Boys | Marriage Confessions Boys | Laugh. Fight. Stay Married.

Bean is entering a new phase. I think this must be the three-year-old behavior people warned me about. These days, Bean is like a PMS-ing tiny warlord hyped up on steroids. He’s emotional, moody, demanding, bossy, and very rambunctious. My sweet, shy, quiet little two-year-old has become a little turd.

I say it with love, but it’s true.

The biggest change in him would have to be his roughness. I remember a few months ago we were at a birthday party for a little boy in Bean’s class who was turning three. There were other three-year-old boys there and I remember watching them push and shove and literally roll around on the ground playing in the dirt. Meanwhile, Bean was hanging out over on the sides, kind of close to me, just watching and checking things out. I remember thinking, “Thank goodness Bean isn’t a rough boy.”

Oh, boy.

It’s like all the rough and tumble that comes with being a boy just suddenly came surging through Bean in the past two weeks. He’s rough and pushy now. He kicks things and jumps on things and throws things and takes things from Gracie. I don’t think he’s intentionally being mean, but it’s like he can’t control it. He reminds me of the Hulk.

All these changes are driving me crazy! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “Michael, is that how we play nicely?” over the past two weeks? Bean hasn’t sat in time out in months, but lately I feel like he’s been in time out more than he’s been out of it! To a certain extent I’m trying to let him ride through this phase. I know this is just part of being three and being a boy, so I try not to stay on him ALL THE TIME. But at the same time, there are rules in our house that we do not break. We share toys, we don’t push or kick, we treat our toys nicely. And no matter what phase my kids are in, those rules have to be followed. Which is usually how Bean ends up in time out…

The difference between the two’s and three’s from what I can tell is that at two, they are still learning how to control their emotions. You get random outbursts and meltdowns because they are learning how to use those emotions and actions, so they can’t really control them yet. And then they learn how to control them, so they like to practice using them – like, a LOT. Two was tough, but the actions (no matter how frustrating) made sense in some way.

But this three-year-old thing? From what I can tell, now it’s not about learning to control those emotions and actions, it is knowing what’s right and wrong and deliberately choosing the wrong, just to try and cross the line. I’m sure that psychologically he’s learning about boundaries and limitations right now and that these little acts of defiance are to test our limits, so I’m glad that Chris and I are holding firm about what rules we have in our house. But GEEEEZZZZ! This is going to be tough!

Last night Bean was particularly challenging. He wasn’t being very nice to Gracie and I ended up sending him to bed early because of his behavior. This morning wasn’t much better as Bean pitched a total temper tantrum about not having a THIRD bowl of cereal because we were running late for school. By the time we got to daycare, I have to admit that I was ready to drop him off. I had told him that he could have breakfast at daycare since he didn’t get to finish his bowl of cereal at home, so I took him into the cafeteria to eat after we’d dropped off Gracie. Normally, if Bean eats breakfast there, I just drop him off and he sits at a little table, eats his breakfast, and then the cafeteria girls take him to his classroom when he’s done. But this morning when I went to drop him off, he took my hand and looked up at me with those big blue eyes of his daddy’s and said, “Mommy, will you sit with me?”

I was so late for work already. So, so, so late. But it was so nice to see my sweet boy shine through for just a minute and so I sat down with him and we ate breakfast together right there in the middle of the daycare cafeteria. There was the normal rush of morning drop off going on around us, but Bean ate his waffle and talked to me like we were the only people in the room, and soon I felt like we were. It only took him about 10 minutes to eat his waffle, and then I walked him to his classroom before I left. And I smiled all the way to school.

Three is going to be rough. I can already tell. But three might also be very surprising on random Tuesday mornings, and that part I’m really looking forward to.

23 comments | posted in About Beanie, Angry Bean, Boys, discipline, Growing Bean, Milestones, parenting, The Romper Room, Toddlerhood | tags: Family, parenting, toddlers

Bean is back on track with his potty training again. He’s not even really potty training anymore. He’s pretty much housebroken.

(I know that’s a puppy terms, but toddlers are a lot like puppies in some areas, right???)

So, we’ve been celebrating a lot about no accidents. When he comes home from school, he tells us all about how he didn’t have any accidents. And when he goes potty, he tells us all about it. A couple weeks ago, he even announced to the entire restaurant where we were having dinner, “DAD! I JUST PEE PEE’D IN THE POTTY!” He’s a proud peacock these days.

Well, last week, I was in the bathroom with him while he went potty. We were chatting while we waited and then all of a sudden he gets really quiet. Then he smiled like the Cheshire Cat and yelled out to me, “Mom! I went poopy in the potty!”

And just as he sat on the potty and said that, he started peeing before he even knew it. And he peed in about a five foot arc out in front of himself. It caught both of us so off-guard that we just stood there, wide-eyed with gaping mouths. Just as I was trying to come up with something positive to say, Bean sighed heavily, slumped his shoulders, and said, “Oh, man…”

I about died. DIED, I tell you!

He looked so defeated. It was the funniest, sweetest, most real thing ever! We decided to celebrate the potty instead of the accidental urine arc that flooded the bathroom floor.

You win some, you lose some, Bean Man.

13 comments | posted in Boys, Potty Training, The Romper Room | tags: humor, potty training, toddlers

The other day, a little fairy came and whispered into my ear that toddlers love playing with brightly colored rice.

Okay. Not really. I found this on Pinterest.

