Potty Training, Part IV

We now have a full-time big boy underwear wearer - even at night! Yay! He had been waking up dry for a while now, and a few times he would even wake up during the night and yell, "Mom! I gotta pee pee! MOM!"

So about a week ago, I decided to make the switch to underwear at night. He was so proud of himself, and has kept his bed dry ever since!

Of course, there have been a few (4 so far) accidents (one was right after he caught his fish at the campground. He must have been excited!), but he is doing so awesome. A couple of times, he's actually been able to stop himself long enough to tell me and for me to get him to the bathroom so he can finish! It's sad, but a little cute, that he gets so upset when he has one. He cries. The last time it happened, he came running up to me crying and said, "Mommy! I pee peed in my underpants!"

"It's ok, Owen. Do you have to pee more?"

"But I got pee pee on my underpants!"

I have to reassure him for a while that it happens sometimes. I guess it's good that he gets upset - makes him more motivated NOT to do it.

Johnna said that the other day he got like 2 dribbles on his underpants and had tears in his eyes. Poor guy, just wants to keep his underpants dry! : )

Owen caught an 8" bass in the kid's fishing tournament at the campground over Labor Day. He lost the title for Smallest Fish by 1", but he was so proud and excited that he caught one!

Pooping on the potty has gone awesome since that first night he went. He prefers to use his Elmo potty for pooping, but has gone many times without, too, when we are out and about. He also will normally stand when he pees, but for some reason he makes me shake it : ) He tells me he has to pee and I tell him to go, and then he'll yell at me, "Waggle my pee pee!" all mad, like how dare I assume he could shake his own. It's kind of strange, because any other time, "pee pee" is pee and "wee wee" is his weiner. Haha, I just said weiner. Maybe he says it that way because I'm shaking the pee off of it. Anyway, he also informed me that he would help potty train the baby. He said, "I'm going to waggle her pee pee and wipe her butt!" I told him girls don't have wee wees, and then he told me, "Daddy doesn't have a wee wee!" I told him I was going to tell Daddy he said that and he just laughed. What a silly billy.

I had my regular doctor appointment today and everything is looking good. She didn't say anything about my ultrasound results, so I asked her what the deal was. She said no news is good news, but she looked it up on the computer (thank goodness everything is computerized and fast these days!) and said everything looked normal. Yay!

20 Weeks

Holy moly, I'm halfway through this pregnancy! I'm not really sure how I feel about that. I think I'm ready for time to sloooow down a bit. So much to do in the next few months!

First off, here is a picture of my baby bump at 20 weeks, 2 days:

Cute, huh? ; )

I'm bigger at this point than I was with Owen, but that's normal for baby #2. Weight gain is around 5-6 lbs, depending on what time of day I weigh myself. : ) I felt baby kicks earlier this time around, too, which is awesome. With Owen it was around 20 weeks, this time around it was about 18 weeks. They feel stronger this time, too, which I think is also normal because everything has been stretched out once already (which is why you show sooner, too). The kicks can already be felt from the outside, but they are still pretty unpredictable, so no one but me has felt them yet.

On Monday, I had my 20 week ultrasound. I was so excited/nervous/anxious for it! Baby's health is #1 concern, of course, but I was also excited to find out what I've got cooking in there. I was hoping baby would be in a position that we would be able to see the all important "potty shot", and luckily, SHE was in the perfect position. That's right, I'm cooking up a GIRL! I had the feeling early in pregnancy that it was a girl. I don't know why, it's just what my heart felt. Pregnancy has been a little different this time around, so maybe that's why. Owen has been an easy child since conception. This time around I've dealt with:

-Nausea, almost every day of my first trimester
-Dizziness, to the point where I've almost passed out about a dozen times
-Sensitivity to heat from the sun. There have been multiple times that I've had to go lay down inside because the sun was just zapping all my energy and making me feel sick.
-Heightened sense of smell. If I had this with Owen, I didn't notice it. This time around, I definitely notice it, and I don't really like it.

But I guess that's about it. Otherwise, things are going very well. So anyway, at the beginning of pregnancy, I was convinced it was a girl and kept having dreams that it was, but in the last month or so, my dreams switched over and it was a boy every time. So when Monday rolled around, I was very undecided as to what I thought it was. I think deep down I thought it was a boy, but I wanted it to be a girl. I knew Ryan thought it was a boy, so when we went in for the ultrasound and the lady asked if we had a feeling, I said girl because Ryan said boy, and Owen said boy, even though that morning he had said girl. And when she found the right angle, even I could tell by looking at it that I was RIGHT! (Dear Lord, let it be right! I plan on getting rid of all of Owen's old clothes!) When the tech said it looks like a girl, I told Owen that and he argued with the tech! "No, it's a boy baby!" And he later told my mom on the phone that it was a boy. Little stinker. He's coming around, though!

