Potty Training

I read this great e-book on 3-day potty training. I really felt like Allison was ready so we decided to do it last weekend. I took Friday off so I could be home alone with her that day. It was a long exhausting weekend but it was a SUCCESS! After 3 days she's having about 1 accident per day. Not too shabby. She's still waking up wet in the morning (she pees right before/after waking up so she's not lying in it all night. But I refuse to use pull-ups or night diapers. She will learn. I know that's true. If it means a few extra loads of laundry for a few weeks, it's totally worth it in the long run to be done with this.

We were going to do it this coming weekend instead but I am going out of town on the Monday right after that and I wanted to be around to reinforce it. And if we waited after that we would be in to April and I didn't want to wait that long. And even if I was a little unsure of my decision, the night before starting she told us she had to poop and then went on the potty (well, the big toilet, she's never really liked her potty chair). And then during bath time she said peepee and sure enough she was standing there peeing. So I knew she was ready.

The next few posts will be a recap of our 3-day adventure. Hope you're ready to hear a lot about pee!

To my OOF Friends - this is all stuff you've already heard.
To the other mommies reading - this might be helpful if you decide to embark on this.
To non-moms - this is going to be tedious detail. Feel free to skip it.

A Lenten Challenge

In addition to my Lenten sacrifice alluded to below I have decided to take on an additional challenge this year:
Fasting From My Clutter

Each day I will post here the challenge for the day and invite all of you to play along.

Don't worry, I'll still be posting updates and pictures of those cuties.

ASH WEDNESDAY
GETTING READY TO CLEAR MY CLUTTER
Jl 2:12-18; 2 Cor 5:20—6:2; Mt 6:1-6, 16-18
Today’s readings give me basic instructions for the next 40 days. As a first step to clearing my heart and mind of clutter, I arrange a quiet prayer corner in which to talk to God. I find a suitable place in my home and stock it with a Bible, a notebook, pens (and this Update!). Today, and every day this Lent, I will spend time with God, reading over the Scriptures for the day, listening to what God is saying to me, and writing down what I hear.

Spring!

I know, there is still about a month until the beginning of the season Spring on our calendar. But today is the beginning of Spring in the Catholic Church.
Lent comes from the Anglo-saxon word lencten, meaning Spring (from Modern Catholic Dictionary).

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church this is why Lent is important:

Jesus' temptation reveals the way in which the Son of God is Messiah, contrary to the way Satan proposes to him and the way men wish to attribute to him.244 This is why Christ vanquished the Tempter for us: "For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sinning."245 By the solemn forty days of Lent the Church unites herself each year to the mystery of Jesus in the desert.

What does Lent mean to me? Advent is a time of preparation - of making ready our hearts for the coming of the King. I suppose Lent is also about preparation but in a more solemn way. It is more about refocusing on the only thing that is truly important. It is about learning to be vigilant and learning to live in the presence of Christ.

I won't share with you my lenten sacrifice. I rather like keeping that between myself and God. But I will tell you that as I work on drawing closer to Him I will be praying for my family and friends that your own Lenten journey will be fruitful and restorative.

Lions & Tigers & Bears

We got to see all of these yesterday at the zoo!

It's been an unusually warm winter here and this week is going to be in the 60's all week. We took advantage yesterday and used our zoo membership to check out the newest baby giraffe. Allison is just about at the perfect age to really start to enjoy the animals. She walked almost the entire zoo by herself. This was great for Peter because he got to enjoy the front seat of the stroller. I think he really liked that.

Allison loved the lions. She started making her lion roar when she saw them. She also really enjoyed the elephants. She just kept saying "wow." We got to see a brown bear stand up on his hind legs. The zoo has a 5 day old baby giraffe that we got to see. As a newborn he is already 6'2" and 175 lbs - basically the size of a full-grown human man.

The other really cool thing we saw were some baby snow leopards. They are just 2 days older than Peter. They were laying right up against the glass and we were about 5 inches away from them. Luckily that was through a brick wall and very thick glass. But it's about as close as I imagine we'd ever get to be to such an animal - so cool.

