James' Ears

First, some gratuitous cuteness: Here's my guys making a treat from the Cheerios Cookbook. Thanks, Grandma!

As cute as James' ears are, they are causing us more grief than I bargained for. For the first 2 years of his life he had a ton of ear infections. He got tubes put in right around his 2nd birthday--and that day was a nightmare. When the tube in his left ear fell out a few months ago, the hole remained. The ENT has been watching it since January, but it never closed. It was time to finally do something about it and today James had a "procedure". (Procedure doesn't seem like right word when they take your baby away on a gurney in a hospital gown and put him under anesthesia to fix his ear.)

James had a "paper patch" put in to fix his ear. Basically the dr goes in, scrapes the ear drum up to irritate it and places a tiny piece of rice paper over the newly irritated hole so that the skin is "encouraged to grow". We are hoping and praying this works, because if it doesn't, the next procedure is more like a major ear surgery. Sigh.

Anyway, things went really well this morning and the only things we have to worry about are 1) Not letting James blow his nose and 2) Not changing altitudes for a couple of weeks. We can handle that!

Oh, and for those of you who wanted to know what the receipt was actually for in the last post, it was some kind of water hose repair kit. Ha!

Aah, Walmart

I was going through our receipts tonight and found this gem. If I had known that it was that cheap, I would have got me some of that a long time ago! I hope they sell it at your local walmart. Ben even bought it for himself!

Heaven Help Us

Earlier this evening:

Ben: Let's get ready to go to Albertsons. James, do you want to wear your Star Wars shirt?

James: (Starts crying) No! I don't want to wear that one!

Me: James, what's wrong with your Star Wars shirt?

James: (Still crying) The girls at Albertsons won't like that shirt! Waaaaaahh!

(Ben and Carolyn try, oh we try, to contain the hysteria of his crying and our laughter. James chooses his Bob the Builder shirt.)

20 Mins later at Albertsons:

Female Employee: Hi James!

(I am not kidding: James sticks out his chest and pulls out the corners of his shirt so that she can fully see his shirt.)

Female Employee: Oooh, I like that shirt!

James smiles and gets all shy.

Yeah, heaven help us.

Potty Training Update

Well, It's May 1st and we started potty training on April 1st. It hasn't been that bad, though I can't say that we're done by any stretch of the imagination.

Some of the highlights:

*Missionaries came over for dinner on day 1. As we were eating, James kept telling them about the Potty Party, Pee, Poop, all of his new underwear, etc. As they tried to share a message with us, James kept interjecting potty talk, potty humor and he would dash off to bring in some of his new underwear and wave it in the Elders' faces. Yeah, thank heavens it was new underwear.

* Has to be nakey from waist down to do his business. Not so convenient in public restrooms, you know.

* As we were falling asleep one night, I told Ben if he could get James to poop on the potty the next morning I would pay him $20. I still owe him that.

* Every one of the songs he knows now has the word "poop" inserted in it somewhere.

We are DEFINITELY still working on the whole poop thing. He's not a big fan of doing it in the right place. However, I think we are progressing...Happy Meals are a powerful bribe.

I don't know what to do (or if something needs to be done) about the whole pee thing. It's been 30 days, and he's only had 10 accidents, total. (yeah, I keep a calendar and make tally marks.) Most of those were in the first week. But, and here's the big but, he's never, not once, told us that he needs to go pee. We've just increased the time between potty breaks every week and now we're taking him every 2 1/2 hours or so. Do we need to try to get him to tell us when he actually needs to go? Or do we just leave it alone and keep taking him according to our schedule?

High Fashion

I guess I spent too long making phone calls this morning...but isn't he cute?