A Few Pretty Much Unrelated Pictures & Booty Camp Eve

Despite appear-ances, we did not let Annalise help us sand the drywall.

SPLASH!

We made a cheesecake for Rob's parents this weekend. I usually try to let the kids do any part of the recipe that calls for flattening or crushing (even meat, I wrap it in plastic and give Caleb his toy hammer - which is hidden the rest of the time!), so here he's stomping on oreos to make a crust - very effective :)

Annalise's sweet lips - with all the plastic sheeting in our house last week, it took some time to get from the living room to the kitchen (normally about a half second trip). I knew Annalise was in the kitchen and have learned to be suspicious of silence. By the time I was able to get to her, she had taken down the sugar container, opened it and was eating sugar by the fistful. She was very silly afterward!

Caleb relaxing with the safety scissors. Sometimes he just likes to cut things out.

Other times he likes to build elevated tracks. He has tried many different things to prop up his train track this year, all with very limited success. He could get it all propped up, but usually it was too flimsy to support the trains actually running on them.

Grandma and Grandpa gave him an early birthday gift this weekend - an set of pieces that were actually built to raise the track - he was more than delighted and insisted that Grandma play train with him most of the weekend :)

Annalise getting in on the track building. While she is very much a girlie girl, she likes making tracks too.

And tomorrow we are making tracks into potty training. We are starting tomorrow because:

1. I think that although she isn't yet 2, she is capable of all the things involved in being potty trained.
2. If we do this now, we'll have 3 solid months of practice before the RFWT in December - I figure if we don't start soon, I might as well wait until January and I think, for her, that is waiting too long.

As with Caleb I am taking the Wendy Sweeney/Booty Camp approach. Actually I tried a few other things with Caleb before discovering Wendy Sweeney, but I like her ideas and, well, it worked with Caleb, which is more than reason enough to like an idea! Sweeney actually potty trains other peoples' kids in her home (for a fee) and she lives in Chicago, so we are just sort of modeling this on her website information.

Basically Day 1 is "Booty Camp Day" and you use sweet drinks and salty snacks to induce much peepee - that is to increase the number of practice sessions in a short amount of time.

The other parts of the Booty Camp experience are learning to put on "panpys" (Caleb wore unnerpans) and being held responsible for mostly cleaning up after accidents. I like that because it does not involve clock watching or timer setting.

So in short, we are giving this 3 days to see either forward progress or extreme resistance. Since she is under 2, if she is very resistant, I am ok with waiting until the new year - but I am not going to let her know that until Thursday night.