Let the Countdown to Tuesday Begin!

We made it through preschool open house! Colin and I took this picture as Daddy was leaving for work and we were heading over to the school. The whole thing went surprisingly well and while I am still absolutely freaking out about it, I think I might live. :-) When we pulled into the parking lot, Colin announced "There is MY SCHOOL!" and actually sounded happy about it. We parked and headed inside with a sea of other people, which made my palms start to sweat. The first part of the morning was a brief assembly in the auditorium and it took Colin about 10 minutes of walking around in the very back with me assuring him that he would be fine before he would go sit with me in the crowd. Once we sat down, he immediately made friends with the two little girls sitting in front of and behind us. It was love at first sight because both girls responded to his knock knock jokes and agreed to play "I Spy". He was having so much fun that I heard absolutely nothing that was said in the assembly. Let's hope it was not important information. The assembly started and ended with a prayer, during which Colin yelled "Mommy! Am I bowing my head? LOOK AT ME! Am I doing it? Where is God? Is he here? AMEN!!!!". It was a beautiful thing. ;-)

After the assembly, we headed to his classroom and met his new teachers, Ms. Gina and Ms. Kelli. They were both very nice and seemed excited. Colin loved the classroom and managed not to have any meltdowns while we were saying hello to all the kids and parents. It was a chaotic atmosphere, so I did not really have a chance to ask a lot of questions with the teachers. I found out when to show up and what to bring and Colin was well behaved. I briefly broached the subject of Colin's sensitivities with them and they both gave me the smiles and nods that you would expect from women used to dealing with mothers dropping off their kids for the first time. You could tell that they were basically dismissing my worries as nervous mom stuff, but I can't blame them at all. I am sure they get lots of speeches from worry wart mothers and they don't know me from Adam yet. They will have first hand knowledge of Colin soon enough and we can touch base again in a less chaotic environment than the open house. They did reaffirm that the best idea was to just drop Colin off and walk right out the door and that is exactly what I am going to do. Colin is going to flip out, but I know that me staying won't solve the problem one bit. They said that they never have to call parents back to get the child, but they certainly won't hesitate to do so if the need arises. That works for me! Like every mother on the planet, I will be absolutely devastated when I leave there with Colin screaming for me. I have already decided to take myself straight over for a coffee and pedicure immediately after I leave. I am hoping that giving myself a small treat will make me feel better and also keep me from parking my butt in the hallway and watching the whole day from the corner of the window! I wish I knew someone with a supply of Xanax...I think I might need one on Tuesday. ;-)

Colin warmed up to the school very quickly and I still believe in my heart that he is going to love this place. It is the most beautiful church and the whole school area is bright and cheerful. It seems like the perfect fit. I also found out while we were there that Colin can move into the twice weekly program. Originally they did not have room, so we went ahead with the one day plan. They made room for him and I am going to take them up on the offer, at least to start off. I think going every Tuesday and Thursday in the beginning will help him acclimate and warm up to the idea much faster than going on Mondays alone. There is just too much time between the once a week class and I know it will take him ages to get used to that. I plan to take him on Tuesday and Thursday instead, at least for the first month. At that point, we will re-evaluate and see what we think. So here is to Labor Day Weekend...our last one before Colin is an official preschooler! :-)

Preschool Prep

Tomorrow morning is the open house at Colin's preschool. I am excited and OH SO NERVOUS! We go from 9 -11:30am, with an assembly first and then breaking up into classrooms to meet the teachers and get a lay of the land. Tomorrow is an important day...if things go good, dropping him off for his first day next week will be a lot easier. If anything goes wrong...well, let's just pray that it doesn't! My prayer is that things are not too loud or overwhelming tomorrow and that his class is full of quiet children. (Yes, I realize that the exact opposite will happen!) :-) Colin has his lunchbox, backpack and fireman nap mat all ready to go and I literally cannot fathom that I am going to drop him off at preschool next week! It feels a little like the twilight zone. This boy was a newborn baby literally 5 minutes ago. I knew this day would come, but it feels so strange to imagine him in a classroom environment already, even if it is just one day a week. I am stressed out by the unknown in all of this and how Colin will handle a change this drastic with his sensory stuff, but I also have this feeling deep down in my gut that he is going to love it. There will be new things to learn and he is such a sponge these days...I think he will be blown away by how much fun it is, as long as we can get past the initial upset that is inevitable with a change this big.

