Life with a cute toddler and an infant on the pot

Some things Alder has been saying and doing:

1. "Me wearing my dinosaur jamamas" - these are wonderful, hand me down, glow in the dark pajamas with matching long sleeves and pants. Super cute - picture to come.

2. "I look at pictures of mine friends on the pooter pooter" - he really has excellent pronunciation of most words, but this one is just too cute to correct. I have been working on a volunteer project for his class where I took tons of pics of all the kids and printed them out to give each a little album. We have really enjoyed looking at all of these. If you care to browse the 350+ pics, you can do so here.

3. If I or Jason says something that Alder is not happy with (i.e., ____ is not available) then he will reply very serious and calm "mommy can't talk". I think this is a euphemism for "shut up!". We are working on this and certainly do not let him know we think it is funny.

4. Alder has apparently grown an inch or so because he can now (all of the sudden?) reach the counters in the kitchen and bar; we therefore are forced into a whole new level of "baby proofing" the house.

5. We starting burning wood again to warm the house and a big dump truck came to drop a cord of wood in our driveway. Alder watched with excitement and then immediately requested his toy dump truck and attempted (unsuccessfully) to place the pieces of wood in it. He also likes to take the long slender sticks (kindling) and pretend to play the fiddle while making funny sing-songy noises.

As for Heath, we started the Elimination Communication process with him about a month ago and have been truly amazed at how well things are going. He seems to REALLY be responding to our cues and we are regularly catching poops and pees. I know many of you may not believe me, but almost every time I put him on the little potty or cue him outdoors, he goes, especially this past week. It is so awesome to be communicating with an infant in this way. We did not start the process with Alder until he was 6 months old and I do not remember feeling this successful for awhile. We shall see...we learned with Alder that it is certaily an up and down process with good days/weeks and not so good days/weeks, but we are happy to be doing it and seeing progress.

Oh yes, and I ran a 10k race this past weekend. It was cold, very hilly and a super challenge! I had to walk a little from a leg cramp, but feel good about giving it a try. It got me motivated and running again and helped raise money for a good cause. Here we are before the race. Alder looks excited, doesn't he...