How fitting, that the last blog post 7 MONTHS AGO was about pee and this one will also include a conversation about peeing. Do I ever talk about anything else? Finley has been dry for 1 week straight in the morning! A huge accomplishment for him! I wake him at 11:30 at night and take him to the bathroom and then sometimes lie awake half the night wondering if he'll be dry in the morning. We are no longer surprised though when he is.
When he turned 5 September 2, he decided quite abruptly that he was no longer going to wear a diaper at night. Well then! So, it all started. I set my alarm for every 2 hours in the beginning ALL NIGHT LONG to wake him up to pee. He sleeps so soundly that he would sometimes fall down if I let go of his arm leading him to the bathroom. One time I found him bent at the waist over the toilet with his head resting on the toilet seat and his arms hanging down both sides ASLEEP! This is what I've been up against for a month and a half! We worked our way out to 2-1/2 hour increments and then 3, etc. It was a long process, but I do believe we are there! One less diaper per night! Finley loves to draw, play in the dirt or gravel outside with his tractors or swing on the tire swing. He's very good at drawing now and will attempt to draw anything that I tell him to. His favorite though is to draw a house with a tractor and one or both of his brothers. The latest was a house with a big window...big enough to see a little figure (Oliver) jumping on the couch! Another recent one was clearly a little boy (Finley) standing next to someone with really long legs (Matthew). That one made me laugh.
Piper had been dry almost every night until Finley started waking up dry and then he decided to start wetting the bed. I'm not ready to retrain right now and lose more sleep, so he wears a diaper again and quite proudly exclaims every morning, "Mommy, I peed in my bed!" like it's the thing to be most proud of. I try to tell him that it's not good, but he's so happy in the morning that I just can't get any remorse from him. He's usually the last to wake of the 3 boys and loves to sneak downstairs and surprise everyone as we're playing on the living room floor. Finley likes to act like he's surprised, but Oliver really is surprised and loves to see Piper jump out from behind the stairway door. Piper makes it his mission in life right now to not eat anything that I make. He's very good at this. But, I'm very good at being stubborn too. Sometimes, the only reason I win though is because I am Mommy...period. Piper loves our animals and is very good at feeding them and petting them and loving on them. Every day for his nap, he sleeps on the dining room floor. This is his choice and it's better than putting him in bed with no nap and waking up Oliver, so I just go with it. It's one of the Mommy rules that I bend, but only because if I didn't, I would be more of a bear by the end of the day than he would be. This allows for a very quiet house for about 1-1/2 hours as Finley and I have a quiet time and then draw, paint, play with play doh, or make a dessert. I imagine Piper will be finished with naps in the next few months and he will then join us in the quiet time and then activity. He already loves to draw.
Oliver loves any surprise. If you can jump out and scare him, he will want you to do it over and over. He loves to sneak up on people and try to get them when they aren't looking. He likes to eat and at any point in the day...even 30 minutes after a full meal, will try to climb up in his chair to eat again. Oliver also really likes playing outside. He doesn't care how cold it is, he just wants to be out there. He learned to jump last night with Piper, so he's been trying to walk and jump at the same time. It doesn't work. And since the other boys are into peeing, I'll tell you that Oliver seems to want to pee like a big boy. I AM NOT ready to potty train, but I'm thinking he may be pretty easy with all the demonstrations he gets in a day! If I let him run wild outside, I would find him in the garden covered in mud, eating mud and picking and eating peppers. He's taken full bites out of our jalapeno peppers (not even grown men could do that) and just barely whimpered. I watched it with my own eyes one day when I was tired of telling him "no" and decided to let him learn for himself. That backfired. Apparently, he doesn't think they are that spicy. Maybe the secret to eating jalapenos is to have mud in your mouth too??? Might have to share that one.
Along the lines of our garden. We accidentally bought 12 jalapeno plants that were marked wrong at Walmart and ended up with over easily over 1000 jalapeno peppers. We ended up giving a lot away, freezing some and using some for salsas. Right now our freezer is filled with them. Here's our professional picture we had done with the first couple hundred of our thousand!
We also planted 5 tomato plants and after picking many ripe tomatoes and making salsa and spaghetti sauce, we got a hard freeze and I had to pick the rest. Our home office was filled with 750 green tomatoes! There have been 125 that have turned red and the rest are on their way to turning red. I have another 10 batches of spaghetti sauce in the fridge ready to assemble and can tonight.
We had family pictures taken again by Monica (see above picture and last years' fall pictures) a few weeks ago. They will be up soon. Can't wait to share them with you! Have fun with this update. There may not be another for another 7 months!
