…and never stops!

Are you wondering whatever happened to our Potty Boot Camp?

Well, by Wednesday of that week, Ryan finally got the idea. And by Friday, he figured out how to STAND UP and was showing his little friends how it was done! Apparently, surviving potty boot camp makes you an expert! He’s still struggling with the idea of #2 in the potty. For some reason he thinks he’s going to clog the toilet. We keep telling him that the reason we hooked up to the sewers was to get new pipes so that wouldn’t happen anymore. We may have had a breakthrough last night, here’s hoping!

Let’s see…what else is happening? I’m typing away on my new laptop as we speak – YAY! I’m still trying to get used to Windows 7, but so far it’s been nice. Ric calls it a big toy since I’ve been checking out the games on it. :)

We’re just about ready to get back into the garage, finish the insulation, and put up the sheet rock! It will be nice to have some of the raw stuff covered up. Once the ceiling is insulated and sheet rock covering it, I’m thinking that the next big thing will be putting the sliding door into the wall so we can cover the walls. Anyone want to volunteer to join us for that one?

For the last month or so, we’ve all had some sort of bronchitis. It hasn’t been fun, but we’ve survived. Just crossing our fingers that any Norovirus germs don’t make their way to us – we hear it’s going around!

I just read through this post – boring, boring, boring!

I’ll have to muster up some humor in the next one!

I have to admit that I was a little worried throughout the day. We weren’t making much progress at all. Ric was at work, so I was the Drill Sergeant.

Megan wasn’t a problem, though we did have a few accidents. (And those accidents were only because I didn’t encourage her to get to the bathroom quickly enough!) She’s really funny though, every time she goes, she sings the “pee pee on the potty” song that I’ve been singing to them – I HAVE to get that on video! It’s hysterical!

Ryan was a different story. I have NO idea how he did this, but he didn’t go to the bathroom ALL day and managed to stay dry too! It wasn’t for lack of trying, I had him in the bathroom many times, but nothing happened! Not even a drip!

Finally, Ric came home and he tried with him.  The second time he tried – success! YAY! You would have thought that Ryan won the lottery! He was running around like a crazy boy! (VERY similar to the cats when they finish in the litter box!*)

Here’s hoping that he’ll remember how to do it tomorrow! Still tired, it’s like being “on call” all day long! I just keep telling myself that it’s all worth it in the end! :)

*Speaking of cats, I mentioned this on Facebook, but if you aren’t there, we lost one of our cats about 2 weeks ago. ChiChi ended up getting really sick and we couldn’t see her suffer anymore, so I took her to the vet for the last time. It was the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done. She was 14 years old and was such a sweet cat. We definitely miss her. SuziQ acts like she doesn’t, but I know she does…they’ve been ’sisters’ for so long, that I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t. Who knows, though, she won’t say. ;)

It was time. Change is good, right?

We were kind of forced into changing our site. I’ll save you all the geek-talk and just tell you that even though we’ve used Blogger since the beginning of our blog, we’ve still hosted it in our own location. Blogger would just upload anything new to our server.

They are discontinuing that little feature, so rather than forward our domain (www.thelevetts.com) to the blogger address, I decided to install Wordpress on our own server and move it all over! It’s been pretty easy to do – the time consuming part was tweaking the “theme” I found to make it look and act like I wanted it to look.

There’s just one thing, if anyone has subscribed in a blog reader to our old website, that link will probably be broken. SO, make sure that you update that link! You can scroll down on the left side at the bottom in the Website Geek Stuff and click the “Entries RSS” link to get the updated feed.

Hope you like the new look – and hopefully there won’t be too many kinks to work out with the new back end!

Yes, I know I’m a little crazy – but why not make potty training (cold turkey mind you) a little more exciting? So this banner is hanging up in our living room right now. I’m dancing around singing potty songs (the good kind!), and we’ve got loads and loads of laundry going on too.

Here we have Team Pink – aka Megan. She’s the most agreeable to this little endeavor I’ve decided to impose on our family this week. (Thank goodness it’s vacation week!) For the most part, she doesn’t complain when I “encourage” her to go sit on the potty every 45 minutes or so.

