Joshua's Spot

I am SO disappointed...

I spotted this little news clipping taped to a shelf in our local bookstore, and just stood there for about five minutes in a state of sheer disbelief.

Robert Jordan died a couple weeks ago. No, really, this time it's true (the previous oft-repeated rumors of his death always turned out to be greatly exaggerated).

For those of you who don't understand the full, horrifying significance of this, I'll leave it at this. He wrote 11 books in the Wheel of Time series, plus a prequel, and was working on his twelfth. Each is thicker than the Bible. The plots and characters and subplots and sub-subplots are so complex that each time a new book comes out, I've had to go back and re-read most of the series. So I've probably read the earlier books at least four times straight through... which means I've invested something like 20,000 pages of reading in this guy.

All I can is that I really, really hope he has an editor or assistant or child or someone who has his notes and knows where he was going with this whole thing - otherwise none of us WoTheads will ever know how it was supposed to end. Which would be soooo disappointing.

It's also, on a less selfish note, very sad that such a talented writer passed away so young (he was only 58).

Trying to gain potty training traction

The battle has been joined. The Battle of the Diaper Bulge, that is.

Actually, it started several months ago, but with more of a whimper than a bang. See, rumor has it that some people have kids who basically potty train themselves. They hate having a dirty diaper, watch their parents going potty on the toilet, get the idea, and by, like, 18 months, they're basically peeing and pooping in the big leagues. I've even heard tall tales about parents who just let their kids run around naked for a long weekend, and by the end of it, they throw away all their diapers and they're done, period. (I hate to think of what their house looked like - or, more to the point, smelled like - in the interim, but that's beside the point.)

The point is: That's not our Boo.

No, on the contrary, Josh can be walking around for hours with a diaper so full of pee that it drags around his ankles, and he won't care until he trips over it trying to jump off something. Until recently, he would actually fight to hold onto the poopies in his diaper, as though they were something precious and sacred that you'd have to be a heathen to try to take away from him (if memory serves, Freud had something to say about that, but my IQ has dropped too far for me to remember what). He showed no interest in the potty, except as a cool way to make paper (of all kinds) magically disappear. He'd calmly observe as friends his age used the potty, without effect - reasonably enough in Bela's case, since she's been pretty hit-or-miss too, but you'd have thought he would be impressed with Becka, given that she's one of those prodigies who was entirely potty-trained long before her second birthday (and can probably pee on a 1-inch target from 20 yards, blindfolded, knowing Becka - this is the child who was walking at 9 months and talking in complete sentences at little over a year, after all).

But no.

Grandma Kay was supposed to take this on as Her Project while she was here, and to her credit, she came prepared. She figured out the perfect incentive, and came loaded for bear, with about 75 dozen 5-packs of MatchBox cars sent ahead in a shipping container, as many as possible of them (you guessed it) orange. She had us buy pull-ups, she bought books, she inspected our training potty setup upon arrival... I mean, she was a pro. She was da man. She had it down.

One problem: she didn't clear her plan with Josh, first.

Long story short: Josh made one or two pee-pees in the potty, maybe a poop or two, and otherwise was uninterested and remained perfectly happy to load up his diapers to the breaking point without warning, utterly indifferent to the proper uses and benefits of modern sanitation. Given that he's now in Size 5 diapers, and that there really isn't a practical "size 6" without moving on to Depends, it was starting to look a little alarming there.

Plus, he still got all the cars as a reward, which we now have to find a way to garage. Have you ever tried to figure out how to safely stash away 6,213 MatchBox cars in the average American home? Without taking out a second mortgage?

A fair amount of sideline research told me that this isn't terribly unusual, and that there are a few reliable signs that you should look for that will tell you that your child is "ready" for potty training - doesn't like being in wet diapers, can warn you when he/she needs to make a poop or a pee, etc. Most of which Josh just didn't show. The research also said that it does more harm than good to force the issue if your child just isn't ready yet, so we just had to sit by and wait. And wait. And wait.

Well, he started showing an interest just about the time that GRANDMA AND POP-POP ABANDONED ME after getting him all interested in this whole potty-training thing, at which point I kind of sidelined the whole project, given that I had an even less potty-constrained child to deal with. For a month or so, we've only paid attention to Josh's potty training haphazardly, letting him go in the potty when it occurs to us and he tells us he wants to go in the potty, but otherwise letting it slide. (Though Felicia did order some special rewards for him, in the form of some custom-lettered all-orange M&Ms that say "Good Job Boo" on them - you can design your own here, if you have a similar project in mind and nothing better to spend your money on, especially given that moms and aunties alike will wind up poaching most of the damn things.)

