Short cardiology update...

Since August, our cardiologist in town has been talking about surgery #3 being scheduled some time around the beginning of the year, at age 2 1/2 or so.  He'd been trying to get in touch with Texas Children's Hospital to nail all of that down, but basically all of our scheduling has been expecting the surgery around that time.

Well, I just got a call from them.  They finally got in touch with TCH.  You may recall that we've been confused in the past about timing of surgery #3, because the in-town docs always talked in terms of 2 1/2 while TCH always talked in terms of 4 or 5.  Well apparently there was a reason for the confusion.  TCH wants to do the surgery between 3 1/2 and 4 years old.  So all of our planning has been for naught.  The easiest way to make God laugh is to make a plan.  

So, no surgery this year.  Looking more like spring of 2014.  I guess God figured that y'all needed another year to pray for him, as you've probably been slacking.

I'm a big kid now!

I will make a promise to the readers of this blog: this is the first and last potty post that you will see from me.

A few months ago, my dad decided that he wanted to take us (and my sister’s family) on a Disney cruise. So we got all of that booked and scheduled and began our normal Disney anticipation and drooling process. There were videos to watch - David made us watch this video multiple times a day - message boards to read, and since we’d never done a cruise of any kind, rules & “what to expect” sort of things. I was thinking, “oh, my kid has a heart condition, I probably need to let them know about that.” David was thinking “OMG LOOK AT ALL OF THOSE POOLS AND WATER.” As we were perusing the details of the ship, looking at all of the pools & water play areas, we noticed a small problem: children are only allowed in the pools - any pools - if they are potty trained. Apparently there is some sort of ancient international maritime law that only allows potty trained children into pools aboard ships. That’s what Disney’s excuse is, anyway. With a child who loves playing in the water and who will almost certainly melt down constantly if he is not allowed to play in all of that available H20, we had a predicament. The obvious solution to which was, of course, potty training him.

So some time in the beginning of August, Christy decided that it was time to take the plunge. He had “shown interest” (whatever that means - but it’s what all of the potty training experts say that you have to look for) for a while, and this was as good of a time as any. Ordinarily, I don’t think we’d have done it so early, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

After reading some blogs on how to effectively get your kid to pee in the toilet, Christy chose the 3-day “potty training boot-camp” method. Essentially, the kid goes around naked for 3 days. If they start to pee, you stop them and bring them to a toilet. And then after 3 days, they are supposed to have it figured out. Sounded pretty fanciful to me, but I figured the worst case would be that Christy would have to deal with 3 days of David peeing all over the place, then we would try something that would have a chance of success. Christy, on the other hand, figured that she’d bring him to her mom’s house for 3 days and leave him outside naked.

3 days later, I was proved wrong and he was potty trained. I think it really only took him about a day to figure out what was going on, and the extra 2 were just for reinforcement. By the time day 4 rolled around, he was wearing disney themed big-boy underwear and telling us “gotta poop gotta pooop!” when he needed to go. IMO it’s a little more of pain in the butt, because now bathrooming is on his schedule instead of changing him being on mine. And travelling is not as easy, because he does have to make bathroom stops more often than Christy or I do. But all in all, it’s pretty cool to have a 2 year old not in diapers anymore. Cheaper too.