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To Potty Train or not to Potty Train…That is the Question

kasper — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:50:20 +0000

Phew, the craziness of Christmas is finally over! Okay, it wasn’t that bad, just exhausting. Christmas Eve we went to the Family Service at church. It was really well done and really included the little ones. I think that’ll have to be a tradition we continue from year to year. Christmas morning we dragged little D out of bed around 8:30 jingling bells and telling him that Santa had been there and that he had presents to open. He replied by saying “under my tree?”. Not really grasping the concept of Christmas he quickly became distracted and much to my husband’s dismay I called a halt to the proceedings with unopened gifts still under the tree. I mean there’s hardly any point in rushing the kid through opening his gifts when he’d much rather throw the paper over his head. Besides, we had to be in the car by 10:30 to get over to my Aunt’s house for 1:00 for my family’s gathering. It was really nice getting together as we don’t get much of a chance to see everyone (Aunt, Uncle, 3 cousins, Gran, Mum, Dad, Brother & his wife) and certainly not all at once. We are generally a loud boisterous family and this gathering was no exception. I miss it, and wish we could all get together more often. I made my big announcement (the pregnancy) via little D’s shirt: “I’m going to be a big brother”. I’m all about the theatrics. We were going out for dinner this year (we used to go out years ago but have stayed home with turkey for the last say 20 years) instead of having my Gran cook for everyone. I liked this idea since my Gran always gets a bit frantic before hand and is constantly checking her watch worried about getting the food ready on time. It’s just not very relaxed, so I think going out was a much better choice. I mean she is 88, she should enjoy Christmas and not be worried about feeding everyone. At dinner everyone was super impressed at how well behaved little D was. I think I sometimes take that for-granted. He just is like that all the time. It really hit home when a kid much older than mine was shrieking at the top of his lungs about something and for a good 5-10 minutes before his parents bothered to do anything!
On to day two of our Christmas traveling. This time we were off to see his family. I sort of dread going up to see them only because it is so opposite of my family. Most of the time with my family you can’t get a word in edgewise and there is certainly never a dull moment. With his family there is only his Mom, sister and niece and certainly they are not even close to rowdy like my family can be. Even just visiting my Mum, we are constantly talking. Being around his family I feel this uncomfortable need to fill the silence, but I’m just not that social, so it’s just uncomfortable. This was no exception, and when you considered that we got there around 1:00 and didn’t go out to eat until 5:30 it made for a long day. When we got to the restaurant for our buffet dinner, we were told that they weren’t running the buffet that night. We were all pretty ticked off since the reservation had been made with that stipulation. We ended up getting 10% off our meals if we stayed and ordered from the menu, so that was at least something. I was starting to think I was on an episode of Hell’s Kitchen seeing as our meals took about 40 minutes to arrive. By the time we finished dinner and made the long drive home it was 9:30. I told hubby that next time we have to insist on an earlier dinner for little D’s sake. Even though he sleeps all the way home in the car, it’s still a really long day.
Today was a total veg day. I really wanted to take little D to see a movie, but hubby didn’t want to go today “it’ll be too busy, you know how I hate crowds…”. Though I could have taken him myself, I thought it would be a nice family outing, so hopefully we’ll be going tomorrow. Although…part of me is thinking I should be trying to potty train starting tomorrow. Little D is going to be 3 in April, and I think it’s time, despite hubby thinking he’s too young. Anyone have any thought, comments, suggestions on the subject? Possibly like a shmuck I bought one of those potty-training guides off the Internet which make me believe that I can have him totally trained in 3 days or less. Am I kidding myself? I’m actually kind of nervous about it. What if he’s totally defiant about the whole thing? The guide says that once you start you should not stop or it’ll just confuse the kid and make it that much harder when you go to try again later. Isn’t there some potty-training school I could just send him off too, like doggy obedience school or something?

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Alone at last

kasper — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:32:44 +0000

I kept meaning to get back here before now, but somehow I didn’t. Blame my son for not going to sleep faster, or blame my hubby for not putting him to sleep (“you’re so much better at it”), blame the ADD type tendencies I have when sitting down in front of my monitor. I am constantly getting sidetracked when I’m on the computer. I begin to do one thing, then have to look something up, then I stumble upon something really cool and continue along that vein until I totally forget why I sat down in the first place. It’s so aggravating!
So I hope not to see any more family for a while. Two weeks ago my Mum was down for a weekend visit with her dog. If I have to hear one more time from hubby that he’s spotted a dog hair that’s been left behind I think I’ll shoot myself! Though my Mum means well, I get a little tired of her criticizing the way I parent MY son. Then this past weekend we got hubby’s Mom. She doesn’t drive so he had to drive 1½-2 hours to pick her up and then the same to get back home again. She’s a nice enough lady, but I just don’t feel that comfortable around her and she doesn’t get around very well, so I had to keep helping her up the stairs and such. Hubby’s sister was supposed to come down on Sunday for a visit and to pick up his Mom. Only problem was it snowed. She being a “sucky woman driver” according to hubby was too scared to make the journey down, so we got to keep Mom until Monday afternoon. So now I finally have the house to myself (well no one to entertain), but have to clean up all the aftermath.

