Lazy summer afternoon

Aaaaaah, a lazy Saturday afternoon in the summer.

The boys are napping, and Michelle is taking a well-earned break, her head resting on a pillow. It's just me and the coffee for now.

We've seen some pretty big moments around here in the last week. First, Isaiah has learned to crawl. Well, mostly. He's figured out how to prop himself up on all fours, his little arms outstretched as if he's about to rip off some pushups. His legs are curled and tucked in, like a frog that's poised to leap. And he's rocking in that position, which generally means he's cuing up to crawl. It's that last step that's eluding him for the moment. But he is moving. He's doing it for now by dropping to his stomach and using his hands and arms to pull himself forward. The motion bears more than a passing resemblance to soldiers shimmying along the ground. Yet Isaiah's leg motion is not as coordinated; they're mostly just flailing around. That last bit of coordinated effort, of combining the leg motion with the arm motion, is just not there. Yet. It's only a matter of time.

And then the fun really starts.

Progress also has been made with Isaiah's older brother, Nathaniel, who's on the doorstep of turning 33 months. That is, he's getting ever closer to turning 3 years old, which would mean he could go to a more structured day care/school. To enroll, however, you need to be potty trained, and on that front our little guy has made amazing strides this week. With patient supervision, monitoring and cheerleading from his mommy, Nathaniel has been pooping and peeing regularly in the potty. The last couple of days, he's barely needed any prompting: Suddenly, he'll run upstairs, do his thing, come down and announce he either pooped or peed in the potty. Then, either Michelle or I will go for confirmation, dump the contents into the toilet and let Nathaniel do the honors of flushing it "down the tunnel."

For each potty pee, he gets two goldfish; for each potty poo, he gets a lollipop. Michelle had started out with giving him a piece of gum for each potty poo, but Natty kept swallowing them, no matter how many times we preached to him to throw the gum in the trash when he was done with it. He just didn't get it. You mean it's not food? Then what is it? he seemed to be thinking. I can't blame him for being confused. Gum is kind of weird that way.

Nathaniel has been on such a roll with the pee/poo potty that we've had him in his big boy pants (i.e. underwear) for the last few days. So far, so good, save for one especially messy mistake. We're all really proud of him. For a few months, we've had isolated incidents when he would pee or poo in the potty. But he's been really regular, so to speak, for the past week. It really appears as if the light bulb has gone off. There's more work to be done, and for all we know he may regress some. But we're sure happy he's on his way.