Another week, another step towards insanity!

Well, no, it's not quite that bad (although we've had a few moments in the past couple of weeks that have made me wonder if boarding schools accept three-year-olds!). Grant is acting every bit of three (which, some people have said, can be worse than two).....he seems to be getting more obstinate by the day. Some days it seems like he yells and screams every time I tell him "no," even when it's something very minor. Like for example, one morning just after going downstairs (before we even ate breakfast), he asked if he could have a piece of gum. I told him not now, but maybe after he eats breakfast. He just erupted, flapping his arms and throwing himself over the floor. So of course that makes me really want to give him a piece of gum!

He is also extremely protective of his toys lately, but only at certain times. Sometimes he'll share his very favorite toys with Drew without me even asking. But then other times, he'll be playing with a toy and he can detect that Drew is getting too close to one of his other toys a few feet away from him. He'll run over there, grab the toy and say, "I'm playing with that!" So then Drew starts crying and usually screams at Grant. And then they both yell at each other. So fun!

And at night.....oh my gosh.....sometimes we feel like we're at our wit's end. Dean reads stories to Grant and tells him goodnight, and warns him not to turn on his light or leave his room, or else he'll get a spanking. For about five nights straight, Dean had to go back upstairs multiple times to give spankings. And these are hard spankings.....I can hear them all the way downstairs. And he'll just cry and cry. But then a few minutes later, Dean is back downstairs and we hear another thud, or we hear the door opening. One night Dean spanked him four times before he finally went to sleep. We're wondering if it's inhumane to tie our child to his bed?? I'm assuming yes.

But to change the subject......last weekend, I spent my first night away from the boys. Ever!! It's not that I've been afraid or hesitant to do it before, but it's just not something that we ever really get the chance to do, unless we hire a babysitter.....and I am too cheap for that! But a group of blogging friends from high school got together last weekend in Bryan. I was looking forward to it for weeks, and it was a blast!! It started at 7pm, and I didn't leave until after 2am....and I wasn't even the last one to go. I spent the night at my parents' house and Dean stayed here with the boys. We're going to try to do it every 6 months. I can't wait until the summer get-together! Here's a picture of the group:

You see, Drew?

My big Christmas present was an iPod touch. I mainly wanted it so I could listen to music inside the house with the kids, without having to transfer all of their CDs to and from the car all the time. But I've had it for three weeks, and I still haven't put any songs on it! I love being able to browse the internet or check my email quickly without having to come upstairs to the study.

I've always been bad about letting Grant hold my cell phones. So when this one came, of course he immediately wanted to play with my "new phone," as he called it. The day it came in the mail, I took it out of the box to look at it.....and it was like Gollum on Lord of the Rings.....he was dying to have that thing in his hands! I put it back in the box and up on my dresser (after he threw a fit because he couldn't hold it), and the next day that stinker made himself a stepstool so he could reach the box!

These were pictures we took a few days after Christmas.....for one short day, we gave Grant privileges to hold my "new phone" when we were sitting there right next to him. So here he's showing Drew how it works.....he loves to act like an adult when he's explaining something to Drew. He'll talk in a really high-pitched voice and more slowly than he normally does. I think it makes him feel so big to be able to teach things to his little brother, or to tell him what's right and wrong. He'll say, "Drew, we do not throw food on the floor. No, sir. If you do that again, I'm going to give you a big spankin." Here he's saying something like, "You see that, Drew? You can touch it. Isn't that cool?"

Unfortunately, Grant lost his holding privileges soon after I took these pictures (probably this same night). Because, you see, our little boy doesn't yet understand that when something fun comes to an end, it doesn't mean he'll never be able to do it again. This has been the story of my life these past few weeks. No matter how patiently I try to explain to him that it's time to give something back to me (being sure that he understands the consequences if he doesn't give it back----mainly that he won't get to have it again), it just doesn't compute in his little head. He kicks and screams and falls on the floor crying......and so now Grant's iPod-holding days are officially over! And he's actually been doing pretty well; he'll see it on the counter and reach up to pick it up, but then he brings it straight to me and says, "here's your iPod" (the Gollum in him is still satisfied because at least he lays his hands on it for a few seconds!).

About a month ago, my cell phone fell into the toilet at Lowe's while I was helping Grant go potty. It still works, except you can't see the screen (which makes it basically useless). So my friend Erin offered her old Sprint phone to me (mine was only a few months old). The day before I went to pick up this new phone, Grant wanted to play with my iPod and I told him he could play with my "boring phone" instead. He grabbed it, pushed some buttons, saw that it didn't really do anything, and said, "no, I don't like this boring phone. I like that one better" (reaching for my iPod). That little stinker knows what he wants!

Jinxed!

Okay, so I just bragged yesterday about how great a job Grant is doing with potty training. He hardly ever has accidents, remember? Since we started potty training, he's accidentally wet himself maybe four times (and the last time was a couple weeks ago). Well, after Dean got home yesterday afternoon, we were all sitting in the den.....Grant was playing with a bunch of his cars and other toys (he had them sitting on the couch in front of him), and he turned around to face us. His pants were all wet! If I believed in jinxes, this would be a prime example!

Then before his bath, he mentioned having to go pee-pee but said he didn't want to go in the toilet. I think I've heard that it's not uncommon for kids to relapse and decide they don't want to use the potty for a while. But today it's been so far, so good (maybe I shouldn't have said that!).

