Thank you to all of my friends, family, & fellow internet buddies for all of your prayers about our potty-training situation. Blessings to you all because your prayers are most potent!

Now don’t get too excited because our Ethan is still not potty-trained…that would be some answered prayer, indeed! No, he has not graduated to the world of Bob the Builder underwear yet, but he did get moved out of that awful class that they were going to put him in this fall where he would have had to been able to use the potty.

We had Ethan’s meet & greet night at school and I have been dreading this for months. I had kept waiting & waiting for the magical phone call that would tell me that Ethan was not in the potty-trained class, but we never received it despite my request that Ethan be placed in the 2b class and not the 3-4 class.

Just in case you have missed my lovely blogs in the past, you will realize that I am either a) not approaching potty-training in the correct manner, b) my kid is not interested in potty-training, or c) we are just not ready for all of this and neither of us has the enthusiasm or time to devote towards making this a 24-7, 365 day hobby. With our amazing track record of peeing on the potty once, I did not see any light at the end of the potty-training tunnel and I realized that the school was either going to have to accept my diaper-clad kid or we were going to get to spend a lot of Ethan & mommy time together. Despite feeling a bit melancholy about Ethan returning to school, I am not so melancholy that I actually want him to miss out on school (puh-leez! Give me a break!)

We were told, once we got to his new classroom, that an opening had become available in the class that we had requested and they would be able to put Ethan where we really needed him to be. The best part was that it was for the days that we had already chosen so I didn’t even have to switch my days around to take advantage of the opening.

His class will still be new to him because he was out of school this summer (when he would have been in this class) so he will still have a new teacher, a new class, and teachers that will be working with him on the potty training too. What a blessing!

This was much cause for celebration so we celebrated by taking Ethan to Dairy Queen for an ice cream sundae, just like my parents did when we had our back to school night. What better place to celebrate returning to school than the big DQ & chocolate sundaes for all!

I have read, on some feminist websites, that they are pretty darn unhappy with my happy-go-lucky attitude about being a homemaker. They consider my happiness with being home as a direct insult to the progress that we have made as women. I respect their feelings, but also know that I am making the most of what my role as at this time. No disrespect to those of you out there who are bringing home the bacon & frying it in the pan, but I actually enjoy being home.

The truth is that I was not always this way about running my household; in fact, I was pretty much a failure at it. Only in the last couple of years have I realized that this is actually something that I can do and I have tried to approach it with some enthusiasm.

To illustrate how far I have come, I will start from the beginning of our marriage….

When my husband & I were first married, I knew how to cook two things. My first dish that I knew how to make was baked chicken. No, nothing fancy with a sauce or anything elaborate…. just chicken. I would sprinkle Lawry’s seasoning on it and add a side of Rice a Roni and that was our dinner. Yum, yum!

My second dish consisted of tuna casserole. You know the one where the ingredients consisted of a can of cream of mushroom, cream of celery, noodles, & tuna. This second dish was probably the thing that I was most proud of because it felt like real cooking to me.

The first night that I cooked for my husband I made the tuna casserole for him. I proudly served up two bowls of the casserole and watched as my husband’s eyes filled with horror over his bowl. He took a few bites and then claimed that he was full and I just started bawling. You see, the only thing that I knew how to cook was this and he hated it. I think that I yelled at him and told him I was going to leave him (or something to that effect) and I felt a real sense of defeat. We lived hundreds of miles away from our family and anyone that I knew so I didn’t even have a mom out there to come show me how to cook.

That first year of our marriage was filled with a lot of baked chicken and going out to dinner. Seeing as we were both working, I really did not mind the break from the kitchen because we could afford to do that.

Only after my husband secured a job in Indiana did I finally learn to cook (this was towards the end of our third year of marriage) and this was only out of necessity. Ryan moved out to the Midwest to start his job and Ethan & I stayed at our home on the East coast until the house was sold.

Despite my lack of cooking, I did know how to stock a pantry with supposed “cook” ingredients. I realized that we would either have to eat the food in our pantry, give the food away or I would have to eat out by myself with Ethan every night until it was moving day.

With hours upon hours of being alone, I started watching the Food Network and I became almost fanatical in my desire to learn how to cook. If they showed how to cook something on television, I wanted to make it at home. This is really how my love for cooking began and that is when I realized some important cooking skills that I had been lacking.

Here are some of my own common misconceptions about the world of food:

– Beef stew does not come out of a can. I mean, it does, but that is not the way one was intended to eat it.

– Whipped cream is actually cream that has been whipped, it is not Cool Whip. This is one of those things I did not realize that you could actually make.

– Marinara sauce is not necessarily all made by Prego or Ragu- you can actually cook stuff from crushed tomatoes, garlic, & herbs.

– Not all rice is made in a minute.

– Chicken can be prepared in a variety of ways, which could include but not be limited to my baked chicken.

– Vegetables can be bought & prepared fresh…and they actually taste better than the Del Monte veggies.