(Though I did get “Mommy, I don’t want to go potty anymore” a few times….she’s just going to have to get used to it, everyone has to pee sometime, right?)

The end of Day 1 meant a bunch of stickers on her little pink chart, a promise for a Happy Meal because she pooped on the potty 1 1/2 times. (Don’t ask about the half…believe me…), and about 3-4 changes because this whole routine is new to her. Luckily, “something” happened every time she was on the potty, so we’re moving forward, I hope!

Here we have Team Blue – Ryan. He’s the whole reason for this cold turkey event. He’s 4. He refuses to go to the potty and would rather just wear a pull-up all the time. (Notice the mis-matched clothes? We most of the others were in the laundry!) We’ve gone around and around on all the theories as to why. Here are just a few…

1) He’s just stubborn
2) He’s lazy or too busy to take the time out to go to the bathroom.
3) He scared of something. (I would be too – have you seen our turquoise toilet?)
4) He really can’t tell when he has to pee – maybe he’s just not aware of it until it happens.
5) It’s a power struggle and he’s trying to remain in control.

We have no real answer yet. It’s been REALLY frustrating though. He does show embarrassment when he does have an accident, does that mean anything?

I think something else happened today too…though I don’t have all the details. He did go out to play with some of the boys down the street. Somewhere in there he had a small accident and ran home to change. When he went back out, the boys had gone inside and wouldn’t let him come in with them. That makes my heart hurt, but maybe it’s what he needs to learn and pay attention. I don’t know. Maybe not.

Anyway…my day looked like this.:

And Ryan ended up like this:

The day after Christmas we went to the Civic Center (Dunkin Donuts Center for those who are new to RI) and watched Nemo on Ice. The kids LOVED it, and it was cute. Here are just a few pictures, some are blurry because my camera doesn’t like to take dark photos very well. But at least you’ll get the idea of how colorful and fun it was. (Not to mention sticky cotton candy faces too!)

For a vacation, the past two weeks have been packed with things to do! In just a couple of days, Ryan and I go back to school and we’ll be back into a routine of some sort.

The Saturday night before Christmas, we were expecting a TON of snow, so before the first flake fell…we got the call the Church was canceled. It was a good thing because at about 10pm, it started to snow and when it was all over in the morning, we had almost 22 inches! It was a nice day off for all of us.

Christmas Eve meant only a half a day of work for Ric. (Of course, he’s forced to take vacation time for the other half! Grrr…) and he had promised to help the kids make a snowman that day. His idea of a snowman is filling up buckets and stacking them up. The kids LOVED it though!
He’s pretty cool with his shades, don’t you think? We changed his hat to a Santa hat the next day after Santa stopped by our house. Unfortunately, the day after that, he was melted and gone. :)

Megan was so pooped after the snowman that she completely crashed on the floor afterwards. That night, we joined some good friends for dinner. The kids were all off the wall with their friends while the four parents, just sat back and watched.

Our Christmas tree and stockings this year were all made with paper (of which I have PLENTY!) because we packed our decorations and everything into a storage unit to make room for the garage remodel. Of course we thought we were going to be a lot further with that little project. So rather than dig into the back of the storage, we made everything. Do you like our poster board stockings? :) You can see the tree on my business website.

Somehow that night, Santa made it to our house. We had a nice Christmas morning with Orange Rolls and tons of wrapping paper. One thing that I wanted to do was to go see a movie – so we chose The Chipmunks, Squeakuel. It was cute, and the kids liked it. That night was Chinese Food at one of our favorite restaurants and then home again. It was a REALLY busy day, and I don’t think we’ll pack that much into one day again…especially since we were going out the next night to see Nemo on Ice! (Tickets courtesy of Santa – I’ll put up a separate post about that one.)

So that was it…I leave you with a crazy Christmas greeting…

When we got home from the movies this afternoon, I thought that I would start my van and let it run for a little while to check out if the overheat / no-heat problem is any better since I took the thermostat out. Well…when we went outside to leave for dinner (2+hours later) the car wasn’t running any more!  I completely forgot that I left it running in the driveway and laid down on the couch for some napping.  D’OH!

Referring to the post a few days ago. I was right. Now…after walking around on it for 2 weeks, how do I convince everyone that I should stay off of it?

Cool picture, huh?