A Little Make-Believe

My kids love to play racecars. They don’t just play with matchbox cars, they are the cars. They line up behind the couch, wait until I say, “Ladies and gentleman,” before they get revved up. I introduce them using their aliases, Tanner “Doc” racecar and Taylor “Lightening McQueen” racecar. They drive out to the podium and say a few words, mostly mumbling something about being careful of the other racers. Then I tell them to start their engines. Ready, set, go and the racers are off. Round and round the family room they go in circles until one crashes and needs repairs or they run out of gas. They come in for new tires every few laps and the race continues until one or the other decides suddenly that it is over. I hand out their blue ribbons, they take a victory lap and they line up to do it all again. This could go on all night if we let it.
Besides playing racecars, they also love to be trains. This time the setting is the kitchen; the track starts at the island then wraps around the table. My son has many alter train egos; he is James or Percy, Gordon or Mavis. My daughter is almost always Thomas. Again, I usually have to introduce them and say “Go, Thomas,” and “Go, James,” before they take off on the tracks. With whistles blowing and engines chugging, they find their own adventures at every turn. Sometimes they head to the “docks” or the “station”; other times they deliver the mail or haul coal. Each time around the track brings new excitement as they let their imaginations soar.
Whether they are being racecars or trains, they enjoy the freedom of childhood and the thrill of imagination. It is wonderful to watch them develop their young minds. There is nothing more beautiful and innocent than the creativity of a child. It is so pure and refreshing. If only we could all take a few moments out of our busy days and remember what it is like to pretend. If only we could hold on to the magic of childhood forever!

Potty Training Advice

My mom is aware of the potty training problems I am having with my son and she recently sent me an article explaining a new, and somewhat radical, solution. The article, “Expect potty-training success, and it will come” written by John Rosemond, discusses a program designed for older children who are not yet potty trained and may be resisting the use of the potty. Mr. Rosemond refers to a common problem known as “stool refusal” and uses this as the basis for his advice. My son does not have this problem; he simply will not use the potty at all. But despite this variation, the article does offer a possible solution for my problem.
To begin, Mr. Roesmond recommends using the child’s doctor as the authority who is demanding the use of the potty. My son, who is 3 1/2, knows what a doctor is and does and he has seen his doctor dozens of time, but I doubt that he would recognize him as an “authority.” The only authority figures in his life are myself and my husband and he hasn’t listened to either of us yet when it comes to understanding the necessity of going to the bathroom. We can certainly try using the “doctor” to motivate him, but I am not sure how successful that will be.
The next step in this process is to force the child to remain in the bathroom by himself until he has a bowel movement. In our case, I would just like him to do something on the potty without having an audience. Our problem with this aspect of the process is that my son will not stay in the bathroom by himself. But Mr. Rosemond addresses this problem and explains that if the child refuses “to stay in the bathroom, [the parents] were to gate him in.” This is what got my attention. Maybe we should put a gate on the door so I can walk away and he won’t follow. While this goes against most philosophies I have read on potty training, it may be just the solution we need. I don’t want to force my son into potty training, but he needs to learn soon. He is getting too old to keep wearing diapers and the older he gets, the harder it is going to be to teach him. I will give him a few more weeks, maybe months, to come around on his own. But if he isn’t potty trained by the time he turns 4, then we may have to put this plan into action. Then I can stop wishing he would use the potty and tell him to just do it!

Potty Training Trouble

I hate changing diapers. I couldn’t wait until my son turned 3 because I was sure that he would be potty trained and out of diapers. When that day came and went, I hoped that he would be potty trained for the first day of preschool. Well, that day came and went also. He is now 4 months away from his 4th birthday and we are no closer to being potty trained than they day we welcomed him into this world. I keep waiting for that miracle moment when he is ready, when he comes to me and says, “Mommy, I need to use the potty.” But I don’t know how much longer I can wait.
I have read everything there is on potty training and spoken to his pediatrician who assures me that my son will learn in his own good time and that lots of boys are not potty trained at this age. Well, that may be true, but I don’t know of any! We have tried rewards including stickers, stamps, potty charts, play- time on the computer, m & m’s. Nothing has worked. I tried taking him to the potty every hour and making him sit, hoping he would do something. But he wouldn’t sit still unless I stayed with him and I could only sit on the bathroom floor for so long. We remind him constantly to tell us when he needs to go potty and he never does. And even when we ask him if he pooped or peed in his diaper, he usually tells us no. We tried having him wear underpants but what a mess! After a few days of that, we went back to diapers. I wonder if he even realizes what it feels like to go number 1 or number 2 or is he just so absorbed in being a 3 year old that he doesn’t have time to worry about it?
Well, I worry about it. I don’t want to push him too hard because I understand that might just make him resist even more. But I also don’t want to have the only child in school who still wears diapers (even though he is the only one right now). And did I mention that I hate changing diapers?
We have had a recent breakthrough of sorts. Instead of insisting that big boys wear diapers, he now states that big boys wear underpants. That doesn’t mean that he is ready to lose the diapers yet but maybe we are getting closer. He does take great pride in picking out a pair of big boy underpants each day which he wears, yes, over top of his diapers! To be continued…

Beach Party

A beach party in the middle of winter? Yes, you heard me right. My son’s preschool had a beach party today. Even though it is only about 35 degrees here in West Virginia, the students all changed into their bathing suits and the classroom was transformed into a sand-filled adventure. Twenty 3 and 4 year olds and a few younger siblings piled into the room, eyes wide with fascination, ready to get jump in. They grabbed their shovels and buckets and began making everything from mere mountains and piles to perfect pies and castles. Some didn’t want to get sand on their hands or feet but they soon forgot about the gritty mess as they filled up their dump trucks and drove from one side of the beach to the other. It was a little bit of summertime magic; the only things missing were the sound of the waves crashing on shore, the smell of salt water in the air and the sun beating down on their backs.
And just as if it were a real day at the beach, they were tired and hungry after an hour in the sand. The smell of hot dogs on the grill settled them all down as they waited for lunch. Beach towels and blankets littered the floor of the adjoining classroom and everyone spread out for a wonderful picnic. The day would not have been complete without snow cones and cotton candy, which my children turned down in favor of playing with pirates and castles. But at the end of the day, everyone had a great time. Just like a day at the beach without the sunburn. What a great idea to chase away those wintertime blues!

Learning to Blog

So far my blogging experience has been frustrating to say the least. I sounded like an easy thing to do but it is a little more complicated than all the blogging gurus make it sound. Maybe I am just behind the learning curve and out of my element here but I am determined to figure this out. See, I am a writer; at least writing is what I last went to school to study. I don’t do much writing because I don’t have enough to say to write a novel, I don’t have enough expertise to write subject-matter articles, and I am not creative enough to write poetry or music. I write little snapshots of my life and that is about it. So starting a blog sounded like the perfect platform for me to say what I want, when I want and how I want. But I also want people to read it. That is where I have a lot to learn. What is RSS? What are metatags? How do you write HTML? These are just a few examples of the jargon I have encountered and I have no idea what it all means. Of course there are plenty of resources on the web to help me out but I have the tendency to over-research a topic and still not make much sense of it. It seems that whenever I stumble on a site filled with information it only leads me to more questions and when I click links to learn about something else, I forget what I started researching in the first place. So for now I have diverted my attention away from the technical aspect of creating a blog to just writing some content and get my ideas out there. I will return to the other blog stuff later and stop wasting time developing and designing the blog and just get down to writing.