(no subject)

[ocelot]

Leif fell asleep at 8:30. He hasn't done this in months. He had two brief naps today, but he doesn't usually compensate for lack of naps by falling asleep quite this early. I'm hoping that this is an actual night-night, and not a really really late nap. And that he isn't sick. koyote suggests possibly a growth spurt.

I didn't get one of the UC Davis jobs. No big surprise there. I hold no hope for the other one, seeing as the interview went worse and it's been forever. This isn't totally a bad thing - I had serious doubts about working for that department again, but would have felt obligated to take a job if offered, just because it was a job.

The ladder up to the loft is boarded off again, after we twice discovered him up in the loft when our backs were turned for 10 seconds. It's just a wee bit too heart-attack inducing.

Leif has peed in the potty three times now with basically no prompting.


First time may have been a fluke - I think he was using the potty as a stepstool, and just happened to pee. However, the second and third time were all his own doing (second time completely 100% on his own, and the third time we'd mentioned peeing in the potty a few minutes before, but not directly).

I'm guessing that the praise he got the first time clued him in on what he was supposed to be doing.

It isn't consistent - he's had two accidents since. However, it does show that he's aware of when he needs to go.

We haven't been actively trying to potty train or anything. We basically had to stop EC when we moved onto the boat. Leif would still go when we offered the potty for a few months, and then started refusing, or even throwing a fit if I even suggested it. So this is a bit of a relief - it seems we didn't manage to completely screw him up for life :)

It's also relieving because he's really starting to hate diapers. I may have said that before, but it's worse now.

I see two main problems at this point - verbal skills and poops.

Leif, as far as I can tell, officially meets the definition of a slow talker (though he seems to be improving quickly these days). He can generally manage to communicate what he wants, verbally or otherwise, but we haven't yet worked out an "I need to go potty" communication yet. He both has to want to tell us, and express it in a way we can understand.

At home, he's been running around nakey butt most of the time. This has definitely really helped, since he can just run over to the potty and go, with no help from us. However, if he has to wear clothing or be taken to the bathroom (as is the case when we're out of the house), we need to be able to know when he has to go.

With lots of babies, it's really obvious when they're about to poop. Their faces get all red, and they grunt, and so forth. Leif doesn't. He just goes, with no big production. If we happen to be looking at him we may notice that he has his "I'm pooping" face on, but usually we don't know until afterwards. Sometimes he tells us afterwards, sometimes he doesn't. When we were doing EC, I'd occasionally catch a poop, but it was almost always by accident (I'd take him to see if he needed to go, and it would just happen to be a poop - I wouldn't know ahead of time), and even that stopped once he started solids.

(You know, this isn't really the thing to be writing about while eating chili for dinner, especially after dealing with two really awful diapers today)

Anyways, the combination of the two make going diaperless in public a bit unappealing.

I guess we'll just see what happens. As nice as it is to think that our big diaper stock-up was an invocation of Murphy, there's no saying whether we'll actually have a repeat performance any time soon.


Of course, it would be nice if he'd learn to sit on the potty, rather than standing on top of it...