Suddenly, though, he's started showing all of the signs at once. To the point where this morning, driving down the middle of the Grants Pass Parkway (a 5-lane road) on the way to gymnastics, he suddenly announced that he'd made a pee-pee and wanted to get a clean diaper - right there, right now, in the middle of the road. I managed to dodge that bullet, barely, and put off the diaper change until we got to gymnastics three minutes later (at which point I could dump the job off on Bubbe, bwaha!), and avoid dealing with any further big-boy bowel issues for another six hours, given that it was Bubbe Day.

But once Josh came home, we had an unprecedented series of Adventures in Bathroom-Going. He made his first-ever (as far as I know) combined poopy and pee-pee in the potty, shortly after dinner time. He did another poopy during bathtime - and, for a first, warned us first, so he could do it in the potty, instead of in the bath. Then he did another pee-pee later. Then, just now, shortly after I put him to bed, I heard him on the monitor, telling Boo Elephant that "I'd better put the pee-pee in the potty, I'll get an enemen" (M&M) - and, yes, he did another pee-pee in the potty, albeit a little one.

(And yes, he did get another enemen, his, letsee, tenth one today.)

Does this constitue critical mass?

On the downside, I am keenly reminded of our friends Meredith and Kelly, who summer before this one just passed, at our vacation on a little lake in New Hampshire, were at a point slightly more advanced than this in potty-training their then-3-year-old, Grace. Kelly spent an entire afternoon hauling Grace from the beach to the cabin (300 yards or so, each way) eight times within a two- or three-hour period when Grace kept telling him she had to make a poopy, with her failing to actually produce said poopy each time. Kelly finally (and rather dramatically, not surprisingly) gave up on the whole process, and left her to Meredith, who promptly took Grace back down to the beach... where she proceeded to poop in the sand.

(Yes, Mere and Kelly, we did notice your pain.)

For the record, I am not looking forward to the "potty emergencies" that strike in the middle of the checkout line at the grocery store, or when I'm stuck at a light in rush-hour traffic (such as we have in Grants Pass), or in the middle of dealing with some little-baby crisis with Ben. Nor am I yearning to clean up the inevitable accidents. But I suppose it's progress, of a sort. No one ever said parenting was glamorous, after all.

Well, except for Angelina and Brad, maybe. But then, I can't just hire an army of super-nannies, either. I am the super-nanny, God help me.

Fear of... fish??

It's more than a little bit belated, but I have to relate a story.

For quite a while before my parents' last visit, Josh, his Pop-Pop, and I were all increasingly eager for Pop-Pop to teach Josh how to fish. It's such a quintessential Midwestern/Smith/little-boy-and-grandpa thing to do, involving all kinds of things that we thought Josh would be soooo into, like digging around in the garden looking for worms, putting the worms into a can and putting the lid on, going down to the lake at the park, watching the bobber float in the water, catching fish... I mean, every part of that sounded absolutely designed to appeal to every last bit of Josh's very boyish personality.

Once Pop-Pop got here, the buildup lasted weeks, and went very well indeed. They went shopping together for just the right fishing pole and reel and bobber set and hooks, and Josh trotted around with it proudly for days. They dug worms together, which apparently wasn't entirely a success, since Josh (as I recall) was kind of tired and cranky at the time and wound up getting threatened with a time out because he wasn't doing what Pop-Pop asked him to do. (Pop-Pop, more than likely, was tired and cranky too, which might have contributed to the whole clash of wills problem, but I digress.) Going to the park with Grandma and Pop-Pop was, predictably, a huge hit as ideas go, and they had no trouble getting him down there.

Everything was apparently going just fine until, to everyone's shock, Pop-Pop actually caught a little tiny fish, in a pond that I had thought to be nothing but a snag-magnet with nothing scaly in it at all. At this point, the whole idyllic picture we all had in our minds of the grandpa-and-little-boy fishing trip shattered against the hard wall of Josh's... fear of fish.

It seems that Josh started crying hysterically and ran to Grandma, and wanted nothing more to do with Pop-Pop or fishing or fishing poles or anything else from that point on. Grandma had to keep holding him and comforting him while Pop-Pop freed the fish, put the gear away, and packed up to leave the park. And that was the end of fishing, at least for now.