The tech then went about her business, trying to find the right spots to get pictures of everything she needs. The only bummer is that the tech really can't tell you anything concrete about the baby's health. Everything has to be looked at by the radiologist. So we left there knowing (hopefully!) that the baby's a girl, but not knowing if she's actually healthy or not. On the bright side, it has been four days since then, and I haven't gotten any phone calls or messages, so hopefully that is good news. I do have a doctor's appointment on Monday, but I'm hoping that if there was anything wrong, they would let us know ASAP.

We took Owen with us the the ultrasound, which I thought was going to be a good idea, but looking back, I sort of wish we hadn't. I thought he'd be more interested in the baby, but he just wanted to play and eat and be sort of distracting for Ryan. Luckily, the tech and the student that was with her were really nice and didn't mind the little boy making noises and running in circles in the room, but I'm pretty sure Ryan was too distracted to really get to enjoy it (but on the other hand, I don't know how interested he was in the first place. Not because he's not excited or whatever, but it's just different for Dad's until baby is actually here). I also forgot how long it takes. We were in there for around an hour, and I think we were all getting a little restless. It's not very comfortable for me to lie on my back like that for so long.

We didn't get many good pictures because her back was towards my belly button, but here are a few shots from the ultrasound:

This shows her nose, lips, cheek and shoulder. The rest of her face is in shadow. Can you see it? Her nose is straight up from the yellow word "LIPS" and her lips are to the right of that. Remember, she is face down. This was to check for cleft palate.

3D pictures are CREEPY looking! Little "Skeletor" looks even extra creepy because of the angle the tech had to go at to get her profile. There's lots of fluid and stuff kind of distorting the picture a little more than normal. As you can see, it appears as if she's about to suck her thumb : )

That's about it for pictures. There are a few more of the 3D ones, but they are even more creepy and distorted than this one, so they aren't really worth showing.

So now I'm looking forward to Monday's regular doctor appointment to hopefully find out that everything looks A-OK! Wish us luck!

Potty Training, Part III: He Did It!

Owen pooped on the potty! I'm a few days behind, it actually happened on Thursday night. He had gone to daycare in undies (still to this day he has only had one accident in undies, and that was very early on!) and when we got home, he wanted a diaper on. Dead giveaway that he needed to poop. I had said that I wasn't going to push him to go poop, but I definitely wanted to wait an hour or two before giving in. I reminded him about the dump truck and convinced him to try. We got as far as putting his Elmo seat on the potty ("So I don't fall in!" he says) and getting his shorts and underwear off before he told me he didn't have to go. So he played in the living room for awhile, and after about 20 minutes came up to me and said, "Mom, I got to go poop!"

"Let's try sitting on the potty, then!"

"LET'S GO, MOMMY!"

Ryan and I exchanged looks like, 'Is this happening?!' and I crossed my fingers at him. Owen and I ran back to the potty, and luckily I hadn't put his undies or shorts back on, because I barely got him on there and there was poop in the potty! I did my little potty dance for him and told him I was so happy. He said, "And Daddy will be so happy, and Nana will be so happy!"

So Owen got his big dump truck, a box of M&Ms (to share with Mommy and Daddy), and got to call Nana and tell her the big news. I am so proud of my BIG BOY!

That night I went out to supper to celebrate a friend's birthday and I got this picture text from Ryan

with the message: Poop on the potty like a big boy for the second time tonight!!!!

So for going poop again, he got to pick something out of his prize box. To my delight, he picket alphabet magnets to put on the fridge, and when I got home, he was excited to show me that he had them up already.

I'm a nerd and made him spell out his name for the picture!

He sometimes gets upset that he has to wear a diaper to bed, so I may have to try buying Pull-Ups and convincing him that they are underwear for nighttime. My mom did appease him by putting undies over his diaper one night, so maybe I can just do that, too. He wakes up dry most of the time, but I'm not ready to send him to bed in just undies yet. He is doing an AWESOME job, though.

Underwear!

Today is the first day that Owen went to daycare in underwear! (He was a little cranky yesterday morning and said he didn't want to wear underwear, so I didn't push it.) He was so proud of himself, too!

He picked his Spiderman underwear to wear today.

And we have been using underwear around the house in the evenings after daycare, so here he is last night.

I'm surprised he posed so nicely for this picture, because I interrupted him watching cartoons to take it. ;)

He told me last night that we wouldn't pee on Spiderman today because then Spiderman would get him! I played along and said, "Oh yeah, you wouldn't want that!" and he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, "No, Mommy, he won't get me! He's just on my underwear!" (Imagine his brow furrowed like he's mad I would think such a thing.) Can't get much passed him!