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Rained out

kasper — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:05:38 +0000

Just got back from a miserable day in Barrie. It was a grey rainy day before we started out and it never really got much better. We went up to belatedly celebrate hubby’s birthday which was June 5th with his family and his sister’s friends. One of the friends brought her 3 daughters along and with our niece who is generally moody they were all miserable by the time we arrived. They had gone up early to make sure we got a shelter, and had been there like 3 hours before we got there. On the way up we stopped to get burgers for everyone as instructed by hubby’s mom. When we arrived she said that she only told him to bring our own food, but he swore that twice she said that we should bring the burgers. That pissed us both off because we wouldn’t have stopped and spent money we didn’t need to otherwise.

We did use the Baby Buzz patch on baby D and between the super smelly patch and hubby and I swatting away the pesky skeeters, I don’t think the baby got any bites at all. Wish I were as lucky. About 10 minutes after I arrived I got a bit bite on my forehead. That I am aware of, I got 3 on my hands (including one right beside the nail on my pinky finger), 1 on my forehead, 3 on my ankle and tons on the backs of my thighs. Talk about itchy!!!

Eventually after we ate the rain stopped so we went on a little walk around the park to view the animals. We saw an albino raccoon, a bear, wolves, foxes and various raptors. It was so sad though, the poor wolves were just running around in circles and obviously had been for some time since the ground under them was all sunken in. I was told that all these animals had been rescue animals, but I wonder if any of them would’ve chosen death over this captivity. Poor animals.

I was hoping to be home by eight since it’s my first day back at work tomorrow, but as usual I couldn’t pry him away from everyone and it was after 21:30 by the time we got home. I’m surprised I’m even writing this – I should be in bed! So I’m off to hopefully get a good night sleep before tomorrow.

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Gearing up

kasper — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:29:07 +0000

Yes, I’m gearing up for the end of the year (school year) madness. Even though I’m not back at work yet, I still have a bunch of stuff to do. Like tomorrow night is my school’s grad. Even though I haven’t been there for over a year, I promised the students that I would be back to announce the grads as they walk across the stage. This has always been my thing, and I really enjoy doing it. Besides they always seem to have a problem finding someone who can say some of the names. For instance Sathananthalingam is just the last name of one of our students. Her first name is still 12 characters long. I don’t seem to have much difficulty in saying these names so I’m always called upon when there’s a long name like that to pronounce. Then on Thursday is our end of the year staff breakfast. Even though I went last year, I think I’m going to beg off this year. I don’t really want to sit through all the goodbyes of staff I don’t really care about or know. Besides I anticipate it being difficult keeping a little guy who is *almost* walking still for like 4 hours. It’ll probably be more trouble than it’s worth and frankly I don’t care that much.

My mum was down for a couple of days and we had a really nice visit. This was the first time she stayed for more than one night. We decided the last time she was here that it didn’t make much sense to just stay for one night because it was all so rushed. We really didn’t do much. We managed to get out for a long walk and admire other people’s front gardens. It gave me all sorts of ideas for mine. And we had my brother and his wife over for dinner Saturday night. They left around 21:00 and my mum, dad, hubby and I stayed up till 23:00 talking about baby D and his birth. Even though it wasn’t that long ago (14 months) there were a couple things I had actually forgotten. I love reminiscing! Yesterday we went to church together and then came home and finally hung up some pictures I’ve been meaning to get on my walls. I will still have to get some more pictures as I have a humongous wall in my family room that could use some lovin’.

This time next Monday I will be at work. I am trying desperately not to think about it for fear that I will lose my mind. It’s only for 2 weeks; 9 days in fact so I’m sure I can do that. The worst will be when baby D goes into daycare and it’s a full time arrangement. If hubby was staying home with baby D the whole time as we had planned I probably wouldn’t be as nervous, but my Dad will be watching him for 3 days. I’m sure it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but he’s old-school German and tends to have his own way of doing things and criticizing mine. I guess I’m just afraid that he’ll be letting baby D scream himself to sleep or feeding him large chunks of stuff that he might choke on or possibly being too rough on him. I’ll just have to keep thinking happy thoughts that everything will go fine or I’m going to make myself sick thinking about it.