The reason I bring this up now, six weeks or so after the fact, is that Josh is still talking about it. Every time he sees something that makes him think of fish, he'll start telling me the story. Just this morning he saw this fish-shaped trivet that we keep on the stove sitting in the dish-drying rack, and he announced "I don't like fish." To which I stupidly (not knowing what he was thinking about) replied, "Well, that's okay, because we don't have fish for breakfast; that would be really weird, wouldn't it."

He looked at me like I'd just said the stupidest, most irrelevant thing in the world, and went on with his tale:  "I cried."

At which point I finally got the clue, and rejoined the conversation. "You did? Did the fish scare you?"

"Yeah. I wanted Grandma."

"And did Grandma make you feel better?"

"Yeah. She held me."

"Why did the fish scare you?"

"I didn't like it. Pop-Pop caught it."

"Yeah, he did. Did that surprise you?"

"Yeah. He put it back. Grandma held me. I cried."

This is how our conversations go these days. (Mind you, I'm editing out a fair number of "ums," halts, repeated words, and mid-sentence revisions on his part. Not to mention a few on my part, too.) What surprised me is that 1) he's still remembering something so many weeks later, and 2) that he's making some pretty distant symbolic associations, like, say, between a fish-shaped trivet and his grandpa catching a fish weeks ago. Intriguing, the way his little mind is working.

Incidentally, he's also discovered the fine art of inflection - you know, that rising note at the end of every sentence that makes Valley Girl talk so, like, annoying? That turns every sentence into a question? This would be really cute and would mark great progress in his speech if he weren't overusing it? And exaggerating it? You know?

Giving Baby Ben his due

Just in case you were feeling like we haven't been taking any pictures of the little one lately... here's some hard disproof for you.

There are also some new photos to be found in both the Boo's and Baby Ben's photo albums (yes, I got the USB ports working long enough to get some processing done, against the odds).

Josh, lest I forget to mention it, is also into a lovey-dovey phase - he's apt to come up and hug your leg, twenty or thirty times a day, and announce "I love you, so-and-so". Doesn't matter if you're Idi Amin, as long as you're in proximity at the right moment, he'll give you your lovin'.

He's also big into "thank you," which, to me, is probably more important. Here's hoping that we're on our way to a polite, affectionate little boy.

Placeholders, plans, and excuses

Well, so - here's the good news: there are a few new pictures in the photo albums. Well, not all of them "new" in the sense that they were just taken, but "new" in the sense that they're old-ish pictures that I've finally gotten off my camera and uploaded so you can see them. The one to the right is truly new, taken just yesterday - the rest go back as far as June. (Shame on me.)

The other good(ish) news is that there are nearly 1,000 (yes, you read it right) other photos waiting in the wings, either on CDs that my mom sent of photos she took while she was here, on on the CF cards from my camera. Not to mention several hours of video on three tapes from the video camera.

The bad news is that all those pictures and all that video are basically stuck where they are. My old computer is slowly dying, bit by bit, starting with (inconveniently enough) the USB ports, which are flickering in and out of usability. I can access devices plugged into the USB ports itermittently, just long enough to, say, import one photo off a card reader into Photoshop Elements - at which point the USB connection will be lost, forcing me to re-establish the connection before I can load another photo. Video works better, since it's over FireWire, but the software I have (ULead Videostudio 9) is so clunky that it's painful to try to get a movie out of it - when it doesn't crash altogether.

So basically, I'm still waiting for the new iMac to arrive before I torture myself any further trying to get this old Dell to function properly. Which means the pile of photos and video waiting to be processed just keeps growing.

Thankfully, once I do get the new machine, it'll be much less painful to clear out the backlog than it would be on the PC. I've been reading through the manual for Aperture 1.5, and am already licking my chops in anticipation, waiting, just waiting to see it do its magic on all those pics. And iMovie '08 sounds like it'll do a far better job of turning raw video footage into interesting movie clips than anything I've used to date on the PC.

Now, if I could just get my greedy hands on that iMac, I'd be all set. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge backlog of orders that aren't being filled, for mysterious reasons - supply? Hardware issues? My reseller pissed off someone at Apple and won't get a machine out of them until the moon turns blue? Who knows.

I just hope they get that iMac here before I throw the Dell over the side of the hill...