All in all, it was a fun day. It was very fun to see her be so interactive with the animal exhibits.

In happier news...

Allison has become quite the little Miss Independent. She loves doing things for herself - getting undressed, picking out clothes, getting out of her carseat, getting out of her booster, etc. Her vocabulary has exploded with too many words to count. She'll repeat anything - so be careful what you say around her!

Peter is very mobile. He still isn't sitting up well but I'm sure that will happen in time. He's doing well at taking Stage 1 foods and we really need to get better about giving him solids on a consistent schedule. He loves have "conversations" with Allison. And taking her toys. His latest trick is finding her sippy cups on the floor, where she dropped them to move on to something more interesting, and trying to drink from them.

Peter's baptism is scheduled for Saturday March 21. If you'd like to attend, please let me know and I can give you the details.

Where have I been?

In case you are all worried about where your faithful blogger has been - well, I've been sick. Not just the "I have a bad cold" kind of sick, but really sick. Possibly permanently.

Gastroparesis

That's what they call in. I am still waiting for that diagnosis to be confirmed with one more test but I and my gastroenterologist (GI) are fairly certain.

Since the symptoms of this aren't something your bring up in polite conversation I haven't really shared this with anyone. But since mid-September I have been getting sick (throwing up) daily. When it first started I also had vertigo. At first I thought that perhaps I was (improbably) pregnant. I'm not. When that was ruled out we suspected it might be my gallbladder. I did have a gallstone and had a history of a poorly functioning gallbladder. So I had it taken out in December. That didn't help. In Oct/Nov I started getting random quick feelings of numbness/tingling. That combined with the vertigo got my brain all riled up thinking it could be MS. None of the doctors think that is the case. I will have an MRI in a few weeks to definitively rule it out but I'm not too worried. I suspected a hormone imbalance since the feeling was similar to my pregnancies. That was also ruled out.

I finally got in to see a GI last week (a fellow Domer - hooray!) and he confirmed my suspicion that this is likely a problem with how quickly my stomach empties. Basically, there is a nerve (vagus nerve) that tells your stomach when to contract and push food through to the small intestine. Sometimes that nerve gets damaged. It happens a lot in people with diabetes (ruled out for me). In the rest of the cases, they don't usually know what causes it. Those cases are called idiopathic gastroparesis. That's me.

They did an endoscopy to rule out any kind of blockage in my upper GI tract. All clear. But they did find some esophagits (inflammation of the esphogous - probably from vomiting so much the last 3 years) and found that my stomach still held food from 6 hours before and had limited motility (movement). I go back this week for a gastric emptying study. I will get to eat some (low-dose) radioactive food and they will check how quickly it passes through. If it takes 4 hours or more then the diagnosis of gastroparesis will likely be confirmed.

Treatment options - none of them are really making me jump for joy. There are some medications I will start trying after the GES. Hopefully those combined with changing my eating habits to have more frequent, smaller meals will help the symptoms. But there is no known cure of which I am yet aware.

If you are the praying sort, please pray that
1. God will heal my body
2. I will have the emotional strength to deal with the repercussions of all of this

If you are not a praying person, I encourage you to think about starting. God is waiting for you!

On the Move

Peter has discovered the excitement of forward motion. This weekend he started doing the "army crawl" (is there a real name for this)? He gets his arm under himself then uses his legs to propel forward. I could tell within the last week that he was itching to move forward and grab things in front of himself. And he finally made it happen.

I don't remember exactly, but it seems like it took Allison a lot longer to crawl. She was content to roll everywhere. She could make it across the room in no time by rolling and pivoting. But not this guy. For him, rolling is so last week.

In other exciting news, the kids got a bit of a shake up this weekend in the car. We moved Peter from the infant carrier to the convertible seat. And we turned Allison's convertible seat around so she is facing forward. I really think she loves the new view. Instead of falling asleep on the ride home from watching the super bowl last night (well past her bed time), she stayed awake and gabbed with us the entire ride home.