UPDATE 8/23/12: Owen went ALL DAY in his undies, kept them dry and clean! Way to go, Owen! Johnna says he doesn't pee as often as her son does, but I guess that makes it easier on us! No poops yet, though.

Potty Training, Part II

My little monkey is doing such a good job with potty training! I'm so proud of him! Last week went awesome, I think he peed in his diaper 2x the whole week! And one time was during the night! Otherwise he has woken up completely dry. Yay! He even told me in the car on the way out to eat that he had to pee, and I asked if he could hold it until we got to the restaurant. He told me yes, and when we got there, he peed on the potty there!

But still no poops on the potty. I was so sure the dump truck was going to be enough motivation, but he just isn't ready for that step yet. Every day he says that he will poop on the potty, but when it comes down to it, he still refuses. I have been getting him naked when we get home from daycare, and a few times he has cried for me to put his diaper on him because he wants to poop in it. I don't put it back on until bedtime, so he has sat on the potty multiple times to "try", but he just won't do it and then ends up with a belly ache because he's holding it in. Poor kid.

A forward step, though, is that even if he has a diaper on, he almost will ask for permission to poop in it. Out of nowhere he will say, "I don't want to poop in the potty!" So I'll ask if he needs to poop, he will say yes, I'll try to persuade him for a few minutes to try on the potty, he will refuse, and I'll tell him he can poop in his diaper. "I can poop in my diaper?" he'll ask. After I tell him yes again, he'll go find somewhere private to poop. This weekend we were camping, so he asked me to open the door to the camper for him because, "I want to poop on Daddy's bed." : ) So he was in there a good 15 minutes, pooping on our bed. I checked on him once, to make sure it was going ok (he hadn't pooped the day before, so I was worried he was constipated), and he said he was fine and for me to "go away". Then a few minutes later he opened the door to the camper and yelled out to me, "Leave me alone!" and then just went back in to go about his business.

All in all, though, he's doing such an awesome job. Johanna (daycare provider) told me on Friday that he is doing so awesome and that if he did well over the weekend, she would be ok with him coming to her house in underwear this week. I sent him in a diaper today, because the weekend kind of threw us off a routine and it was hard to get him to try when he was playing with his friends at the campground. He still did awesome this weekend, though, and if he does his usual great job today, I'll send him in undies tomorrow if he tells me its ok with him. : )

I also went to the doctor today. I'm 17 weeks and everything is looking as it should. Blood pressure and blood sugar were normal, uterus growing at the right speed, baby's heart rate was 148. The only thing she mentioned was my weight gain - only 5 lbs so far - but that as long as I'm eating and feeling ok, she expects my weight will catch up later! I remember with Owen, they also mentioned my weight gain was slow, but I ended up gaining the 30 lbs they recommended, so I'm not too worried. They also scheduled my big ultrasound for September 10 (3 weeks away), so we are very excited for that and then I go back for my regular appointment the next week. Something to look forward to after Labor Day and summer ending.

Potty Training, Part I

**Long post all about pee and poop : )

Every morning for the past week, Owen has been going pee pee on the potty. He has gone on the potty before, but now it is much more regular. It started one night when Owen and I had just gotten out of the shower and he was in my room with me still naked. We were talking and he suddenly turned and left and ran into the bathroom. He even got ON the potty all by himself and just started going! I was so happy and as a reward, Owen got LOTS of Reeses Pieces (or as he just calls them, M&Ms). That was a bit of a mistake, because the rule quickly changed to just 2 M&Ms for pee pee and 4 for poopy, but he wasn't very happy the first few times when he only got 2 - "I want wots of M&Ms, Mommy!"

So Ryan and I have been VERY happy that he is making progress going pee pee, but he was very against going poop on the potty. He always announces that he has to poop, so every time I will ask him/try to convince him to go on the potty, but he tells me NO! every time. So I haven't pushed it. And when we would talk about it, he would tell me that it's hard to go poop on the potty, but the word of the week for us has been TRY! I give him examples of things he has learned now that he has tried to do them a few times, like opening the front door from the outside. For the longest time, he would REFUSE to even try to open the door to get back in, which I will be honest, was very annoying. But after lots of tears and frustration, he finally tried it, and lo and behold found out that he actually could do it, and now he does it all the time and he is still proud of himself for doing it. So Ryan and I keep telling him he just needs to try going poop on the potty. And now, we have a new system.

Instead of 4 M&Ms for poop, we decided on prizes. So we told Owen that if he went poopoo on the potty, we would get him a new toy. We thought it was a good idea, but soon found out that the idea of a new toy is not motivational for a 2 and a half year old. So, we hit up Walmart Sunday night and bought him a big CAT dump truck, plus a prize box and various other prizes.

And we showed him all the goodies.

And we set them on a table where he can see them.

But, he has to poop on the potty to get them!

