Holding My Breath

Oma's house is "across the pasture," and that's about 1/3 mile from our house. When I used to backpack baby Wyatt down to Oma's, we would only meet 1-2 cars on her road, but since we don't live in a subdivision, I'm just too scared to let him walk on his on. Plus, while it may be a nice walk for me, it's a little too long for Wyatt, especially since we have to walk down the road to get there. And then there's the problem of the twins--needless to say, we haven't "walked" to Oma's house; we've been riding in the van, which involves seatbelts, carseats, screaming children who don't want to be strapped in: just not fun and no exercise, which is part of the point in going there to begin with.

But, my friend Catherine gave me her jogging stroller to use with the twins. Still, there was no room for Wyatt, so as the saying goes, necessity was the mother of invention, and I had Doug attach a temporary bar for Wyatt. So, for now, Wyatt happily hangs on to his bar and doesn't even complain about the twins who are incessently kneading his back with little baby kicks. No tears from anybody (although Amelia has been running low fever and has had the sniffles for the past 2 days). They're really too heavy to turn easily in this contraption, but it's so good to feel a bit of freedom.

Now to the title of this blog: I've been hesitant to say anything for fear that Wyatt will regress tomorrow, but it looks like we may be making progress on the potty training front. Wyatt has started to take himself to the bathroom!!! It started Easter Sunday: I lost Wyatt (in a house full of 20 other people, that's not too difficult) only to find him parked on the potty--door wide open, lights off, but he was doing a #2 on the potty all by himself. I squealed with delight, gave him a "huge" treat, and just made an enormous deal out of it.

Yesterday, he did his business in the potty again; later in the day, he started an "accident" in his Thomas underware, stopped himself, ran to the potty, and finished there. Today, we had one accident, and he didn't like it, so by the time I learned of it, there was a big mess on the lid of the little potty and his underware was left on the floor. But tonight, he even took himself to the bathroom at Oma's to do his #2.

If you notice in the picture, he has "pink underware" on--they're pull-ups with Dora the Explorer on them. I learned the hard way that they make "girl" pull-ups and "boy" pull-ups. Who knew! But, I found that out only after opening the package, so poor kid has to use them up. He doesn't mind, though--when I told him that was Dora's picture on his underware, he said, "No. That Wyatt." Same haircut, so why not! It's just special underware with Wyatt's picture on it! I'm hoping this is a good sign that soon I'll be able to put him in big boy underware all day long and that he'll take himself to the bathroom without much prompting. Fingers & toes are crossed! Prayers are said.