One of the things that we did yesterday was surprise Noah with a new gift. One of his Christmas gifts needed to be returned and it just so happened that we saw the perfect new gift for him at the store… based on the title to this post, I’m sure that you can guess what it is… he got a kid tough camera that he just LOVES! Just an example of how much he loves it… with in a few short hours, Noah had taken 570 digital photos with his new camera!! 70 in the first hour this morning!!!  =)

While most of the photos turned out to be blurry or unrecognizable {thank goodness, because I know that he took at least 1 shot of Abby’s successful trip to the potty}, there were a few that turned out pretty well for a 3 year old.

I love looking through his photos and seeing what he sees. It’s a little different to see things from his height and perspective… it also made me realize just how much he looks at my stomach!! ;)

Well, Abby is done with her nap now, so that’s my cue to stop writing. =) Til next time…

I took some video of Noah so that Ray could watch him in action, and I thought that I would share 1 of them on here too…

Noah breaking his first official board.

He looks so very enthused in that photo! ha! He really was having a good time, I just think that he was embarrassed by the extra attention.

Abby couldn’t keep her eyes off of her brother.  She was just giggling and laughing the whole class. I don’t know who had a bigger smile on their face… Abby or Noah. =)

Three years ago you decided you had spent enough time inside your warm cushy home and came out to meet us and change our lives forever. We love you so very much!!

It seems like from one day to the next he just decided to grow up. He is copying what we say a lot more now… not always a good thing!! Thanks to him I found out that I say “I said yes” and “I don’t want to hear any whining” far too often… maybe if he wouldn’t always say “no”…  hmm…

I feel like he is  in an extremely picky eating stage right now… he was picky to begin with, but it has gotten 100 times worse. It is a fight to just get him to eat anything at some meals, even his favorite foods. Someone please tell me that this phase ends soon and won’t last until he’s 12… right at the age where he starts eating us out of house and home!

Noah alternates between wanting to be a big boy and a little boy right now… it all depends on what we are doing and how it will best fit his needs. It’s so cute! We were at Old Navy today and he saw a shirt that he liked, but it was too small. I told him that and he replied “But I wittle boy!” a few minutes later he found another shirt – this time too big – when he found out it was too big for him “But I big boy, right?” I couldn’t win either way!

Potty training… ahhhh the thorn in my side! There are days, like yesterday and today (knocking on wood ), where he does great. He may put up a fuss when I want to put him on the potty (just so that he tries), but he always does something and looks forward to the potty treat (Pez). Then there are other times where he will tell us he doesn’t have to go or he may go a little on the toilet, but then 5 minutes later he will go again in his pants *sigh* He tells me that diapers are for babies and that he’s a big boy, so I know that he wants to be out of them but it seems that he still has a hard time “feeling” when he has to go before it’s too late… though the past two days have been better… he stopped himself after just a dribble and we made it to the bathroom to finish… I can deal  with a dribble – it’s the floods that I don’t care for.

I bet you really love hearing all of the ins and outs of potty training don’t you? I guess I’m just a little frustrated about it all because he learned to go poo on the toilet so quickly and has been great with that for the past 15-16 months so I thought when the time came to be “dry” it would go just as easily… guess I was wrong. It’s okay though – he’ll be completely out of diapers soon enough at some point, I mean, you don’t any grown adults running around with them on… well most of the time anyway ;)

We have had more than our share of bed time problems with this little two year old and yet bed time continues to be a thorn in my side with this little one.

It’s not so much that he puts up a fight at bedtime… we’ve past that… in fact he lets us brush his teeth after going potty, gives daddy a kiss and happily climbs the stairs to go out to his room. Once there he crawls right into bed… well on most nights… and waits in it until I have Abby changed and in her crib. He lets me change him and some days even gets his night time diaper out of the dresser cabinet. We then lay in bed and read a story or two… lately The Going-To-Bed Book has been our book of choice… and say our prayers (…in German, the way that I have always said my prayers). Then… well… then I tell him that I have to go downstairs and clean the kitchen because if I don’t there will be bugs… yes, I know it’s a terrible thing to do, but it is effective (he looks at me with these huge eyes and quietly says “bugs… ewww” then lays down) and it has pretty much eliminated what used to be 45-90 minutes of bedtime drama.

