Threat Level Midnight: Adventures in Potty Training

We're back! 2011 is here, and with it new found hope that this blog will be updated more consistently. We'll see.

Did anyone know that having two kids in diapers at the same time is pretty expensive? It is. So for the last few months Courtney and I have been talking up the big boy potty to Levi. I've even gone so far as to bribe him with his favorite snack in the world, M&Ms. Nothing worked. He refused to sit on the potty and cried when we tried to put him there. I was on vacation the last week of December so we made a concerted effort to have him sit on the potty a couple times a day, and slowly but surely he is getting more accustomed to the potty. We're proud to say that Levi is going pee on the potty a few times every day, and today he had his first poop.

We are learning that being flexible is a very important quality to have when parenting. Levi's interests are always changing, so it can be hard to keep up him. He still loves Thomas the Train and loves to play with all the cool trains he got for Christmas. Over my vacation Levi watched his first movie, The Jungle Book. This was an intentional choice on my part because this was the first movie I watched when I was a kid. He loved it. Since then he's been pretending to be the characters from the movie, most notably Colonel Hathi the elephant. I guess the upside is that we're all in good shape with all the marching we've been doing.

Our family accounts for about a million of this clip's views.

Levi with his "elephant trunk".

Additionally, Levi loves to sing. His current favorites are "elephants marching" (the song from the clip above), "six eight" (theme song to Thomas), and Skinnamarinky Dinky Dink.

Who needs TV when you have this kid?

At about 4-1/2 months, Lucas stopped sleeping through the night. The last three months have been very frustrating with a lot of sleepless nights. Things have been better in the last week, so we're not sure if maybe he's coming out of the whole sleep issue, or if he's just messing with us. He did cut his first tooth yesterday, so maybe he'll be a great sleeper since that's out of the way. He is very good at crawling backwards, but he hasn't quite mastered the art of traveling forwards yet. He's generally a happy boy, especially when his brother is being a ham and making him laugh hysterically.