What we've been working on: potties and sleep

Sometimes I get the feeling that I'll be writing about trying to potty train for damn ever.  Or until my kid can change his own diapers.  Whichever comes first.

Ok, in all seriousness I do expect him to be fully potty trained (when awake) within these next few weeks.  Because, well, he has to.  So it will happen.  Don't burst my bubble.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, all the potty progress we had made apparently got left here when we flew to Texas.  We quickly realized that using the toilet was just not happening while we were there (too many people, distractions, excitement, who knows).  And so, we put D back in diapers again, planning to get back into the swing of things as soon as we got back here again.

Tuesday was our first day back to Operation: No Diapers.  I had a stack of underwear and rags set up both upstairs and downstairs, prepared to spend the day cleaning up messes.  To my utter shock and surprise, we actually had ZERO accidents, all day long.  I had D sit on the potty every 30 minutes-1 hour, and we managed to catch every pee.  WOOT!

Wednesday and Thursday? Not so good.  Zero catches. (correction, Zach just told me D peed in the potty once this evening, got out of the bath specifically to go pee.  So that's AWESOME) Every pee went on the floor.  I don't know if Tuesday was a complete fluke or what.  He starts school in a little under two weeks, and all joking aside I do feel fairly confident that by then he'll have a decent hang on this, and then seeing all his classmates going to the bathroom will clinch it.  Why not be hopeful, right?

In other news.  Quinn's actually getting to be really ridiculously adorable.  He's much happier now that he's mobile.  He still has definitely grumpy periods, but spends more of his day crawling and playing and being super cute.  Today he kept crawling under our dining table and smiling back at me.  He and D were also getting into our tupperware cabinet together, also pretty adorable.  His sleep is kind of atrocious, though.  At least the past few nights he's only been waking up twice at night which is way way way better than what he's been doing the past two or so months (getting a couple 3-4 hour stretches of sleep really does feel significantly better than 1-2 hours at a time).  I kind of feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place as far as his sleep, because it also changes so quickly that I don't really know what to work on to try to help encourage better sleeping.  Some weeks he'll go to sleep pretty easily for naps & at night.  Then the next week sleep will be like pulling teeth.  Occasionally he'll take a decent hour-long nap, other times he'll sleep all of 10 minutes (usually closer to 30).  I usually nurse him to sleep, and the times when he fights it are so frustrating and then that frustration starts rubbing off on breastfeeding in general, which I really don't like happening.  So I'm trying to encourage him to fall asleep without needing to be on the boob. That was seeming pretty doable last week, then this week he's latched on (ha) all over again.   What I've started doing sometimes is do an in-arms cry-it-out of sorts, rocking and holding him as he cries to sleep.  Kinda sucks, but I'm hoping he'll figure it out soonish and not need to suckle to sleep (BTW no, he won't take a pacifier.  He has one, uses it as a chew toy instead).

It's a good thing these two are so dang cute and sweet.

Here's to the sleep and potty gods throwing me a bone sometime soon.