I Say Poop

Dinner conversation Monday night:

L: I say pee pee and poo poo.

G: I say poo poo and pee pee.

L: I say salad.

G: I say salad dressing.

L: I say cup.

G: I say bowl.

L: I say spoon.

G: I say fork.

L: I say light.

G: I say lightbulb.

L: I say pickle (there were no pickles in sight)

G: I say pee pee and poo poo.

Well, at least the conversation came full circle. There has been a lot of potty talk since starting PT, and last night I finally figured out where the "I say" part was coming from. The boys were in bed not going to sleep, and they started the "I say pee pee" conversation again. We have an Elmo video about potty training, which they watched several times in the days before going straight-to-underwear. One of the segments features children talking about which words they use to describe bodily functions. My personal favorite was "I call it dookie!".

While I'm on the subject, the boys have been waking up dry from their naps most of the time. However, Liam was particularly tired on Sunday after a morning visit to the zoo. He fell asleep in the car on the way home, and I decided that I'd rather chance him peeing during his nap than wake him up before the nap and ask him to go. He does not wake up pretty when he's tired, so straight to bed he went. Almost two hours later, he stumbled into my room, and the front of his hair was wet. Upon inspection of his head and his bed, I determined that he peed twice and moved his head into one of the pee puddles during his nap. Now that is heavy sleeping!

Why Yes, I Do Frequently Burst Out in Song

So I've joined Facebook. A person new to Singapore invited me to join, and I ended up finding half of my high school class on there, as well as many of my friends in Atlanta and Singapore. It's been fun catching up with everyone, though it reminds me that I am now twice the age I was when I graduated from high school. Anyway, there are groups that you can join which will be shown on your profile to give friends an idea of your interests. I've joined high school, college, and pharmacy school alumni groups, plus a few random "just for fun" groups, one of which is the title of this post.

I joined this group because I do like to sing (though not well at all), and I do enjoy musicals, but mostly I joined in honor of Graeme and Liam. Graeme is singing more than his ABCs now. He started entertaining us with hilarious renditions of "Happy Birthday" sung into anything remotely resembling a microphone. Liam soon joined him, and now they both sing while in funny little stances like tiny Elvis's, wearing T-shirts and Elmo/Nemo/Cars/Thomas underwear instead of sparkly jumpsuits. Grandma Arlene and Grandpa Denny were lucky enough to witness a short demonstration while webcamming a couple of weeks ago. Graeme has added "Wheels On the Bus" and "Where is Thumbkin?" to his repertoire just in the past couple of days. And, yes, he just sings whenever he feels the need.

While I'm on the subject, Liam has a developed a reaction to the rest of the family's singing. Whenever Graeme, Sean, or I sing, Liam adopts the talk-to-the-hand pose and whines, "Noooooooo" as though his ears are bleeding. We're not great singers, but I didn't think we were that bad. He doesn't do this when his Kindermusik teacher sings, so maybe we are terrible instead of just mediocre.

The boys' language development continues to amaze us. Before Grandma Ar and Aunt Mar's late July/August visit, the kids would speak in several short sentences. After the visit, their sentences and words were more complex. Liam now says things like, "I want to go downstairs and play with my digger in the playroom".

This past week, the boys began narrating on a regular basis while playing, and their play has become more imaginative. They talk about going places a lot, particularly by plane, boat, and cable car. Evidently our cable car ride to Sentosa Island made an impression. And, unfortunately for our discipline approach, the boys have declared the Group W bench an airplane, which they fly in every day. The laundry basket is a boat, and a small ride-on car is the cable car. They go shopping for food often, and they have afternoon tea with their new dinosaurs. The boys also pretend to spray us with water like firefighters. And, of course, they play with their airplanes, rocket, and Tonka trucks every day. We're doing lots of reading of the Mouse Cookie anthology too, with "If You Give a Pig a Pancake" their current favorite of the series.

As for the terrible twos phase, Liam's the whiner and Graeme is tantrum/angry boy. Overall, they're good kids, but today I had to give Graeme a you-better-shape-up-or-I'm-taking- you-out-of-this-room speech at Kindermusik, and later Liam whined and needed a "hug, hug, hug" for 30 minutes after he woke up from his nap. Graeme's reaction lately when he doesn't get his way: scream or get extremely frustrated in one way or another. Liam's reaction: whine and act put-upon. Alas, I am subjected to both common annoying toddler habits, though it could certainly be worse in terms of frequency.