The last time I left Colin somewhere was the day I quit work when he was 6 months old. With the exception of the occasional drop-off at his grandparents house (and even that is rare), he has not been dropped off anywhere. I don't know how long it will take him to adjust to this, so I am beyond anxious to get the first day here so that I can just know what I am dealing with. He will not even entertain the idea of being left at school and any time I bring it up, he says that I have to stay with him. Since he has no idea what preschool will really be like, I am hoping that he quickly sees that everything is fine and that I will be back. I am also wondering how long the teachers will let him cry before they make me come back and get him. :-) I'm REALLY wondering what it will feel like to be without a child from 9am to 2pm on Mondays! I have these visions of a clean house, laundry folded and put away, dinner done and my eyebrows properly waxed. I imagine what it will feel like to grocery shop by myself on Mondays and not have to purchase $15 worth of extras to keep Colin quiet and in the cart. I picture picking out my own library book and making a fall centerpiece for the kitchen table. I just don't know what I will do with 5 whole hours to myself once a week. It sounds decadent in the extreme. Heck, I might even paint my toenails! How about that! :-)

A Goodbye to Chubby Mom

I have lost 26 lbs now. I still can't believe it. This is bringing me so much joy. I had no clue how wonderful this would feel and I am so glad that I spent my summer working so hard. I bring this up because I bought new jeans last week that are 3 sizes smaller and on top of that...they are skinny jeans! I never in a million years thought I would ever EVER wear skinny jeans. Hell, they have the word "skinny" literally in the title! Heaven help me! I bought them and then ordered a pair of tall boots on sale. They came this afternoon and I tried on the boots and jeans together and I must say that it made me teary eyed. It has been several long years since I put anything on that made me that happy. I have spent an awfully long time feeling like a chubby mom trapped in sweatshirts and seeing clothes that I wished I could wear. The nagging little voice in my head that says, "you can't pull that off!" finally went away today in front of the mirror. I actually bought something trendy and for probably the very first time since I gave birth to my son, I feel good about myself. I had gotten to the point that I didn't recognize myself and I saw the old Chalna in the mirror today. I have always felt like two different people; the girl before Colin and the mom after Colin. After I gave birth and came home as big as a house, I never really got the old me back. I feel like I have finally merged the two people together. I have realized that I can still be focused completely on being a mother while taking care of myself at the same time. I have learned that if I feel good about myself, I am a better mother. It really does matter. I am writing all of this down today because I have tried and failed a dozen times since Colin was born. I finally did it and I know that the time will come when I have to do it again. When I have our second child one day, I want to have this to look back on. I want to be reminded of how good I feel right now. I should have done this years ago and knowing the way my body works, I will be right back in this boat after my next child (or after Christmas!) and I want to remember that I did it once and I can do it again. I can! :-)

Drum roll, please....Here I am before, on May 31st

And here I am today...in my awesome new jeans and boots. I much prefer "after"!

