Poopy Fingers and Silly Bands

Excerpt from today's email to Ryan:

Things are going a little better for me this week, in large part because I set very low expectations for myself. I decided that nap time and potty training weren't going to work well together. So I gave up on having Anna take naps and focused on getting Evie one good nap. Miraculously for me, for a few days there she slept for almost three hours. I was totally amazed since she has been taking one hour naps, but at the same time now that Anna's not taking naps, nap time isn't such a break for me. But it's nice to have a few hours in which Anna isn't squeezing the life out of Evie or yanking her toys away or doing whatever else that makes Evie cry. In some ways it was sort of nice not to worry about fighting with Anna to get her to take a nap and she does a better job playing on her own, so I did squeeze a few things besides laundry and dishes in this week.

The potty training is a less positive story. I guess I need to go back to the potty training books, but I feel like I have tried everything and it's just not clicking with her. We've reached the point where as long as I get her to sit on the potty (usually by bribing her with candy) every thirty minutes, then she keeps her panties dry. But I can't get her to anticipate the need to go at all, so I spend a lot of my day trying to get her to the bathroom before she has an accident and most days I forget at least once or twice. I made all these commitments about potty training and I haven't kept a single one. I said I'd never use candy to bribe her. I planned to have her potty trained early, and I said I'd never use pull-ups. These days it's candy all day long and whenever I can't take it anymore or we need to go out, I stick her in pull-ups, which she just treats like a diaper. And whenever I talk to other moms about it, they all give me advice, but that just makes me feel like a bigger failure because I feel like I've tried it all and it's just not working for us. I think what's really going on here is that Anna is training me to better understand her personality. She just likes to take her time about these things and I'm sure that one day it will just click. I guess I'd put her back in diapers at this point and try again in a month or two, but I don't think she'll wear them. She wants to wear panties, which is also a bit of progress.

In between the potty training and the lack of naps, I finally finished the DVD I was compiling for Anna's birth mom. For Anna's third birthday, I wanted to put together all the videos I have of Anna over the past year and send it to her birth mom, along with some professional photos of Anna. Well, Anna's birthday came and went and I was a long ways off from getting the DVDs done. I felt so guilty about being late because I know that birthdays can be a rough time for birth moms, but I just couldn't manage to find the time to get it done. I also ran into some technical problems. I had so much video of Anna that I had to burn it onto two DVDs, but the good news is that I finished it this week. I'm going to try to be a lot more careful now about starting projects with deadlines. I think I just do better if I have something I can work on when I do happen to have a few moments to myself, as long as I'm not trying to get it done in time for a birthday or a holiday, because something always comes up to interrupt me.

I've also managed to find some time to go running again. I'm hoping to find a half marathon around the middle of the summer that I can enter. Then if all goes well and I don't injure myself, I'm going to try for my first marathon in September. It's nice to be running again and most of the time it makes me a happier person, but I have such a hard time going to bed early enough and then I'm up at 5:30 so that I can go running and be back home in time to let Dan have his turn at the gym. And now that there's no nap time, it's hard to catch up on my sleep.

Speaking of nap time, by Friday of this past week, I was exhausted, so I decided that during Evie's nap time, I'd put Anna in her room for quiet time. Well, after thirty to forty minutes, I heard Anna call out. At first I planned to ignore her, but then I started to worry that she really needed me. So I went to check on her and after seeing me, she wasn't interested in staying in her room. I tried to close her door, but then she started banging on it. So I let her out and went to lie down again. Her loud banging woke Evie up, but Evie wasn't too upset, so I left her in her crib. Then a few minutes later, Anna started screaming my name. I told her to come to me and tell me what was going on. She came into my room and said, "Mom, I've got poop on my hands." Once again, she decided to stick her hands into her diaper after pooping. So after that I just got Evie up and gave up on the nap.

So yesterday Anna got to go to a Princess birthday party. As part of the party favors, she got to bring home a mylar balloon and some of those silly bands bracelets. Today in Church Evie was playing with one of Anna's silly bands. She started to pull on it and she was totally stretching it out. I started to wonder if she was going to break it and then suddenly it was gone. It shot off her fingers like a rubber band. Then a woman a few rows up, lifted her hand up to the back of her head and turned around with a confused look on her face. I kind of mouthed, "Sorry. It was Evie," as they handed back the silly band. Anyway, I thought it was hilarious.

Transitions

This blog is the closest thing we have to a family journal, so I have felt loads of guilt over the fact that I haven't been posting anything lately. I have this dream that one day I will actually put these posts into a book. In an effort to record something of what's been going on at our house, I'm going to start including excerpts from my emails to my brother Ryan who is currently serving a mission in England.


Excerpt from email written on April 3:
So life has been crazy at our house. I can't decide if I keep getting
busier or if I'm just getting more realistic about how much time I
actually have. We've been going through a lot of transitions lately
with the girls. I guess it's been about a week and a half now that
Anna has been binky free. I was gone at book group and Dan couldn't
find any of Anna's binkies. He told her that the binky fairy came and
took them to help her be a big girl. Anna didn't think much of that
and kept saying, "the binky fairy needs to come back and give me my
binkies." Of course I found two of her binkies the next day, but I
figured I didn't want to lose the progress we had already made, so I
hid them.  We both decided though that we felt a little guilty using
the story of the binky fairy, so the next day I told Anna that Dad had
told her that story because he thought it would help her but there
really isn't a binky fairy. We just couldn't find her binkies. I guess
the story made an impression though because she continued to tell me
that the binky fairy better come back. Anyway, it was hard for the
first twenty-four hours and there was a lot of crying for her binkies.
She even woke up in the night, crying because she didn't have her binkies to soothe
her. The next day she never took her nap because she didn't have her
binkies and I noticed her sucking on her fingers, but by the second
day there was less crying, and she took her
nap. Even now when she is extra tired or really sad, she'll cry, "I
want my binkies," but most of the time she's ok.

About the same time all of this happened, Anna also decided she wanted
to start wearing underwear instead of diapers, but she's not so
interested at sitting on the potty. So I've been putting her in
panties every morning, but then I spend most of the day trying to talk
her into sitting on the potty instead of just wetting her panties.
Rarely does she ask to sit on the potty herself. Usually I have to
bribe her with jelly beans, Skittles, or today it was gummy bugs. Evie
doesn't really know what's going on but she knows that when I go to the
pantry it's to get Anna some candy. Evie follows me now and begs for candy
too, so usually I give her some. I'm afraid of her first trip to the
dentist. Evie loves sweets and already eats more than Anna got at this
age. We usually make it through the first part of the day by eating
lots of candy and I spend a lot of time in the bathroom waiting to
hear that magical tinkle sound. Usually at nap time I put Anna in a
pair of pull-ups and if I'm too tired I just leave her in the same
pair until we put her in her diaper at bedtime. She's making progress
but it's very slow going. I want to give up but I figure as long as
she asks for panties I should try too.

On top of all of this, nap time is falling apart. Evie has been
sleeping for only an hour a day and this last week Anna has taken only
one nap. I think she's decided she's done with naps. I wonder if the
lack of binky has something to do with it. So this past week I spent a
lot of time rocking Evie to try and get her to take better naps and
then I spend more time trying to convince Anna to take a nap. I'm
continuing to try to focus more on my kids than on my to do list, but
at the end of this week, I felt like all I had done was sit in the
bathroom or rock Evie to sleep or the dishes. It's been a hard week
for me.