(sigh)

Because I’m addicted.

Since browsing Pinterest a few months ago, I have been pinning all these great, simple ideas and then doing nothing about them. Finally, in the past few weeks, I have started actually doing a lot of them. Mostly, I’ve been doing home organization tips, which I’ll share little by little on the blog in the next few days. Today, though, I did one of the ideas for kids and it was pretty cool.

Chris has been working a lot in the past week and the kids and I have been a little stir crazy on our own. So, today I busted out one of my pins… Colored rice.

First, you take four gallon Ziplock bags and fill each one with two cups of rice. Then, add two teaspoons of rubbing alcohol to the bag.

Next, add six or seven drops of food coloring to each bag. I used what I thought was a lot of food coloring and the rice still came out a little pastel, so be generous if you’re going for brighter colors.

Then, seal the bags and start shaking up the rice and food coloring, making sure that you’re evenly spreading the color throughout the rice. This is a fun part for your wee tot to help you with.

Next, line baking pans or big plastic bins or whatever you have on hand with aluminum foil or wax paper. Then, pour each color out onto the lining and put the bin in the sun so that the food coloring can dry. It was really sunny here today and so the rice dried pretty quickly – under half an hour, I think.

When the rice dried, I combined it all into one big tub, threw in some spoons and other sifting toys (including a construction truck…), and turned Bean loose!

All total, it took about five minutes to dye the rice, then half an hour to let it dry, and VOILA! A really fun, different activity for Bean to play with.

We spent the rest of the afternoon burying things in the rice and then digging them back out again and sorting and shifting through the rice bin. Even I thought it was fun! Rice feels crazy fun when you run your hands through it!

Even Chris played in it when he came home for a little break from working…

I have another pin that uses this same rice for a different game, I-Spy Bottles. You fill an empty plastic 2-liter bottle with the rice and stick a few little toys in there. Then, your tot can shake the bottle all around and try to find the toys in the bottle. I haven’t done that one yet, but we’ll probably try it tomorrow. Here’s a picture from Pinterest of what that looks like…

For now, though, we’re pretty content to shift and sort and pour and dig and bury with our brightly colored rice in a bin. We’re purists like that, I guess.

*******

For more info about this activity and for other fun ideas, be sure to check out the original post from Pinterest.

20 comments | posted in Boys, Fun with Mom, Parenting Ideas, Playing, The Romper Room, Toddlerhood | tags: parenting, toddler activities, toddlers

There are few things Bean loves more in this world than his underwear. He likes to count it, carry it, stack it, fold it, and wear it.

For a while, we really encouraged it. It was keeping him excited about going potty and it kept him interested in potty training. But, we started drawing the line the day that he tried to carry three pair into his Sunday School class. And it was getting awkward to have a kid carrying underwear sitting in the grocery cart at Target. I felt the need to explain to strangers that he was carrying CLEAN underwear. But that explanation just made things weirder. Finally, Chris and I made the rule that underwear stays in the house, unless we are wearing it out.

Bean protested this new decree.

He protested much.

While the carrying of the underwear thing was weird, it didn’t become a problem until recently. In the past two weeks, Bean has suddenly become obsessed with changing his underwear each time he goes to the bathroom. We don’t let him change because we want him to learn how to wear underwear the, you know, normal way…one pair at a time. But every time he’d go potty, he’d start asking for a different pair of underwear.

“I want Thomas!” he’d cry. “Let’s wear Thomas now!”

When he realized that this wasn’t going to get him a change of underwear, I think Bean got a little smarter. This past weekend, Bean started having multiple accidents in one day. He’s been really good about going potty, but on Sunday he had two accidents and on Monday in school he had three. That was highly unusual. And what got my attention was that when I’d pick him up from school, he would announce very proudly, “MOM! I PEED ON WALL-E AND NEMO! NOW I WEARING BUZZ!” He was so happy that he had gone through so many characters.

Now, I had a dilemma. I didn’t want to discourage Bean from going potty and I didn’t want him to think he was in trouble for having accidents (we’ve tried to keep potty training as positive and upbeat as possible so far), but clearly he needed to know that going potty was not a way to get a change in underwear. So, in a fleeting moment of parenting genius, I had a shining moment.

I went to Target and I bought two packs of plain white underwear. This morning, I explained in my happiest voice to Bean that he would get to pick one pair of fun underwear that he would wear for the day. If he had an accident at school, then he would have to wear the white underwear until tomorrow. He just kind of stared at me a little and I couldn’t tell if he understood or if he thought he was in trouble. When we got to school, Bean stood there with me while I explained the new system to his teacher (who thought it was a great idea). Then, both his teacher and I reminded Bean that he needed to tell someone when he needed to go potty so that he could keep wearing his Cars underwear. He kind of nodded his head and I thought that maybe this idea wasn’t making sense to him.

But when I picked him up at daycare today, guess what! NO ACCIDENTS! ALL DAY! And Bean came running up to me saying, “Mom! I still wearing Cars!”

There are a lot of things I mess up as a parent. (Remind me to tell you how I may have been starving Gracie for the past month…) So when I solve a problem, I very seriously pump my fists in the air and yell, “SCORE ONE FOR MOM!”

40 comments | posted in About Beanie, Boys, Milestones, parenting, Parenting Ideas, Potty Training, The Romper Room, Toddlerhood | tags: parenting, potty training, toddlers