I wish I could say that he goes right to sleep, but I can’t. About five (5) minutes after walking out of the kids room I can hear him get up, walk to the door and start to whimper… “Mami pah-tee… pah-tee mami!” I open the door and he walks straight to the master bathroom (he can’t go into his own until the remodel is finished). I find it amazing that 95% of the time he will actually go “yellow”, despite having gone not more than 20 minutes earlier! Then it’s back to bed… another mention of cleaning the kitchen and bugs and out the door I go. Some nights I’m up there again a few minutes later, while on others he’s good with that.

We can usually count on him sleeping for 3 hours or so then until sometime between midnight and 1am. That’s when he wakes up again. I try to get him to go back to sleep in his bed. It doesn’t last long though and he usually wakes within 30 minutes again. At this point I know that Abby will be awake in the very near future looking for her personal milk bar and I am just so tired. He doesn’t have to put up much of a fight and I have him in bed with Ray and me. What follows is a restless night of sleep with hands and feet poking and prodding me… pushing my blankets away when I try to pull them up.

Part of me wishes that he would just sleep through the night in his bed… his twin bed that we just went and bought a new mattress and bedding for. But then again… I know that this wouldn’t last forever. While he is a big brother, he’s still so small and young… I often forget that… expect more of him than I might if Abby weren’t here… and so I take him into bed with us and let him sleep there. Because I know it won’t always be this way… and besides it’s nice waking up to a smiling face.

I guess in the fight of Noah vs Bedtime, both win a little and both lose a little… and as long as there are no tears shed I’m okay with it.

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It’s not just that he is now sleeping in a  twin bed (we pulled his convertible bed out completely Saturday night)… or the fact that, with the exception of a tiny dribble this evening (which he stopped in order to finish in the potty), he’s been dry for over 24 hours – including all of last night! (YAY!!) My baby boy is growing up and there is nothing that I can do to stop it… as much as I may want to… and oh there are so many times that I want to do just that!

Although I may complain about the lack of sleep and bedtime fiasco’s… although potty training may be more of a pain in my butt than his, I want to freeze this age… there are so many things that I don’t want him to stop doing… so many things that I find so stinking cute that I can’t bare the thought that it’s not going to be this way forever. I don’t want him to stop saying “yeh-woh” (yellow) instead of “pee”. I love how he says “paw-ee” and runs to the toilet… how he  says milk… making it sound more like “muhlk”. I love how he calls Abby “Be-abby”, a mix between “baby” and “Abby”, and showers her with kisses, thousands of them, all day long… needing to hold her hand to fall asleep both at nap-time and bedtime on the nights when they take over our bed. I love how he calls things by the sound that they make instead of by their name… like he does for chicken and airplane… and how he says “ref” and “een” for red and green. I don’t want to forget these things once he’s stopped saying them the way he does right now, but I’m so afraid that I will.

I don’t want him to lose those cute little, chubby cheeks and the dimples he gets when he smiles… or have him stop furrowing his eyebrows at us, just to make us laugh. I hate to think that one day he will stop coming up to me for a snuggle… just because. I want him to continue to get excited about new things and still jump up and run to the door when he hears the garage door open at 5:30. I don’t want things to change…

I hate to think of  him growing up and wanting to call me by my first name, instead of Mami… or worse not talking to me at all. I would hate if he were to treat me as unkindly as others I know have treated their mothers… or worse to stop talking to me altogether. I wish I could say that it will never happen, but there’s no way of knowing that.

I don’t know why this is affecting me so much right now… I know that there is something good to be said about every age. Maybe it’s because I look at him and then I look at Abby and I think to myself… “It wasn’t that long ago that he was as small as she is… doing the things that she is…” and I realize just how quickly time passes. It doesn’t really matter what the reason, right now I just want to hold him tight and keep him just as he is for a little while longer long, long time.

In typical Noah fashion, bedtime was a fight the night before… and then he woke up again at 12:30am and didn’t fall back asleep until 2:30… he either had a bad dream, or he was afraid of turning 2! ;) haha But it really wasn’t a laughing matter! I was dead tired and knew that my alarm would be going off sooner rather than later and just wanted Noah to fall asleep… which he did… on the couch downstairs… right when Abby woke up for her dark o’clock feeding… go figure. So I ended up sleeping on the couch because I didn’t want to risk moving him and having to go through the gigantic ordeal of getting him to fall asleep again.

We had his party at Noah’s Omi and Nonno’s house, which was great and very kind of them!! There was no way that we would have been able to fit everyone in our little place. Despite the lack of sleep the night before and the fact  that he refused to sleep during the hour + drive down to my moms (he missed his nap entirely yesterday), Noah did great with very few (just 1 or 2) mini meltdowns all day long. I don’t know what he was most excited about… the toys, the cake or the fact that his bestest and most favorite cousin ever was there (okay, so E was his only cousin for the longest time, but he really does love her and the get alone great!)

