The Sweetest Little Thing

  First off, I want to just say a big THANK YOU to everyone that has reached out to us this past weekend. The kind words, hugs, and encouragement have been like a healing salve on our hearts. You guys have really made me feel so loved and it is so wonderful to see how much my little boy is adored. It makes me laugh to think of how many of you were ready to go kick butt and take names for our sake :-) I have some tenacious friends! I like to keep up the appearance that I am well put together. For those of you this weekend that saw the cracks in the facade, thank you for allowing me to fall apart just a moment and thank you for helping me put it all back together.

  E has become really good at understanding what we tell him. Saturday, his papa fell asleep on the couch. I silently signed to E, "Look at Papa. Papa's asleep. Go get him!" E knew exactly what I said. He grinned and ran across the room to Papa, jumped up on the couch, and commenced to wallowing all over Papa to "wake him up." This morning, I heard my husband tell E, "go give Mommy a kiss." I look up and here comes E into my office all by himself. He takes his paci out, leans on the arm of my office chair and puckers up to give me a kiss. It is so cute that it makes me want to do some crazy happy dance. I love when he does things that we did not train him to do and wonder what other things he is picking up on his own. It's definitely time to start really watching what we say and do in front of him!

  Speaking of training, our "happy accidents" on the potty are increasing in frequency. I am still not sure he has made the connection between eliminating in the potty and the potty party that follows, but I think it will get there soon. I mentioned before that we have started just sitting E on the potty each night before his bath to just get him used to the idea so that he is not wary of the potty when it comes time to train. To our delight, E sometimes goes while he is sitting there. E had also started to pinch his nose to indicate that he was stinky after he had filled his diaper. Last night, he indicated a "stinky" before he did anything. Just as an experiment, I took him to the potty. E finished his stinky on the potty!!! I was so excited! E is now 17 months old and it looks like we might be making some excellent progress toward readiness for potty training. We did a little celebration dance and let him use the flush handle. His reward any time he goes in the potty is to get to use the flusher handle. He is not to touch it at any other time. I don't want things to start disappearing around here! Unless you are a parent, you are probably wondering why I am actually blogging about the potty habits of my kid, but anyone of you that has experienced this knows that this is a REALLY BIG DEAL :-) For the rest of you, hang in there with me...I will not always talk about life behind closed (bathroom) doors.