Potty training- done! (for the most part)

Grant did a remarkably good job with potty training.....I would say that we're mostly done, except for at naptime and bedtime. I've been so relieved (no pun intended!) at how easy it's been, maybe because we didn't try to start him too early. Since he started wearing underwear a few months ago, he's had just a handful of accidents. I always envisioned potty training being this months-long process of hurrying to the toilet every half-hour, changing wet underwear four times daily, etc. Thankfully it wasn't like that. If he has a diaper on, he will never go into the bathroom or tell us that he has to go. He just uses the diaper. That's why I never used pull-ups with him; I figured he would just treat them as diapers (and very expensive diapers, at that!). So we just went straight to underwear, and now I'm glad we did.

Now when he has to go potty, he just disappears into the bathroom, and usually doesn't even say anything to us. He doesn't like for us to help him, and will tell us to leave if we try to come in! Until recently he'd strip completely naked (except for his shirt) before climbing onto the toilet, even though I tried to show him how to just pull his pants and underwear down. Just before Christmas, I sent him to school with underwear for the first time. When I picked him up, his teacher said, "he took all of his clothes off when he went to the bathroom!" Oops! I hope he didn't walk back out into his classroom naked waist-down when he was finished (like he does at home!).

Anyway, I know his teachers have worked with him on this, and now he's gotten better about leaving his clothes on. And he still comes out of the bathroom exclaiming, "I went pee-pee/poopy in the potty! Now can I have some candy?" (We've rewarded him with candy from the very beginning of this process, so now he still expects it. The problem is that Drew also wants candy whenever he sees Grant get some. I feel like I'm giving out candy all day!) Grant's current favorite candy is Starbursts......he tells us that he should receive one piece for going pee-pee, and two for poopy. But we're trying to phase this down considerably......that is a lot of sugar!

And one last thing.....I have also been really pleasantly surprised how well Grant does when we're out. We'll go to do errands and he might mention to me that he has to go pee-pee. So I'll ask him to try to wait.....and sometimes it's a while before we finally find a restroom. But he always seems to do fine. I guess this proves that he was just at the right age. So glad to have Grant's diaper days mostly behind us!

Roll Tide!

We are super excited that Alabama won the national championship game last night!! I believe we watched almost every single one of Alabama's plays this season (I think maybe one or two games weren't on tv?). I've become an Alabama fan anyway since marrying Dean, but by the end of this year I knew most of the players' names and even could recognize them by their numbers. They seemed like a high quality group of guys.....Dean keeps up with all of the Alabama message boards and articles, and he's told me some impressive stuff about the players (of course I know Texas also had a lot of great guys on their team). So it was great to see them win! I know it would have been a completely different game if Colt McCoy hadn't been injured.....that was a shame. And it turned into a much closer game than it should have been, with McCoy being out! The only sad thing now is that there's no more college football for another 7 months. :(

These pictures are from an earlier game this season; Grant was in big time fit-throwing mode last night, so he went to bed before the game even started!

We had a fun week. The boys and I went into town on Tuesday and ended up going to the zoo in the afternoon. We went to the Childrens' Zoo for the first time.....it's hidden in the back and we've never known about it. Our favorite animals by far were the sea otters......those two little guys were so funny! The instant we walked up, they both jumped in the water and started doing flips right in front of us. The boys got such a kick out of them. And there were two giant porcupines! And a playground too, which of course makes the trip almost worth it in itself (at least for Grant). Maybe next time we'll do the petting zoo.....I was never a fan of those and Grant hasn't been either. I think Drew would love it, but I kind of avoided it this time (he didn't know any better)!

Then yesterday, it was 10:30am and we had already completed my one errand of the day (Half Price Books). I was driving around trying to think of something (anything!) we could do that would keep us away from the house for a little longer.....and something other than just going into a random store, where the boys have very little patience and I usually end up leaving frustrated at them! (And of course, for the last month, we've had basically the same problem as we had in the summer.....it has been SO cold, making it difficult to do outdoorsy things. We played in our backyard maybe two times in all of December....crazy.)

So we were driving down past NASA, and I thought we'd check out the Space Center. I went ahead and got a 1-year pass for $23, and we had a fun time! There's very little that's actually appropriate for kids as young as ours (I guess that's why they don't charge for kids under 4). There was a mock-up rocket that we were sitting in when the screen said something about a countdown to blastoff. Grant said, "I want to get out of here. It's about to blast off." There was also a mock-up space shuttle that you can walk inside, but he wouldn't go in there. He thought it was going to blast off too! Overall, it seems like a lot of the hands-on exhibits are outdated. Grant doesn't know any different now; he just likes to press all of the buttons randomly. But I think an 8-year-old might get frustrated because some of the exhibits don't really seem to work! But for $23, hopefully it will at least give us a place for them to run around every once in a while!

It was a bummer today.....I was supposed to go to dinner tonight with a few girls for Sierra's birthday. But Dean is working late......some of their product froze today with the cold weather, so they've been trying to get it back to normal. I was going to mention this earlier this week: this is his first week in a completely new position. He was transferred to a different plant (basically the same commute), and his first day was Monday. This plant is known to have a lot of breakdowns like this. Oh no!! It becomes really hard to find things to do by myself with the boys in the evenings when I've been with them all day already. I hope this doesn't happen a lot!

I went to wash my face a few minutes ago, and didn't realize until I splashed water into my face that I still had my glasses on! I need some sleep!!