Our intensive potty training weekend went OK. We started on Thursday, Melisa cried all day Friday, Had a completely dry daon on Saturday (along with waking up to dry beds Saturday & Sunday mornings). He still hasn’t asked us, on his own, to go to the potty, but he’s a lot more willing to go when we tell him it’s time to go.

We woke up to wet sheets this morning, but, we already figured we’d go back to pull ups at bed time after a while. We really just wanted him to get it into his head that it’s OK to get out of bed to go to the potty.

He still has absolutely NO interests in actually going #2 on the potty. He’ll talk about it as if he gets it, but when it comes time for action, he’ll still run to his room & play with his cars @ his dresser while he does his business.  We’ll get him in the bathroom when he’s done & clean him up, clean up the underwear, & tell him very briefly about where our poo poo is supposed to go, & he’ll talk enthusiastically about it, but he just won’t follow through…

I guess I feel a little defeated, but he’ll catch on eventually. And when he does, we’re throwin’ a party.

He’s also been faithfully trying out patience at bed time. As mentioned in my last post, he’s having fun getting out of bed & slowly making his way to where he can see us in the living room or our bedroom & about an hour into getting spankings & being told about why he can and cannot come out of his room, he’ll finally be tired enough to give up & go to sleep.

Our method right now is approaching this like we do any disciplinary action. We sit him down, very calmly explain to him what it is that he is doing that is not acceptable, tell him he’s going to get a spanking for his actions/words/attitude, calmly turn him over & SWAP! After he’s had a chance to calm down, we ask him to come back up to us & we’ll comfort him for a moment & reassure him that we love him. Then we’ll ask him why he got a spanking. probably 75% of the time he remembers & will tell us why, if not, we’ll remind him. Then we tell him why that action/words/attitude is not OK & ask him to apologize to who ever might have been wronged by what he did. Then we love on him & forgive him & remind him why he isn’t to do it again. In the case of bedtime, we then lay him down & tell him he’s only allowed to get up if he needs to go potty.

I’m thinking if he’s still doing this by next weekend, I’m going to try & do things the “Supernanny way”. If you’ve ever watch Supernanny on ABC, then you’ll know she always uses the same techniques to teach kids that bed time means to stay in your room, in your bed.

For “needy” children, you basically sit in their room, just out of reach, so they feel a little comforted by your presence, then you slowly move toward the door, stopping every couple of feet so the child still sees you, but starts getting comfortable that you aren’t sitting right next to them. Eventually, you’re sitting right outside the door & closing the door.

For “bouncers” like Taven (kids that “bounce” out of bed as soon as you close their door), you don’t say anything to them, you just take them back to their rooms (preferably with them walking, but carry them if you must) and say ONLY 3 little words “it’s bed time” each time. The idea is you are drilling it into their head that it’s not time to interact, or get attention & that your will is greater than theirs.

How do (or did) you deal with disciplining your kids?
How were you disciplined?
What about potty training, what did/didn’t work for you?

All thoughts are welcome.

Spanking Spoon #1, Retired...

The sad thing? It was broken on my own rear-end!!! LOL. Well, sorta. It was in my back pocket when I came out of Taven’s room last night. Then I sat down on the couch… Crack.

I just thought that was funny enough to share.

On a side note, we’ve decided to jump into this whole potty training gig full-time, seriously. We’re going for a complete lack of pull-ups & trying to make it a big deal for Taven so he’ll want to do this. It’s been almost 6 months since we first put him in pull-ups & got him to go pee-pee on the potty. He’s just not been that interested. We’ve been doing a mix of underwear & pull-ups for a while now & that hasn’t been doing much for us. He has started to hold his pee a little longer, so there were some signs that he’s starting to catch on, but not very quickly.

Anyhow, the new method is all about getting them excited about going on the potty, lots of rewards (stickers on a reward chart, fun little grab bag items for ever 4-5 stickers, surprises if he’ll actually do #2 on the potty [I'm thinking $1 matchbox cars here, since he's SO into cars right now], etc…)

We decided to toss out the pull-ups & we’re trying to keep him conscious of his bodily functions & when he needs to head to the bathroom.