Now THAT is worth celebrating! On a side note, that is clearly not the top that will actually go with my new fall boots and jeans. I just happened to have it on today. ;-) And now for the outtakes from my oh-so-professional self timed photo shoot. Colin wanted in on the action. It is really unfair that lugging that boy around doesn't make me skinny on it's own. I mean, really. :-)

Colin Tells "Knock Knock Jokes"

Colin is the silliest boy in the whole world. Case in point: the knock knock joke. This is video of Colin telling me these "jokes" while making a giant mess with his dinner. Please note that these jokes make absolutely no sense, yet he is cracking himself up. I love him. :-)

The Potty Chronicles

I don't really know a clever way to begin a post about the toilet. The topic of potty training is almost overwhelming to discuss when one is the mother of a just-turned-3 year old boy. I feel as though I could write forEVER and not touch the surface of everything I have been thinking about lately. Who knew that something like going to the bathroom would ever occupy so much of my life! :-)

I read enough baby books when Colin was born to know that potty training a boy was going to be tough, so the good news is that I did not give it a single thought for the first 2.5 years of Colin's life. Last fall, we purchased a little potty and sat it in the bathroom. It became a topic of conversation, something to sit on every now and then, and the perfect stool for turning on the sink and making a giant mess. :-) We bought a few potty books and put them in rotation and would frequently talk about going to the bathroom and what life would be like when Colin was ready to stop wearing diapers. We borrowed a child's seat for the adult toilet from my parents house and left it sitting around. A couple of times, Colin peed and once he even pooped, but those were merely novelty moments...he was nowhere near ready to entertain actually using the toilet. Life continued on peacefully and truly, I was happy not to start the process. Life had become so much easier and the thought of dealing with bathroom breaks while out with Colin was overwhelming. It is so easy to just put on a diaper and go. I know that some moms complain about diapers and changing poops, but for some reason, it has never bothered me. They are easy and I am all about easy. :-) I also know Colin very well, and knowing his sensitivities like I do....well, the thought of navigating public restrooms with him frankly gives me hives. So I have just not stressed about it. My pediatrician told me years ago that the average age for boys to be trained is 3.5 years old...and that is just the average! Many are older still! So for the entire year that Colin was merely 2, I happily wallowed in the fact that he was so far from 3 and a half.

Cut to Colin's birthday last month. Seemingly out of the blue, it felt strange to put diapers on him. What had seemed totally normal for all this time suddenly felt weird. Putting my big boy on the changing table several times a day felt almost foolish. It hit me like a ton of bricks that the diaper days needed to come to an end and I couldn't avoid that fact anymore. I do know that this can't be my idea alone...Colin has to be ready for the change and I certainly can't force him to be. I have been watching and waiting for the last few weeks and talking to him a lot about it. He has fought with me vocally on the subject, claiming that he is "only a baby" every time I bring it up. I did notice a couple of things that gave me hope. First, Colin HATES getting changed. It is now almost impossible to do with how hard he fights me. Second, he has run around naked a few times lately and I have gotten sidetracked from putting a new diaper on. During these occasions, he has not had an accident, which led me to believe that he was holding it when he needed to. Last Saturday morning, I undressed Colin and as usual, he ran away before I could get a diaper on. I decided very randomly to let it go and see what happened. I reminded him that he was diaperless and to tell me if he needed to go potty. He played for a long while and then called out that he needed to go. I took him to the bathroom, where he informed me that he must use the big toilet. I sat the seat there and he proceeded to pee and poop like it was no big deal. He ordered me to read a book, which I did, and everything just happened! I almost passed out from shock. He was perfect the rest of the day, no accidents at all, and even pooped again that evening. I had my answer. Colin was mentally and physically ready to do this. I put a diaper on him for bed and ran out to Target after bedtime for new underwear options.