The kids, meanwhile, have been presenting their own challenges this week. Josh has discovered the fine art of changing his mind, much to my annoyance. He'll be standing there holding, say, a plastic orange, and suddenly announce, "I don't want the orange." (To which I'll say, "Fine, then put it down.") Yesterday he changed his mind four times about what he wanted to wear to school - he wanted the white socks, then no, the red ones; the brown shoes, then, no, the red ones; to wear the froggy raincoat, then no, no froggy raincoat... until I finally got so fed up with changing him back and forth that I gave him a time out and told him he was going to school in whatever he had on his back when I was ready to leave. He's been expressing his opinion about what he wants and doesn't want a lot in general, which I suppose is a sign of important progress in developing and expressing a sense of self - but man, can it grate on the nerves at times.

Ben, meanwhile, has finally awakened from his protracted post-delivery slumber, and now wants to play. Which is great, it's wonderful to see him awakening to the world and wanting Input at long last, instead of just napping and eating and pooping and napping again, but running from one little boy to the other for 12 hours a day more or less non-stop has been exhausting the past few days. I'm beginning to see why some parents are so adamant about the need to put kids on a schedule - not for the kids' benefit, but for the parents'. Knowing that however badly they're running you ragged at the moment, there'll be a three-hour period in the middle of the day when they're all safely locked up and quiet would be a great relief. If only I could get Ben to quiet down and stop eating us out of house and boobie long enough to take a solid nap in the middle of the day, while Josh is sleeping, I'd be all set.

Night-time is a different matter - Ben is turning out to be, in addition to a champion eater (something Josh never was, and still isn't), a world-class sleeper. For several nights in a row now, he's slept solidly from about 8pm to 3:30am. That's more than seven hours, folks - and he's just two months old today. People kept bragging to me that their 6-week-old kid would/did sleep through the night, and kept asking how Josh was doing and expressing pity and urgency about the fact that he still wasn't sleeping through the night at nearly a year old - and I thought they were just making the whole thing up. Until Ben came along, that is.

Now, of course, we're getting all anxious in the middle of the night, getting up to check to make sure he's still breathing, because it just seems so unnatural that such a little guy could sleep that long. I guess we're just not the types to be satisfied. Go figure.

Where, oh where, have Boo and Ben done gone??

For those who follow this here blog (both of you), this summer has been a long, undeserved dry spell - and for that I'm sorry.

I have a number of excuses that I'm willing to try out on you, in the long-standing tradition of pasta chefs everywhere (throw some at the wall until they stick, and then you're done):

1. Last week was my first experience being truly on my own with two boys. Momma went back to work, Grandma Kay and Pop-Pop fled back to Michigan, and, well, I could have asked Bubbe and Poppy Mike for help, but I was too damn proud. (We all survived. Gimli, however, is still complaining about neglect and threatening to call the ASPCA.)
2. Neither Felicia nor I have been getting enough sleep - Felicia because she's been getting up to feed the baby a couple times a night, and answering pages when she's on call, and I because, well, I've been... hearing her get up. (Okay, lame, I know, but still.)
3. We're about to switch from our 4-1/2-year-old Dell to one of the new iMacs, and I'm holding off on any new photo or video projects until I have the new computer. Honestly, it's just more files that I'll have to find a way to move over from a Windows machine that is within a single lock-up or failed reboot of taking a nose-dive off the edge of the hill. We're all better off if I wait, believe me.

Truly, the kids are fine. Baby Ben was up to 11 pounds 6 ounces as of a week ago Monday (the 27th) - he's gone from the 25th percentile in weight at birth to the 75th in just 5 weeks. (Powerful stuff, that Momma Milk.) He's developing a nice second chin, which he'll just have to work off on the jumpy chair in a few months, once we start the baby aerobics program that seems to have worked so well with Josh.

Momma, meanwhile, is having No Issues At All with the Milk Fairy this time around. In fact, she's out-producing the little human fire hose by anywhere between 12 to 18 ounces a day. (Remember how stressed out we were, this time with Josh, about every last 1/4 ounce that got wasted??) Not only does she have the entire lower compartment of our kitchen fridge's freezer filled to capacity, but she has stuffed a little mini-freezer in the garage that we bought especially for this purpose to the point where if she stopped pumping tomorrow, we could probably feed Ben until he's about, oh, four. (Years, that is, not months.)

The Milk Fairy taketh away, and then she giveth...

The Blog Fairy, however... well, you'll just have to wait until the iMac arriveth. And then, watch out.