That said, there are so many sweet, hilarious moments with the boys that all the annoying stuff is (mostly) forgotten. When he wasn't showing his rear in Kindermusik today, Graeme was telling the teacher what to do in a helpful way and putting away the instruments. After the teacher announced quiet time, Graeme repeated "quiet time" loudly and told her to turn off the lights. Later this afternoon, Liam cuddled on the couch with a baby doll after pretending to feed her a bottle. He then collected a few plastic dinosaurs and managed to hug them and the doll at the same time. I'll write in my next post about the crazy dinner conversation tonight.

And finally, a potty training update: We've managed to go to My Gym last Thursday, the zoo yesterday, a picnic at the Botanic Gardens yesterday, and Kindermusik today without accidents. Today was completely accident-free for both boys, and they both pooped in the "big potty" as they call it - the regular toilet with a plastic seat insert so they don't fall in. Yay! They're growing up.

It Has Begun

What is "it" you may ask? Why, potty training of course. I kind-of started last week with a few scheduled potty times and a switch to pull-ups, but the whole thing was a waste of time. Once the boys realized that they could pee in the pull-ups and not feel much different, they just peed whenever. Plus they couldn't manage pulling them down and up easily. I resigned myself to going straight-to-underwear this week after we got past a few events that we needed to attend with the boys. The carpet people came to pick up my carpets for annual cleaning on Monday, so those are out of the way. We have nothing planned from yesterday afternoon until the Saturday morning swim lesson, so we've got some time to start working on it.

Yesterday after morning playgroup and lunch, I let them pick out underwear for their nap. They made it through the nap dry but peed soon after waking up, which caused them (especially Liam) to be upset. I made the mistake of leaving the potties in the bathroom, and I think they were "out of sight, out of mind", even though I reminded the boys where the potties were. There were several accidents yesterday, including two which required the sofa upholstery cleaner. Yay!

Last night I re-read the potty training Q & A entries from John Rosemond's website and realized that I should keep the potties in the boys' sight for the first few days so they are easy to access. This morning Liam said, "I'm not gonna pee pee on the floor" after I took off his night diaper, and then he promptly peed in his potty. Then the rest of the morning Liam said, "I need to pee pee" before he went by himself. Graeme said the same but sometimes spotted his underwear while he said it, and then he went to the potty. He peed on the floor once this morning 5 minutes after peeing a little in the potty and saying he was finished.

They both peed (and Liam pooped) in their potties before their nap, but woke up UGLY after peeing during the nap. After I got them cleaned up and settled down, they peed in their clean underwear soon thereafter. The rest of the afternoon went okay, with both of them requesting to pee during dinner. Graeme hasn't pooped in the potty yet, so hopefully that won't be an issue for him. I imagine that there's nothing quite like a constipated toddler. Fun! We'll see how it goes tomorrow.

They'll wear night diapers until they're day trained, and of course they have to wear the swim diapers for swimming lessons. It's underwear-only for all other times though. Messy, but supposedly more effective time-wise than pull-ups. It appears that we'll be having ups and downs for a few days before they get the hang of it.


Besides clapping wildly and yelling "I PEE PEED IN THE POTTY!", there are some funny and/or bizarre things that they boys have said and done lately, and I thought I'd share a few:

1) Bargaining for fruit - I'm not sure how this came about, but one night while the boys were in bed not sleeping, I hear, "One apple". Then, "No, one PINEapple." Followed by, "Two strawberries". "No, one strawberry". "No, two bananas". And so on, for a couple of minutes. They have debated fruit on several occasions since then. Maybe they got the idea from the fruit all over their Elmo and Zoe cups, which I've caught Liam studying during mealtimes instead of drinking his milk.

2) Graeme is sitting next to me while I'm on the laptop, and he sneezes all over the screen. He immediately says, "I excuse me'd on the 'puter!". At least he knows what to say when he sneezes.

3) Micro is running off at the mouth during Sean's morning routine, and I asked him if he could say, "No comment". He immediately repeats, "No comment, mommy". If only he would take that advice.