– Roasting a whole bird (turkey or chicken), despite looking pretty complicated, is not as hard as it looks.

– Brownies can be made from basic ingredients in your pantry- they aren’t all made by Betty Crocker and brownies are not always put together in a powder form.

These are just a few of the simple things that I did not know and why I have attacked cooking & homemaking with a vengeance.

Through my Food Network knowledge, it has opened all of these new doors for me. Now I am not attributing Food Network with everything (watch Sandra Lee’s Semi-Homemade show to understand why I wouldn’t give them all the credit), but without my new love for cooking and a desire to be home with my family, I would have never had this blog, or my site, or all of this extra spending money (okay, that last part is a total lie, but you get the picture).

Go ahead, feminist sites, bash me away. Just try to make me look foolish! Ridicule my Donna Reed-ism & my Leave it to Beaver site…..say what you must!!

But just ask my husband once, if he would like a bowl of tuna noodle casserole and you just SEE if he wants his working woman back…..Hmmm…I think NOT!!

Now just where did I leave my apron?

I have discovered that I have lost all of my motivation, to do basically anything, since I have been pregnant. I am supposedly in the honeymoon phase of my pregnancy (the second trimester) and I can’t seem to complete anything these days.

Part of it feels like I am lacking motivation, but the other part of me feels like I am trying to squeeze in as much time with Ethan as I can before he returns to school & before the next baby arrives.

Instead of running him all over town, we have just been hanging out at the house and I have been doing absolutely nothing. Our home has been in poor condition, our meals have been lacking that certain sparkle that I am so famous for, and my calendar has been cleared of all my obligations.

I am so excited about having another baby, but I am also a little bit scared too. We have wanted this baby for so long, but now that it is finally happening, I seem to be getting a little bit of the jitters.

When it was just the two of us (my husband & I) I couldn’t imagine how we were ever going to have enough love/time/devotion to add one more person to the mix. Then Ethan arrived and we realized that we did have all of those things to offer him.

Now we have given Ethan all of our love/time/devotion and I can’t imagine how I will ever have enough of that to give to one more person. I suppose that my heart has the capacity to do this though since people have more children than us, but it just seems very mind-blowing that I will be able to divide my love/time/devotion evenly between two children.

I remember asking my mom over and over and over again which of us she loved more. She always told me that she loved us equally and every time she said this to me, I always thought that she was harboring a secret special love that was extra and just for me. I couldn’t imagine that, of the three of us kids, that she could equally distribute her love. She never told me if she had a favorite among us, but always claimed that she loved each of us the same. Then I would ask her if she loved me more than my dad and this would be answered with the statement of it being a different kind of love and yada yada, but I still thought she was storing some dark secret of loving one of us the best of all.

I wonder if my kids will be asking me this someday and wondering the same thing when I answer them with the same answers my mother gave me. History does have a way of repeating itself, and I can picture me telling my children this same exact thing…..and I have feeling that they won’t believe me either!

Well, I may be lacking motivation these days, but I am not lacking love/time/devotion for my son and I guess that is all that matters.

I checked my email this evening and noticed that there were actually comments that had come through on my blog. That is when I remembered that I had a blog….oh, and that it could use a little updating. Unfortunately, my creative moments seem few & far between so I have had little to contribute these days. I will give this my best shot though…

We found out a couple of weeks ago that we are expecting a baby girl. What a dream come true to have a boy & a girl! I feel like the luckiest woman in the world. My life has been a sea of pink since we got the news. This is the first granddaughter on either side of our family and I know she is just going to be spoiled rotten. We already have quite the little wardrobe, for our future princess, and I already know that her outfits are going to be better than my own. It is just so much fun to be able to buy for her.

Ethan is starting school soon and we have his little meet & greet night coming up. I am a teensy bit worried about all of this because they have put him in a class that is for potty-trained kids and my son is nowhere near the potty-trained stage. I have read that it isn’t good to pressure them into potty-training just because you feel under the gun, but it is hard not to feel that pressure.

Potty-training with Ethan is not going as I had hoped. There are a couple of things that inhibit us from being successful. One thing is that he does not like to be naked…..at all. I know that most parents have the exact opposite problem, but our Ethan is very private and thus he must be fully clothed at all times. Other than swift diaper changes and popping him in the tub (both with much struggle) he is always fully clothed from head to toe.

The other problem we have may be the way that we started the potty-training fun. We thought that putting him on his little toilet in front of the boob tube, watching a favorite movie, would be a great way to get him to go on the potty. We also gave him his favorite salty movie snacks, a gallon of fruit punch, and a big bowl filled with warm water and little boats for him to play with. I even was pouring the water very slowly into the bowl to make great sounds for him to potty by. Two hours later he did potty, but now all sitting on the potty must now be done in front of all of his favorite shows, playing with boats, eating snacks, and drinking fruit punch. Are we going about this the wrong way? Oh…the other thing….he has never peed on the potty since this one incident so our tactics have not been a roaring success.