I thought it was cute that while opening his gifts, Noah quickly realized that it would be much easier and faster to just turn the gift bags over and dump them out, rather than taking the gifts out of the bag!! In doing so, he could also quickly see which gifts were fun (toys and books) and which were boring (clothes)… he’s a smart one that kid of mine!

So without further ado, here are some pictures from his big day…

There’s  no doubt about it, he had a great time… and was asleep within  minutes of getting into the car!! hehe

It’s been hot here in the Midwest. The temperature has been rising up to the high 80′s to low 90′s for the past few days now but factor in the humidity and it feels more like high 90′s to low 100′s… that’s just plain ol’ oppressively hot. While I’m loving the sunshine, I’m not a fan of feeling like you’ve walked into a sauna as soon as you open the front door.

I must say though that it has been nice here in the house. The air has been running non stop and has been doing a good job keeping both the heat and humidity under control here in the house… during the day at least. At night the temperature drop outside and the air doesn’t kick on… and it gets hot and uncomfortable in the house again. Noah’s room tends to be the worst and sometime during the night he will come crawling into our bed to cool  off in our room. When that’s not good enough for him anymore, he will get up slide out of bed and head to the top of the (gated) stairs. I’ve spent part of the past two nights with him downstairs on the couch, just because it’s cooler down here and he can get to sleep again.

Ray has been talking of buzzing off Noah ‘s hair for a few weeks now and I have always veto’d it. I was afraid of what he would look like and I didn’t think that he had enough hair to pull off that look. Seeing my child so miserably hot and sweaty within minutes of falling asleep though has changed my mind.

And so that is why my son went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

and while it didn’t stop us from sleeping down on the couch again at 4 am, it did help with the sweaty head problem!

Noah has never been to the movies… mainly because 1) he’s still young and 2) we didn’t think that he would sit through it. Since these movies are free though, Ray and I thought that we would take him to go see his first movie… Kung Fu Panda.

He was so excited to go… he kept saying “wow!” and when you would ask him how big the screen was he would hold his hands out to his sides and just say “wow!”

Even after falling on the cement outside and scraping up his knee (and getting his first official “BooBoo” of the season), he was still smiling… you could just not wipe that thing off of his face…

He had fun pointing at the screen and at the many other kids there… I swear they came in by the bus loads!

I have to say, he did really well for his first movie experience. He did get fidgety towards the end, and we left with about 10 minutes left to the movie. Ray and I had seen it before, so it was no big deal to us. Noah was still all smiles afterward and I think I know what I will be doing at least one morning a week for the next few weeks!

(I was not approached by anyone to write about this… I found out about the Free Family Film Festival last year and finally went to it this year… It’s a great free way to get the kids out of the house for  a few hours and I just wanted to pass the info along to my readers!)

(This picture was taken in September 2009)

It’s come to that time… we are attempting to potty train Noah. I would love it if he was out of diapers by the time the baby is born. I hate to think of having to change 2 dirty butts! So I’ve given him… and myself…  a goal… to have the box of diapers that I bought last week at Sam’s Club be his last box of daytime diapers. I realize that he is nowhere close to being dry at night yet, so I won’t even push for that for now.Pick and choose your battles, right?

He’s not unfamiliar with the potty. I started putting him on it shortly after his birthday last year (just to see what he would do and to get him used to it) and he really took to it, doing both businesses on it within a matter of days. We did this for a few weeks and then… I don’t know what happened… did school get in the way or did we stop attempting because it was a hit or miss situation since he couldn’t tell us when he had to go… I don’t know, but we stopped putting him on there. So… when I started putting him on the potty again recently, it was no surprise to me that he didn’t use it and would just sit there. Not even 1 drop of pee would come out of him, let alone anything else.

Now we’ve got some real work ahead of us!

Yesterday was a partial success – he did do some business on it, but I think it had more to do with the fact that he was in the middle of working on getting that something out when I put him on there. =) (Hey a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do!) Naturally we made a big deal out of it and he got a prize for being such a big boy. I’m hoping that today is a success too and that he uses it again.

Here’s where I need your help though… I could use any and all advice that you have for potty training! What things worked for you? I realize that Noah may be a bit younger than other boys that are potty training, but I’m really hoping that we can do this!