One side-effect of doing this, is more change than we realized. Because Taven is a night-owl (regularly stays up an hour after we put him down @ 8PM), we’ve kept a gate up in his doorway to keep him from wandering around the house at night. He’s usually pretty good after he falls asleep, but until then, it’s a mini war trying to keep him in his bed if the gate is not up.

Well, in order for him to not wear pull-ups at night, we’ve got to give him the availability to go to the potty at night. No more gate. That’s what eventually lead to the retirement of the spanking spoon as mentioned above (although not quite in the expected way).

Now we’re looking for an all plastic mattress protector/sheet to put under his bed sheet. We’ve got one of those “terry-mattress protectors”, but it’s got material over the plastic (for comfort & absorption), but that means it has to be washed every time it gets wet too & it’s starting to fall apart. So now I’m hoping they still make plain plastic sheets like I remember having (sadly needing it until I was like 6 or 8? oy…) I’m hoping Taven figures out this whole night-time bladder control thing faster than I did. (EDIT: Found the mattress protectors @ Wal-Mart, we’re good to go!)

I’ll keep you posted on the progress & I’ll try to remember to post a couple of pics of how we decorated the potty for this latest adventure.

Got any tips?
We’re still open to new ideas…

For the techies out there, I’m not talking about click-hijacking, or even sneaky hacker ways of taking over your browser… No… I’m talking about my wife. More specifically my wife’s internet browsing habits and how they have started to affect me.

I got Melisa hooked on using Mozilla Firefox a while back (because, afterall, it is the better browser). Anyhow, Melisa got hooked specifically on the abiulity to open multiple tabs at one time (for those of you not in-the-know, each tab can open up a different web page & allows you to keep them all up at one time).  She got hooked so much that the first time she really got digging into some research topic she had to call me in there because she “lost” some of her open tabs.  What really happened is she had so many opened that she now had to scroll left & right to see them all.

Well, she’s gotten used to all that & has even gotten used to having multiple windows open, with multiple tabs open on each of them. So used to it, in fact, that recently I took a look & found 49 total tabs opened thorughout 4 windows!!!

Needless to say, I installed a session manager add-on in Firefox to easily close Firefox without losing all those “precious” tabs (they’d all pop back open when you restarted Firefox), and also created a separate profile for myself so I can still use Firefox without getting swallowed up in Melisa’s sink-hole of a collection of tabs.

To get into my Firefox profile, I created a separate shortcut file & kept it on the desktop. Her profile was the default one, so she just had to go about her way as usual, and I was the only one who had to mess with a different route. Nice, easy, straightforward (for her).

Now we get to the hijacking bit…  Melisa got to the point that she had so many tabs opened, then she started to use my profile to look up some things… WAIT A SECOND!!! Now when I get on the internet, I all of a sudden have 15 tabs open in addition to the 2 or 3 I had opened last time I was poking around. That’s IT! I moved my shortcut so she doesn’t know where is it (although still fairly obvious if you went looking for it). A few days later, she found it… NNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!!  I even have IE (Internet Explorer), and Chrome (Google Chrome, Google’s web browser) on the desktop so she can spill over to that if she feels the need to stray from her own growing cesspool. But that just wasn’t good enough.

I moved access to my profile to a place she wouldn’t find it and renamed it. And now I access it in such a way that she wouldn’t be able to figure it out. (Not that she couldn’t figure it out, but I’m hoping it’s obscure enough to at least keep her in her own playground & out of my personal one…)

Of course, the other night, I leave my profile open because I plan on getting back to it & Melisa decides to play a little trick on me for keeping her out of my profile. She clicks on each of my bookmarks about 3 times each (I’ve got about 10 bookmarks in the bookmarks toolbar) to open up a bunch of tabs in my browser.

Ha…Ha…Ha…

Love you honey! (JUST STAY OUT OF MY FIREFOX SESSIONS!)