Now I have read these great tales of people potty-training their kids in a day and, God bless them, I think that is just freakin’ wonderful….but I have trouble grasping the realism and if there is really that much success with that. I have heard greater success stories from people who just let their kids decide to go on the potty and when they made the decision, their kid was potty-trained.

Now all I need is for Ethan to make this decision within the next two weeks and we will have absolutely no problems…..

Any suggestions from my little peanut gallery will be much appreciated. If I have to read Once Upon a Potty one more time I just might lose it, however, I will read it four thousand more times if you all think it might make a difference.

I must return back to the potty-training trenches….good night, all!

Once upon a time, I was an attractive person. Not in the drop-dead-knock-you-off-your-feet attractive, but a mildly attractive woman who was able to snag herself a nice young man to spend some time with. That young man, of course, was my husband and upon being married, I realized that no one’s head would be turning for me anymore because I was a married woman.

Despite my marriage, I still thought I could maybe turn a head or two, of a gross, not-so-attractive man, in a grocery store or the mall. I knew I still had a little bit of the “it” factor left- just barely, but I was still ticking away.

Upon having a child though, I have become invisible to the male population, which is fine with me. Instead of seeing who is looking at me, in the vain way that I used to do, I now look at other mommies with their kiddos in the carts. I also look at those young whippersnappers to see exactly what clothes are in style anymore. Those are the types of things that I look at. This only happens, of course, when I am not doing a tap dance for my son in the aisles to keep him entertained.

To illustrate my point on how rare it is that a man looks at me, I will share with you all my funny story of a little incident that happened to me at Walmart…..

Last summer, our family had been out for the evening and we came home to our dark house to get ready for our nightly routine. When we flipped on the light in the kitchen, however, we found ourselves with a truly terrible problem. A problem that about flipped my little prissy heart out of my body….we had ants. Little tiny baby ants had somehow crawled through our window and were now trying to make a home in my kitchen. Well, I freaked out (just a little bit) about these stupid ants and started pouring salt all over our kitchen amid my sobs about how we were such clean people, how do these things happen to us, and a few curse words here and there. My husband just kept looking at me like I was crazy and then finally asked me what the purpose of the salt is….”To deter their sense of smell, until I can take care of this problem.” Let’s just say I felt a little bit taller after that because my husband thought I was the smartest woman alive as we watched the ants running around in a frantic circle. All I can say is that it sometimes DOES help you to read those stupid forwards people send you.

After pouring the salt, I headed over to Walmart to get some ant killer to spray all over our kitchen to rid ourselves of our pest problem. I grabbed the only type of indoor killing spray that they had and made a mad dash up to the cash register. Of course we are talking about WALMART here, so obviously I had to do a lot of waiting in line for my turn to get the heck out of there. While I waited, I people-watched and that is when I saw this guy looking at me. Considering I couldn’t even remember what I was wearing, I looked behind me to see who he was staring at….Yup, it was me! I started to gain back some of my old confidence in myself that had been lacking a little bit. I paid for my purchases and shook my tail feather all the way back to my car. All the while I am thinking, “OH YEAH! I still got it! I am still hot! I am not even TRYIN’ and this guy is looking at me.” I just couldn’t wait to run home and tell my husband just what a lucky man he was….that is when I flipped down the mirror just to take another look at my hot-self and I realized the humiliating truth. The truth that I can share with only a few people was…..I had black mascara trails running all down my face- I looked just like Tammy Faye Baker. I had mascara everywhere from my little prissy-soap-opera drama, which I apply to just about everything in my life, and that was why the guy was looking at me. Black streaks all down my pale face made me look like I was a goth-chick-wannabe- it was, to say the least, a teeny bit embarrassing.

Oh yes, my tail feather was between my legs when I arrived home to tackle those dang ants….all the while trying to chant to myself, “OH YEAH! I still got it! I am still hot!” as I spray the heck out of our kitchen.

Now how pathetic was THAT story??

Today is Ethan’s third birthday! I can hardly believe that he is that big!

This morning I was going to make some cinnamon rolls for him & put a candle in them, but discovered that I never had any cinnamon rolls in our fridge. Hmmm…wonder why I thought I had those? I decided instead to put his candle in his bagel with peanut butter. Heck, he’s three! He could care less what I am putting the candle in because the candle is the most exciting part!

I brought his bagel down to him and he looked so precious in his Superman pj’s (complete with cape), waiting very impatiently for breakfast to be served. I took a picture of him as he attempted to blow out the candle from six feet away. You can tell we have scared the crap out of him about fire- ha!

It is moments like these where I don’t want him to get big. I know he is never going to be this little again and we will never celebrate another third birthday with him. Each year he will get bigger & older….it is all so depressing. Why must our children grow up and need you less and less?

Please allow me to weep a little bit- I think my pregnancy hormones are making me a bit more sappy than usual….

Happy Birthday, precious boy!