Sunday morning dawned early and we had a lot to do. We met Jer's parents for breakfast at 9am, so I had no time to argue with Colin over putting on underwear. In his mind, it is fine to wear underwear alone around the house, but he won't put it on with pants to actually leave home. That was problem number one. After our morning out, my parents were coming over to stay for a couple of days. He did manage to switch to underwear, but had several pee accidents and was clearly having too much fun with all the visitors to stop and think about what he was doing. That was problem number two. When my parents left this morning, I took his diaper off and geared up for another day at home for training. He started off perfectly and peed and pooped on the potty when he needed to. Everything was going great until I put underwear on him after spending the first half of the day naked from the waist down. He started having pee accidents as soon as the underwear went on. When I think back, his accidents while my parents were here were also when wearing underwear. Apparently, being naked reminds him to go to the bathroom, but even having underwear on makes him forget. Obviously it is no problem to be naked at home, but I am wondering how long I am going to be home before we can leave again! Not to mention that I have not even broached the subject of public restrooms with Colin, nor do I know how I will convince him to sit on one without our trusty plastic seat cover. And with the rules that Colin has for himself regarding getting dressed, I don't know how I will convince him to wear pants over underwear, or even commando! He is very particular about the way things feel and the new sensation of being dressed without a diaper is already proving to be tough. Good lord, this is too hard! Whew!

For the time being, we are just going to take it one day at a time. Colin is VERY new to this and I am going to just keep going with trial and error. At least he is finally getting a lot of practice and doing a great job with it. He appears to be a master at potty pooping and shockingly has not had one poop accident. I think he actually prefers to poop on the potty, which is awesome. I have not made a decision yet about what I will do going forward. When this batch of diapers is out, I may not buy anymore and just use the pull-up style at night. I can't know for sure, because regardless of what works for most, I have to do what is right for Colin. That may mean diapers for awhile...but maybe not. The timing is bad because Colin starts preschool in 3 short weeks and will go one day a week from 9-2. That is going to be a huge adjustment on it's own...much less while also dealing with potty training for the first time. I still can't believe how crazy this process is! The main thing that I am taking away from the last few days is that Colin has made major headway in this department, which is wonderful news! He went from absolutely refusing to even discuss the toilet to using it like a champ. He showed me that he can do it and is far closer to being fully trained than I could have imagined. I know we are close to having this figured out...I just have to tie a knot in my rope and hang on! :-)

A Tangent

A friend of mine posted a picture from high school on Facebook that I stumbled across recently. She was holding a "cell phone" in the picture and it was a gigantic cream colored rectangle that covered the whole side of her head and had a long extended antennae that went out of the frame. At first I giggled because it looked like a joke...and then I realized that it wasn't. It gave me pause. Life doesn't seem that much different now (shoulder pads and high top Reeboks excluded) until you take a minute and think on it. When I was a senior in high school, a very few people had "car phones" that were mounted and plugged into the car. They hardly ever worked and they were for emergency use only, as they were astronomically expensive to call on. And those were just the super rich kids. :-) Our big thing was a "pager". Once you were paged, you had to get to a phone to return the calls. That seems like a very foggy memory to me, but it happened none the less. Our parents had absolutely no way of knowing where we really were. All of those keg parties out in a pasture with half the school in attendance...yep, we were spending the night with our friends. ;-) If you told friends where you were going, you had to actually show up as planned because there was no way to reach them once they left their house, except for the errant page. I remember the endless slumber parties at my house full of "prank calling" every cute boy in the directory...nobody had caller id at the time. I can vividly recall being at my friend Robbie's house in the 10th grade and him showing me the "Internet" for the very first time in real life. It was so strange and foreign that I actually remember the moment. I thought it was amazing. I remember spending literally hours at the computer lab in college so that I could play with email and look things up online. There was no wireless and nobody had dial-up at our apartments or dorms. We had to go online at school. I am only 33 years old, yet things have changed so much already. I made fun of my parents almost every day of my childhood for their stories about how life was in "their day" and how things were so much different. I suppose that is inevitable of each generation. I am sure that Colin will have things in his life that I can't even imagine right now. That picture of the giant phone brought all these thoughts to the forefront of my mind.

