Toddler Topics...

My little Dex turned 2 in April, so we are anxious to have the little booger potty trained. I decided when he turned two it was time for Elmo underwear and a couple of small packages of pull ups. (I've never wanted to use pull-ups, by the way.)  However I didn't want to go cold turkey to underwear and have to leave work everyday to deliver more clothes to the daycare. I tried over a weekend, and quickly discovered that he wasn't ready, and I wasn't ready to stress myself out with cleaning poo and pee off my floors. I guess no one ever is. :-) We put it on hold for a couple of months, and now we are at it again. I think we may be closer to success since he has now started asking to go tee tee. Even though a lot of the time we just read books and wait for 'nothing' to happen, I still see this as progress. He does go pretty regularly when he sits there,so hopefully within the next couple of months I will get to STOP BUYING DIAPERS!!! HIP HIP HOORAY!! Either way, I'm not stressing about it, and at this point, I've made the decision to follow his lead, and encourage going as often as possible.

One worry I've had since Dex turned two is that he wasn't using small phrases a whole lot. He says a ton of words, but hadn't really shown much interest in putting them together to form short sentences. Don't get me wrong, he's always 'talked' a lot, but most of it was just cute gibberish. I've noticed over the past month that his vocabulary has really grown. He's starting to put words together, and there's less gibberish and more actual conversation. Talk about relieving a worried momma. I never  thought anything was wrong with him, but I just wanted to make sure that he was where he needed to be with his vocabulary. I started reading to him a lot more, and encouraged him to say "up please, more juice, juice please, no more..slowly we're getting there, and I'm glad I haven't let the worry consume me too much. I have let it get to me here and there, but I know he's fine, and once he REALLY starts talking, I may wish he'd waited a little bit longer.;-)

I think as moms we are always comparing our kiddos to others. In my case it's a fueled the fire of my worry, but I've come to the conclusion that each child is unique. They develop at their own pace. As a mom,we just have to be proactive in their development and make sure that we're not enabling their fit throwing, giving in to their every whim just to keep them quiet, letting them point instead of ask for something...It's the little things that we do that makes all the difference.

The most important thing we can do is pray for our children and pray for ourselves to be the best moms we can be. It's a huge responsibility and it's a little overwhelming sometimes, but the blessings our kiddos bring are truly amazing. They steal your heart from the moment you lay eyes on them.