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…

So… If you’ve followed the blog much, you know we’ve got half a dozen cats (yup, 6…) living in & around our backyard. Well, 2 of them just had litters of kittens. We haven’t found one litter, but that momma cat isn’t around as much, so we’re assuming she had them a few houses down or something. The other cat (the momma of the other 5) had her litter of 3 kittens right outside Taven’s window AC unit next to the house.

So… You remember the other night is rained “cats & dogs” in the metroplex? Yeah, when I laid Taven down, I could hear those poor kittens crying outside in the COLD, WET, RAIN… (Well, of course it was wet, but it also happened to be cold too…)

Anyhow, I went out in the rain to check on them & I couldn’t find momma anywhere. So I decided to see if there was some sort of shelter I could put over them, but all I could find was Taven’s little “PlaySkool” plastic table & it didn’t do much for the SOAKED leaves & ground they were laying on. So I did what any self-respecting animal lover would do. I picked them up in my shirt and brought them in the house & used Melisa’s haird dryer to fluff them up.

They are only about 3 weeks old right now, so they aren’t extremely mobile quite yet. They can crawl around, but not very fast. They also don’t quite have both eyes open yet either. Anyhow, we dried them off, put them in a box with a towel & put that box out on the front porch. The momma cat has been known to hang around there when it’s raining, so we figured she’d find them there when she was seeking shelter.

Momma wouldn’t cone to her kitties on the porch, so we brought them back to her next to the house & she nursed them & cleaned them up. That next night, I spent a little over an hour building a little Cat House. You know… Kinda like a dog house, but for cats. It’s wide & has a sloped roof with a large overhang over the doorway. The cats haven’t curled up in there yet, but I’m thinking I’ll put the kittins in there tomorrow since it’ll get REALLY cold this weekend. I’m just hoping Momma joins them in there… We’ll see.

I’ll post pics after I get back from the Men’s Retreat this weekend.

Well, we went to lifegroup as usual. We were all a bit surprised by a sudden flash of lightning and clap of thunder… (Which turns out probably struck something 2 streets over since there were 3 firetrucks & 2 ambulances pulling in there a few minutes later…)

Anyhow, back home in Haltom City, there was a decent wind storm accompanying the rain… It was strange driving through the area today because it seemed like the main damage was about 3 blocks wide & only maybe 1 or 2 miles long (with out street on one side of that 3 block width). We even got a little new coverage. (This was shot right there on NE 28th near Oakwood St.)

Anyhow, I drove around during lunch today & snapped a few pics of the damage… Enjoy!

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Ug… Well, we’re glad the seller offered us a home warranty! Our main sewage line had some blockage going on this last week… We called our warranty peoples and they sent out a plumber from their network… Poor guy, it was rainy, cold, nasty outside & he ended up finding the plumbing clean-out access was about 2 feet UNDER OUR DECK in the back yard! Silly deck builders..
.

Anyhow, he was here for about an hour & essentially gave up. He told Melisa that his cable wasn’t long enough (he had 100 feet!!!) to get to the stoppage & we’d have to find some one with a 120 foot clean-out snake. Um… The clean-out access is in the back yard… The utilities easement is the back 4 feet of our back yard which is only maybe 60-70 feet away!!! I think he was just miserable trying to work under the deck & just came up with an excuse to get out of here.

So we called our warranty peoples back and they told us we’d have to just find & pay a plumber to do the work, then they’d reimburse us for the charges. Melisa found some one from the Shepherd’s Guide and not only did they say the previous guy is off his rocker with that excuse, but they came right out (also stating that we’d need to cut out access through the deck to the clean-out pipe.)

So I hurried home & cut a handful of our decking planks to be able to pull them up to access the clean-out pipe & they got the job done with the same basic equipment the previous plumber had… I will say that I would not have wanted to work that equipment while lying on my belly under the deck though, so I’ll give him that much.

Anyhow, we’re back to flushing out toilet and taking showers without also wading in ankle deep waters.

Ah, the joys of owning a 60 year old house.

Oh, while I’m on the subject of plumbing, apparently when some one did some of the remodeling around here they decided to add in a new clean-out pipe. They also decided that since the new washer & dryer hookups were pretty close to the old cast iron clean-out that they’d just run some PVC pipes out from the wall & just dumping the water into the old clean-out pipe!

Yes that white stuff around the pipe on the ground is used toilet paper (well, not the big tag, but the gray-ish colored stuff all around the pipe) stuff … Apparently when our “facilities” we’re draining out to the sewage system, it found an alternate source of relief here… I asked the plumber if that set-up would be considered “normal”… He just scratched his head to figure out what was going on there & just kinda laughed. Apparently, it’s not the “best” method to drain our plumbing down the old clean-out access…

I figured it works well enough (when our main sewage line isn’t blocked up), so I’m going to leave it this way until spring & I’ll figure out what I want to do about it then. In the mean time, I’m very glad for all the rain we’ve been having. Could you imagine the stank if it were the heat of summer when this happened!!!

Well, life has been SO FREAKING HECTIC lately, I’ve forgotten all about you (the 2 readers of my Blog)…

Anyhow, Melisa & I will try to post over the next few weeks to update what kinds of chaos has ensued in our lives since August…

Just a quick run-down, here’s a bullet point list of the things that has transpired…

• Found a house, put in an offer, got rejected, kept looking
• Found another house, put in an offer, they countered, we countered, they countered back & we accepted.
• Had troubles getting Visa for my mission trip to India in Dec/Jan
• Almost lost $400-500 worth of products & rebates for our friends in South Asia (In the middle of moving out of apartment & trying to coordinate shipping/receiving products & departure dates of a team from our church toIndia, etc… Oy…)
• Continued living in Hodge house for a month (can’t wait to get into out own place… I hate being a burden to others…)
• Taven got sick with “the cruds” (sinuses dripping, coughing/hacking, & snot galore!)
• I went to Orlando, FL for a business conference for 3 days
• Melisa dropped Taven off at my parents & joined me after the work was done & we spent a couple of days alone in Orlando for a mini-vacation before the next Smith joins us
• I get sick with “the cruds” when Melisa shows up in Orlando… Pretty similar description to Taven’s above… Ew!
• Closing for our house was postponed From Monday to Friday
• Closing was postponed from 1PM to 2PM on Friday ( I got that call @ 12:30… Gr….)
• Closing papers had Melisa’s name spelt with 2 SSSSsss… Closing papers redrawn…
• Lender hadn’t wired funds yet…??? WHAT!!!?!?!?! It’s 3:30PM on Friday…!!! We wanted to move in this weekend!!!
• Left closing table @ 4PM Friday with papers all signe, but no funding… No moving… So Sad… (no, really… Very sad…)
• Get some rest over the weekend
• Take Taven Trick-or-Treating in my parent’s neighborhood halloween carnival (the weekend before Halloween) as a Fireman (he was a fireman… I was a very boring man in bluejeans & a black t-shirt…)
• Go to work Monday morning to find out work phones are all updated with the new Daylight savings time shift a week early…
• Start fixing phones
• Log onto tmasman.com & type this post…
• I guess I outta get back to work huh?

Byeee