4) We have a small, maybe 2-inch long gecko in our house (probably one of many) which sometimes runs across the wall but mostly hides during the day. A week ago the gecko showed himself while Liam was walking down the stairs. I was a couple of stairs in front of him, but he still managed to jump onto my leg in fear of the tiny lizard. In an attempt to make the lizard seem cute and lovable, I thought we would give him a name. I listed names typical (Bill) and not typical (Beauregard), but was shot down by both Graeme and Liam. I told them that I would come up with a name they would like. That night, "Jamal" popped into my head, which is more than a little off. The next morning, I said to Liam, "The lizard's name is Jamal", and Liam beamed, "Yes, Jamal!!!". Evidently the kids ARE as weird as I am.

5) The boys are into rockets and space lately, and they wanted to see a picture of a rocket on the computer instead of the same one in their book. I went to the NASA website and found some good pics of Saturn V, plus a space shuttle blastoff. Now whenever they see the laptop, they want to see the rocket, want to see the rocket, want to see the rocket, want to see the rocket, want to see the rocket!!!! So I had sense enough to bookmark the page after being too slow to bring up the pictures after only the second request. Today Graeme requested airplanes also, so I bookmarked the Lockheed Martin photo gallery (Granddaddy Al will be proud!), and he had a good time staring at the airplanes, satellites, and rockets for a solid 10 minutes. Whatever works, I say.

I've already ordered some rocket and airplane books for the boys and have many more books, plus NASA, space, and airplane videos on my wish list for them. If they keep this up, they'll be having a space-themed 3rd birthday party in April 2009 and will be wearing this while riding this. The things they sell these days! I feel old when I look at some of this stuff and think of what was available in the '70s when I was 3. We had to make our space shuttle out of cardboard. Oh wait, there were no shuttles then. Anyway, I'm getting my tired self to bed now before I look at more crap on Amazon.

Future Aviators of America

Liam is currently suffering from Mystery Fever, which is not some rabid desire to read The Hardy Boys, but instead my term for a moderately high fever of unknown origin with no other symptoms. Graeme suffered Mystery Fever for two days last week, then he was fine. Hopefully there won't be a day three for Liam, because he is just tragic when he's feeling really bad. He did have moments yesterday and today when he was feeling okay enough to play and be a subdued version his usual crazy self.

While Liam was reclining on the playroom couch this afternoon, I brought out the trampoline in an effort to tire Graeme before dinner. After watching Graeme jump for a couple of minutes, Liam got up and decided to jump a bit. It was half-hearted compared to his usual jumping, but at least he got up. Maybe there's hope that when he's older he won't be so pitiful when he's sick like some adult males are (I'm looking at you, E. Brown).

Enough sickness; moving on to the fun. On Sunday we went to the Singapore Air Force open house. Being the aircraft lovers that they are, the boys had a great time. Check out this photo of Liam, Graeme, and Sean with two Black Knights, members of S'pore's aerobatics team (Singapore's Thunderbirds):

Lookin' good in our shades

We were able to go inside a C-130. This was especially cool since my dad used to fly them when he was in the Air Force. Yes, I actually exist in this picture, since Sean volunteered to take it:

Hercules!
(Not me - the plane, though Graeme is weighing more these days)

Ready for our first jump

After looking at more planes, helicopters, and weapons, we saw a military version of a front loader, which the boys immediately called a digger. Here's a pic of them "driving" the digger:

Get out of the way down there!

After the digger, Liam and Graeme jumped around in a bouncy thing that was set up for little kids. Nearby, some people were taking a hot air balloon ride, and Liam was particularly fascinated by the balloon and the fire involved. We then rushed to the grandstand to watch the aerial display. We saw F-16s and F-5s take off, fly around, and land; a Chinook helicopter drop a vehicle and some commandos (ok, they used ropes to get down); and Apache helicopters pretend to intercept an unidentified aircraft. Finally, a C-130 landed in the distance, as you can see in the far right of this picture:

One of the few moments Graeme took his eyes off the aircraft

The best part of the aerial display for me and Sean was the music. It seems military personnel all over the world enjoy 80s rock - the soundtrack included several Metallica songs and, of course, The Final Countdown. I guess we were showing our age when we named the band and the year that song was a hit.

Coming soon - the Great Fruit Debate and other strange toddler discussions.