all bothered by being wet or poopy, even though we told him it would make Thomas (the character on the underwear) sad if he got peed on. (Yeah, Dexter wasn't too worried about Thomas. He also quite wisely pointed out to me after one accident that Thomas was still smiling, so he wasn't sad at all!)

The tide started to turn in mid-August, during our trip to Mississippi to see Tootsie and Pop. Honestly, we almost didn't even bring the training potty because we thought there was no point.  He and Desmond spent a good chunk of the trip naked and in the pool. Somehow, magically, Dexter decided he was willing to use the potty instead of just peeing and pooping on the floor.

After we got back home, he continued wearing the diaper for a while but was using the potty pretty consistently.  His daycare teachers agreed that he was ready for big-boy underwear sometime around August 30.

Here's what I had to say about it on September 5 - another blog post drafted but never published:

BIG news over the last 2 weeks is that Dexter is using the potty!  I don't think he's had a single poop accident since about August 25. He still doesn't care too much about wetting his pants, and he has about one accident per day (more if you don't make him use the potty periodically). I think it's starting to bother him a little more, though, so maybe we'll see even more progress there in the coming weeks.  (We are not even attempting nighttime potty training at this point. His diapers are WAY too wet in the morning for us to consider that, I think, especially since he is so sleep-deprived as it is.)
Edit: Naturally, the day after I wrote that, he woke up dry. Mark it - September 6, 2011.  We'll see if it's a trend or a one-time deal.

  Well, he only had 2 bedtime, one naptime, and one daytime accident after that. The last one was September 16. I said I would declare the training official after 7 dry days. Thus, here we are.

He still has to wake up once/night to use the bathroom, and for some reason this is really upsetting for him. I guess it's no fun for anything to wake you up in the middle of a good sleep. Anyway, he still goes to the potty, so I guess we'll just hope it becomes less traumatic over time.

I always maintained that kids are perfectly capable of potty training between 18m and 2 years. And I still believe that's true. But this was SO EASY since we let him do it on his terms, it was (almost) worth paying for diapers for an extra year. Hopefully Desmond will see this happening around him and catch on sooner than later, though I can say it doesn't look promising just yet.

So, YAY for Dexter and YAY for slashing the diaper budget in HALF!  (And yay for adorable big-boy underwear. I mean, it really is adorable.)

This was June 5. So yeah, I guess we *have* been working on this for a long time, even though it seems now like it was an overnight success.

"Are they twins?"

For the record, it is Sunday, September 25, 2011,  and we got our first "Are they twins?" today.
They looked like this:

When I said they were just over a year apart, the Sam's cashier said, "They look just alike. Which one's older?"

That part shocked me even more than the twins question. I guess our Desmo is even more grown up than I thought. (Or Dexter is not as grown up as I thought?)
 

Desmond is 22 Months Old!

And boy is 22 months VERY close to 2, in so many ways. He is more hilarious, more energetic, more verbal, and much much more opinionated, all in one increasingly tall package.

Teeth: ONE new tooth since last month!  His bottom right canine came in on or just before September 18.

Height: Still really tall. Holding out for his birthday for an official measurement.

Weight: If anything, he's lost a few ounces this month, thanks to what we hope is just a standard toddler-esque finicky appetite. (see below)

Sleep: I can't say this has been his best sleep month. In fact, it's probably one of his worst since infancy. Waking up once a night almost every night, often waking up his brother (and sometimes being awoken by his brother). He's also just started, in the last week or so, employing stall tactics at bedtime and naptime. Says he wants a song (often, the "burp burp" song - the one we sang to both boys while burping them as infants. An odd resurgence of that one, I think.) or "rock-rocks," but really he's just stalling. He used to be the kid that would tell you, "Naptime!" and now he is the kid who stalls.  Thank god he is still trapped in his crib, or none of us would ever get any sleep.

Food: Ugh. While we could usually count on him to eat 3 breakfasts if offered, he now refuses food (all kinds of food) often, and when we find something he IS willing to eat, we shovel as much of it into him as we can. Of course, that's the same food he refused the day before and will refuse again tomorrow. So it's not so much what food it is but what mood he's in at the time. He still drinks a lot of milk, which I suppose is better than nothing.


Words: Favorite new word? "Nope!"  It is pretty cute, I must say, even when he is refusing to do things he really needs to do (see "sleep" above). Strangers laugh when they overhear him saying it. He does string some sentences together, but we're still mostly just working with nouns and verbs. "Mom! Fish! Watch! Fish! TV! Please! Fish!" (That's "Mom, I want to watch Finding Nemo, please.") or "Mom! Fish! Eat! Fish! More fish? Please?" (That's "Mom, I would like some of those delicious vanilla goldfish grahams, please!") There is also the occasional adjective - "yucky" or "orange" (his favorite color, I do believe).

Books: This is another one of his stall tactics at bedtime.  He still does legitimately love his books, but lately he asks for more and more instead of going to bed. He still reads a lot of Frosty the Snowman, and we had a great rendition of "Moo, Baa, La La La" a few nights ago. He also really likes "Good Morning Sun," which is where we learned that he knows what a rooster says. ("Ca ca DOO doo!")  It's a good thing he is so cute saying all of the animal sounds, because that humanoid sun is pretty creepy, if you ask me. (Why are their favorite books always your least favorite?)