That kicked motivation into high gear. He wants that dump truck pretty bad! And bless his little heart, he tried 3 times Sunday night and once Monday morning to go. He just didn't have to, poor kid. After the first poop, he gets to pick a goody from the prize box, which includes cars, temporary tattoos, treats, and a Clifford movie.  The prize box is also see through, for some added motivation. : )

Monday morning started the same way the last few mornings have. I got Owen up, took off his diaper (which was almost completely dry, maybe one little pee during the night), and asked if he wanted to pee on the potty. And he did and got 2 M&Ms for his reward. Every morning I write in Owen's daycare book (what time he got up, if he ate any breakfast, when I changed him, etc), so I wrote, again, that he peed on the potty and got a treat. Johnna (the daycare lady) has a son that is just 2 weeks older than Owen, and since she knew that Owen was starting to go on the potty, she told me that she was starting to potty train her son and asked if I wanted her to train Owen during the day. Of course! So at daycare, the boys get 1 M&M for trying (she must set a timer and has them sit on the potty when it goes off), 2 M&Ms for pee and 3 M&Ms for poop. I got a text after lunch that he had a dry diaper ALL morning! I was so happy! And when I picked him up at 5, she said he had on the same diaper that he came with! He peed on the potty ALL DAY! Whoo hoo! She writes in his notebook all day, so she wrote down every time he tried, every time he went, what he ate, when he napped, etc. He did such a good job! And Johnna and I both agreed that it's probably easier for both the boys to have a potty buddy. It's more fun with a friend!

So after that, I was even more certain that last night was the night for pooping on the potty. Plus, it was Ryan's birthday, so I had even more to bribe Owen with if necessary - birthday brownies.

But unfortunately, Owen had a big mood swing and was very uncooperative and stubborn last night. As soon as we got home I asked him if he had to go potty and he just flat out refused to even try to go pee. And right before supper, he put his shoes on to go outside (he really likes to poop outside. I think it's because of the dogs, I'm not kidding. Or maybe he just likes the fresh air, but he prefers to poop by one of the trees in our yard.) and I quick grabbed him and tried to remind him of the dump truck, but he was SO mad at me. Kicking, hitting, crying. Finally we calmed him down, and even took the dump truck out of it's package to show him. Then we sweetened the deal by getting out a package of M&Ms from his prize box, PLUS let him pick 2 tattoos, AND told him we could call Nana if he went on the potty (he LOVES talking on the phone). He wanted the truck and all the goodies, but just didn't want to go on the potty. And maybe it was all the kicking and screaming, but he managed to poop in his diaper at some point without us realizing it anyway. Bummer.

But after we cleaned him up, we put him in some Captain America underwear and he kept those clean and dry for the rest of the night, and peed on the potty right before bed. This morning, his diaper was pretty wet, but again, pee on the potty. I hope the day and night go the same.

13 Weeks

I had my first "fun" doctor appointment today. She had to do a full exam, but that went really fast and then came an ultrasound! Yay! Baby was MOVING so much, that we really didn't get great pics, but here are the best two.

Measuring baby from butt to top of head - 7.06cm. Looking at baby's back.

3D pic - the body parts are listed at the height of the actual body part. So go from the word to the left and there is the part. The hand is covering its eyes and forehead, bump of nose right under wrist.

If you were looking very closely at the first picture, you may have noticed that at the top it says 7.7cm and I listed the baby at 7.06. I don't know exactly what the 7.7cm is, but this picture cut off the bottom right of the actual picture which lists the CRL (crown to rump length) as 7.06 cm and GA (gestational age) at 13 weeks 2 days. BUT, she takes the average of three measurements to come up with how far along I am, and it came to 13 weeks and 1 day. Which changes my due date from February 8 to January 27! They first determine your due date from the last time you have your period, but mine didn't like to keep a very good schedule, so that's why I was off by more than a week. Better to think you are behind schedule than to think you are ahead of schedule!

Another thing I learned is that this baby is from my left ovary! Owen was from my right one. They can tell because your ovary grows a cyst on it every time it releases an egg, and the cyst acts like a placenta until the real one grows and takes over.

All in all everything looked good and I go back in another month. The only bummer was that Ryan wasn't able to go with me because of work, but the appointment went great and I'm happy that I'm farther than I thought. Also, seeing the baby makes it more real! The first trimester is always so boring because you don't look pregnant and can't feel any movement. The only signs of pregnancy are bad ones! Nausea, fatigue, lots of peeing (especially at night!), being crabby and OUCHIE boobs!

Owen looked at the pictures of the baby and I think he is a little confused. First he asked if that was him, and then he just kept asking, "Who is that?" Maybe when I start to get a big belly, he'll start to really understand. He keeps saying he wants a baby sister. Last night he told me he thinks there is an Isabel in there (a baby from daycare). So cute. And I hope he's right!!