The use of social media, like Facebook, has been the latest change to my everyday life. I am now in touch with hundreds of people, and the number grows daily, that I would not have a clue about right now otherwise. I love that I can post pictures and funny stories about Colin and my entire family spread across the country has immediate access to it all. I love the constant access to friends and family and how I can wonder where to get a good birthday cake in one minute and have 20 answers from local friends in the next. I love that I can see pictures of the children of childhood friends and that I know who married who without having to go to a reunion. :-) It is just good fun for me, but I am an adult and never knew media like this as a child. It makes me wonder how much harder the teenage years will be for Colin than they were for me. The 6th and 7th grade were the absolute worst days of my life...and I was bullied around simply because I was very small for my age. The constant torment of my peers at that time was seemingly impossible to bear. I consider myself lucky because I managed to shake it off and enjoy high school as a popular and well-liked girl. Lots of kids are not so lucky and are tormented throughout their teenage years. When I think about those hard years, it makes me wonder how very much worse it all would have been if there had been a "Facebook" at the time. My husband was recently "friended" by a very young cousin and we were blown away by the peek into her world. There was a big feud going on and the things being written back and forth on their "walls" were literally mind blowing. To see such horrible comments written down for the world to see took my breath away...these are 12 year olds! I have seen the news and know all about this trend, but seeing it in person and happening to someone in real time really shook me up. I have several years before Colin is into this stage, but I can say without a doubt that I will be very much in his business and will be completely in charge of his use of every bit of new technology on the market. Even if I have to take classes to understand all of it! :-) All I could think as I read through that Facebook wall of trash was "WHERE IN THE HELL ARE YOUR PARENTS?!". It is going to take a lot of work to protect our children in this new and improved world. A lot!

Okay, I am stepping down off my very random soap box. I am telling you...seeing that "Zach phone" in the picture of my friends really pushed me over the edge! (obscure Saved By the Bell reference included!) ;-)

Dogs, Dimples and Aquariums

I call this series "Colin is the Cutest Boy of All Time: A Study in Dimples". ;-) Colin decided one day last week that he needed to have his picture taken with Enzo. I got the camera out and proceeded to take these adorable shots. They were all so sweet that I had no choice but to post every last one of them. I love that boy...and that silly dog!

That same day, we spent the afternoon at the Dallas World Aquarium with several of our good friends. We had a wonderful time and I was super happy that Colin enjoyed himself. The last time we went was on a holiday weekend, which meant major crowds and not much fun. This time was perfect...not too many people there and plenty of room to roam around with all the kids. At one point, there was a man letting kids feed the toucans and Colin begged to do it. He took the little piece of food and held out his hand exactly the way he was shown and the toucan nibbled it right up. Colin loved chasing his friends and grabbed Kim at one point to show her the crocodiles. I think they were his favorite part of all. The funniest part was the "penguin issue". Colin was very excited for the penguin exhibit and asked to see them immediately when we arrived. The penguins are the very last thing you see, as their habitat is on the way out the exit. He was begging me the entire time to hurry up so that we could see them. The aquarium and shark tank is toward the end and by that point, Colin was so bent out of shape over seeing the penguins that he could take it no longer. We broke from our group and headed out the door to see them. I showed Colin the door and breathed a sigh of relief that we were finally where Colin wanted to be. Colin, however, took one step outside and got the most horrified look you have ever seen on his face. "Mommy, penguins STINK!!!!!!!" he screamed...while sticking fingers up each nostril and giving me a look that could have set fire to something. I explained all about the fish smell and told him that even though they are stinky, they are still so cute. Colin was having none of it...he marched right back inside, despite these adorable penguins being right there in the open air for him to see, and started announcing to people that they shouldn't go out there because of the smell. I just had to laugh at that point. ;-) Colin was none to pleased with me, as if it were my fault that they stank, so we headed out through the gift shop. Jer had asked Colin to purchase him a pen before we came home, (basically a bit of a plea bargain to get Colin inside in case of an anxiety meltdown) so he picked out a very nice glittery one and we headed home. It was a great afternoon, although the penguins have moved to the bottom of Colin's bucket list. :-)

The moment he stepped out the door and realized that pengiuns stink. I am glad I had the camera ready to go. He bolted right after this shot. LOL!!