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Lazy, lazy, lazy

kasper — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:53:59 +0000

I’m such a slack. I have no idea where my weekend went. I guess between watching movies and working on my new layout all the time just got sucked away. I really want to get this new layout finished up, but it seems that I keep changing my mind about how it should look. Maybe by next weekend I’ll have it looking spiffy enough to put up.
I started doing the Weekend Snapshot and was really looking forward to making myself take some photos so that I’d be able to post along with everyone, but I’ll refer back to the first statement of this entry. That’s right, I’m a slack. We were supposed to go to London to my Aunt’s house for my Mum’s “surprise” birthday. The “surprise” part is a joke because my Gran told my Mum to ask us (my brother & I) if we could come down to her party. Seeing as she already knows about it, it’s not exactly a surprise. I talked to her Friday and she said that she had been practicing looking surprised. I was really looking forward to seeing everyone and showing off how big baby D’s getting, but it got postponed due to weather. We got a dumping of like 25-30cm! As I suspected it was sunny on Sunday and melted the snow pretty fast. That figures. So we’ll be heading south next weekend instead. Since I don’t get out and do stuff much, find myself being inflexible when plans change. So with the family doing nothing interesting over the weekend, I once again have no photo to show for it. We may actually make it out of the house today and drag baby D through the snow on his sled, so if we do I’ll be sure to get some photos up. FYI I don’t post baby D photos publicly (or mine either for that matter), so if you’re interested in seeing them let me know here and befriend me in Flickr.
I did manage to get some things straightened out about my maternity leave. So, I’ve been in to work and done the paper work, here’s how it’s going to play out. I am taking an Infant Care leave after my maternity runs out. This will be unpaid, but I don’t have to return to work. I will return to work on June 30th for 2 weeks until our summer starts while hubby takes 2 weeks holidays to stay home with baby D. When I go back to work my unpaid vacation time (20 days) will be processed and paid out to me which will hopefully help get us through the summer since I can’t claim EI. Then I will be back full time for the new school year in mid-August. The other hitch of this scenario is that my Dad (Mr. Financial) thought I was insane to even consider such a stupid idea when we discussed it a couple of weeks ago. To go without money when we’re stretched as it is would be suicide. It’s true, it will be extremely hard on us but I feel that it’s what’s best for baby D. So on Thursday night we all went out for dinner and while I searched for a good way to break the final news to my Dad, he said ’so March Break is coming up, I guess you’ll have to go back to work soon’. “Actually no.” ‘Oh, so you are staying off until August?” ‘Yup, got it all cleared through work.’ And that was the end of it. No arguing, no yelling, no ‘you can’t possibly afford to stay home’. It was sweet. So one less thing for me to worry about. Yay! Now I’ll just have to think of something else…

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First tooth

kasper — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:03:24 +0000

[flickr]photo:2278861812[/flickr]

Baby D cut his first tooth! Finally. He just turned 10 month old and this is the first. I gave up checking for teeth a while ago, but Saturday afternoon he grabbed my finger and went to suck on it. The sharp little ridges of the tooth actually scared me since I wasn’t expecting anything but gums. Sucking my fingers isn’t something he normally does, so it was almost like he wanted to show me that it was there.

Yesterday was a brand new holiday here. It was “Family Day”. It’s a nice idea I think. I mean there is nothing but miserable snow from Christmas to Easter with nothing to look forward to in between. So to celebrate the day we (my Dad, me, hubby, baby, brother & sister-in-law) got together for lunch at Swiss Chalet (oooh aaaah). I was ready to invite everyone back to our place to play a board game or something, but before I got the chance, my brother asked us back to his place to watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Hubby said that it hadn’t gotten great reviews so I wasn’t expecting much, but despite being fairly slow I found it quite interesting. It was a nice day spent with family and I especially loved watching my brother with baby D. Not having any kids of his own and not having any access to any it was cute watching him try to entertain my son.

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Goodbye…

kasper — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:10:36 +0000

I hate getting behind on my posts because so much has happened since the last one. The biggest thing that happened was my Great-Aunt dying. She passed away on February 2nd, and it came as a great shock to the whole family. I mean granted she wasn’t young, but she also hadn’t been sick or anything. My Gran took it very hard as she was the last remaining sister of 4, and my Great-Aunt was her younger sister. She kept saying that she couldn’t believe that she was gone and that it was supposed to have been her that went first. I came to learn that on top of their Grandmother dying, February second was also the same day that my cousins’ mother died of cancer about 10 years ago. That poor family has been through the wringer, I’m telling you! The first son Dylan was born with a birth defect that caused him to not have any thigh bones so basically his knees are around his pelvis, and he only has 3 deformed fingers on each hand. Then they adopted a son (not sure why – maybe they thought they couldn’t have anymore children, I’m really not sure). Then they had a daughter. Ashley fell out of bed at around 4 years of age and was paralyzed from the waist down. She can walk now but not without a cane and her leg is all twisted. Then of course the mother dies young leaving the children when the oldest was only a teenager. I’ve heard the saying that God only gives you what you can handle, but I can’t believe that any one family should have to go through so much.

It was a beautiful service packed into the small chapel. My Great-Uncle actually gave the eulogy. All I can say is that he is one strong man. I couldn’t get up and speak after just losing my wife of nearly 60 years! As it was my cousin mentioned a couple of days before the memorial, that he was going over to teach him how to use the washing machine! I couldn’t imagine the hole in his life now! It makes me sad just thinking about it now. It also makes me more aware of my family and how much I treasure them. I think that happens to a lot of people. That when someone close to them dies they realize just how much their family means to them. It’s sort of haunted me a bit. Especially with my Gran. She is a strong person and I don’t expect her to waste away because of her sister, but what if the last time I saw her really was the last time? You know. You have to make every visit count. And make sure you say what’s in your heart or you could be regretting not doing it when it’s too late.

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