It’s so funny how God orchesrates some events…

A 5 or 6 years back, Melisa’s employer was throwing out some old desks (the smaller cart-style desks). They told us we could load one up if we wanted to save it from the landfill, so we did and it served us well for a couple of years. Well, the thing started getting a little wobbly on us after a move, so we decided to buy a cabinet-style desk & put our old one out by the dumpster at our apartments. Some one had grabbed that desk before night-fall. We felt kind of good that it wouldn’t be going to the landfill (again). A few months later, we niticed it by that same dumpster again. (I guess they didn’t want a wobbly desk either). Later that evening, while driving home, we saw that very desk in the back of some guy’s trailor being hauled away.  A long story to say that one man’s trash is another’s treasure & how things have use long after you no longer need them.

A couple of months ago, our neighbors were throwing out a Powerwheels vehicle that had been left out in the weather & stopped working. What do I do? Grab it as fast as I could, despite the fact that it was a pink Barbie Escalade.  As I mentioned here, I got the thing painted, working & put together this morning & Taven got to go for a ride at his party!!! This was our “big” birthday present to him this year & there’s no way we could have afforded a new one ($300!!!) or even a used/working one ($90-200). Their trash, our treasure!!!

This story isn’t a trash/treasure, but more of the reason I was prompted to put together this post… Tonight I returned the bounce house & was filling up 5 1-gallon jugs of water at a local drive-up water filter kiosk thingy.  Well, the pricing works like this: $0.25 for 1 gallon, $1.00 for 5 gallons. When I left the house, I grabbed exactly 5 quarters, but seeing that “$1.00 for 5 gallons” I was of course tempted to try & pick that option & just swap jugs quickly trying not to spill to much while I swap them. Hey! I’d be saving a whole quarter & at worst I’d be missing maybe a cup of water if I was quick enough. Well, about half-way through swapping jugs, a man walks up to me & asks specifically for “1 quarter”.  I pulled out the, now extra, quarter I had left & said, this is all I have. He smiled & said “I only need one quarter”.  He gladly took the quarter & continued walking on his way without asking for anything else. Crazy…

I’m sure I’ve got some more examples. Maybe I’ll put together another post when I come up with a few.

About a month ago (maybe longer) I saw a pink PowerWheels Escalade sitting by the curb next to our neighbor’s trash. Of course this thing had been left out in the rain & weather for quite some time & I had no idea if it was theirs, or if they picked it up from some one else’s curb thinking they’d give it a try.

Anyhow, it took me about 30 seconds to push that thing across the street & into our back yard. I figured I could fix it up. Another project.

Well, for anyone who knows me, I’m notorious for taking on “projects” that I can do, but I rarely actually finish them (unless it’s one for Melisa & she schedules my time for it, but that’s another category of projects).  Anyhow, I had a goal of getting this thing put together for Taven’s birthday party this weekend.

I had taken it apart, cleaned off most of the mud, dirt, & grime, bought a new battery for it (instead of the $80 PowerWheels battery, I picked up a generic battery with a little more juice for half that!) and even started to spray paint it (I’m not going to have my little boy prancing around in a pink cadi…) And then I realized I hadn’t even taken a good look at the electronics in the thing to make sure it even works. I mean, I know the gear boxes are in decent shape as they don’t rattle & make that wonderful whirring sound when you push the car around, but I don’t know if all the switches & wiring is up-to-snuff.

So that’s what I tackled tonight.

The “gas pedal” switch was stuck, one motor had a broken wire, and I needed a way to connect the new battery to the original wiring.

I took a spring from a retractable pen & reconstructed & cleaned up the pedal switch, soldered the wire back onto the motor, and made a short adapter cable to hook up the new battery. And guess what… It actually WORKS!!!

I just know I’m the guy who takes on projects that I’ve never done before, but know how to do them (either because I looked up how to do it, or it just makes sense)… Then never gets around to actually doing them, or I never put in the time to see them to completion.  I still need to finish painting some of the pieces for it & put all the electronics back into it, but I feel a HUGE weight lifted off now because I actually got this decrepit weathered stuff to work again!

Let’s see if I can pull it all off by Saturday morning (by 8AM since I’ve got to go pick up the bounce house by then…)