TV: We've given up all pretense of being a limited TV family. Now we just turn the thing on and sometimes leave it on. Interestingly, Panda has fallen somewhat out of favor. The new go-to is Finding Nemo, which is kindof putting a wrench into our Halloween and birthday plans (both were going to be Panda-esque). I am considering telling them that the TV is broken for a while, but then I'll just spend all of my time breaking up fights or putting people in time out, so I'm not quite sure if/when that will happen.

Phone: His love for the phone hasn't diminished at all in the last month. Nor do we really expect it to for a while, actually. Usually, he doesn't really want you - he just wants your phone.

Colors: Still being quite the stinker here, and I can't tell how much he actually knows and how much is just laziness.  He definitely gets orange every time, and I know he knows yellow and blue. Green and red are still hit or miss, and he often interchanges pink and purple for some reason. White and brown are pretty solid, too.

Other Likes & Dislikes: Play-doh is a new favorite activity.



He picks a color, tells one of us to "oh-pum-it?!" He gets the play-doh out of the container himself. Then you have to mush it for him to give him a flat (ish) palette for him to make various impressions with different cut-outs. He loves it, and it isn't TV, so we are all for that. 

Outside is still fun, but he'll often choose TV over outside. It's that time of year with schizophrenic weather, too, which makes it a little bit challenging to find the right wardrobe for outside play.

OH!!  Songs!  Desmond does love singing songs. Especially "FAST!" like "Foo foo FAST!" (That's "Little Bunny Foo Foo," sung very fast.) Other favorites are Wheels on the Bus, Baby Shark, and Itsy-Bitsy Spider, all of which naturally come with their own fabulous hand motions. What did we talk about at dinner before we spent it singing Baby Shark? I certainly don't know.

I'll close with a few more pictures from today, because whatever I write wont' come close to Desmond's cuteness. These also show his raw nose, since he has a cold that requires constant nose-wiping, and his recent too-short haircut. (Note to self and future stylists - going too short on this kid means spiky hair.)

Last Water Day?

We managed to have a little bit of fun in the water outside, even though it was probably just over 60 degrees. It might even be our last chance to play in the water until next summer.

But it was fun!!

How's Dexter doing?

Hey look! Another post I didn't finish.

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I've been so busy not keeping up with Desmond's blog posts, I've neglected to do any for Dexter, either.

In fact, it's been so long since I wrote anything substantial about Dexter, I don't even know where to begin, so I guess I'll start with the latest stuff.

Speaking of sleep deprivation, I'm afraid the whole last year and a half or so has been practically defined by Dexter's sleep patterns, or lack thereof. Ever since he climbed out of his crib (March 1, 2010, if anyone is keeping track), it has been a nightly fight to get him in bed and asleep.  Almost all the time, he falls asleep between 9:45 and 10:15. Occasionally, he will fall asleep earlier (July 24, 2011 - 8:50pm) or later (Sept 1, 2011 - 11:00pm), but 10:00, give or take, is the norm. He sleeps through about half of the time. The other half of the time, he ends up in our bed, where he is about 50/50 on either tossing and turning or going right back to sleep.  He's not a great napper (we don't even really try most weekends), so he's getting about 10 hours of sleep/day. Neither awesome nor horrible, but I think we might have slightly fewer tantrums if he were better-rested.

Dexter started putting the "X" in his name a few months ago. So he is now "Dextah" instead of "Deh-tur," which is great and a little sad all at the same time.  Growing up!

He's had all of his letters, with sounds, mastered for some time. I wish I had kept better track of when he nailed those down. If I had to make an educated guess now, I'd have to say it was sometime around February 2011. The Leap Frog Letter Factory video really helped with the sounds part. Who says TV is bad?!

Over the last couple of months, he's really gotten much better at recalling and recounting events, like what he did at daycare during the day, or what he had for breakfast at Grandma's house. It's pretty neat to be able to carry on a real conversation with the kid.

Dexter's New Shoes

People always tell you how fast kids go through shoes, but it's tough sometimes to believe it's actually true.

Here are Dexter's most recent pair of shoes:

(Seriously. I looked at them 2 days ago. They were looking rough, but there was not an actual hole in the front.)

He's had them for THREE MONTHS. Four, max.  They were a size 9.


Today, we settled on these:

Intact, for the moment. Size 10w. We tested his ability to run and jump in them while in the store. He even found another kid to run around with, so we know they stay on when he's in full play mode.

Fingers crossed that they last until we need to spring for winter boots.  Gotta love that growing boy. :)

Tonight, Desmond used his imagination!

Our little Desmo is growing up, for sure!  He's got some imagination now, to go with his increasingly long legs.

He was having a rather traumatic dinner, since we wouldn't let him play with  "mom's foam." (That's the iphone, in case you're not caught up.) He pretty much just wandered around, crying his little heart out, while the rest of us tried to show by example what an awesome idea it would be to sit down and eat dinner. (That didn't work.)

At one point, he quieted down a little bit and brought this little toy sheep to the table.  He said, "Sheep hungry. Sheep eat." and put the sheep next to his plate.

I'm not sure if that's an official milestone or what, but we were pretty impressed. (He is 21m 13d old.)