Gettin Wordy With It

It’s been almost a month since my last post, and I’m on the train, so his may be a bit jumbled.

The biggest news is that Reece has finally come to terms with potty training.  We spent a weekend really close to the bathroom, took away his diaper, and set a timer to go off every half hour.  We gave him a warning five minutes before the timer was going to go off.  We had a few accidents the first couple of days, but Lisa was quick on the draw when it came to recognizing the early signs of the type of accident that would have forced us to abandon our house and look for a new home to live in.  After a couple of days of hard effort, the general idea seemed to have sunk in.  The days have been getting easier and there have been fewer accidents, so it looks like we’re soon going to be on the hook for all the things we promised him a few months ago.  You know, the bike, the scooter, the baseball glove, the fire engine, the moon.

Lorelai has been really supportive of Reece getting potty trained because when he is going potty, and she goes potty, they both get mints as a reward.  That reward had been phased out for her a few months ago, but it came back when he started going.  And they also believe that mint rewards carry over from day to day, so if you went potty 4 times yesterday and only got 2 mints, you have two coming to you right after breakfast. 

The kids have really gotten into doing jigsaw puzzles of up to 100 pieces, though they’re a little better off doing 75 pieces and smaller.  They’ll do the same ones over and over again, and love it.  More importantly, we love it as it keeps them busy for hours.

Reece has become a computer geek, and somehow he learned how to type the 3 letter password I put on his login account on the computer, and he’ll sneak into the office and play pretty much any time of the day or night.  I blame Lisa’s brother, Eric for that.  Because I can.

The rainy weather in the PNW the last few weeks has put a damper on the outdoor fun with the neighborhood kids, so last Sunday we bought the board game ‘Candyland’ to try with them.  I knew I was in trouble when the board came out and Lisa disappeared upstairs to ‘do laundry’, leaving me with two of the cheatenist kids you ever did see.  It was like they didn’t even care about the rules.  All they wanted to do was to get to the ice cream cone.  And if their card said to go past it, they stopped on it and refused to move.  Daddy almost won the game and put an end to the madness, but I pulled the Gingerbread Man card on what should have been the last play, and I ended up back at the start.  The game went on until I helped Reece to win.

Lisa and I took a night to celebrate our 5th Anniversary in Seattle recently.  We went to a movie (Ironman 2… better than I expected), and were supposed to eat at a restaurant called ‘The Flying Fish’ but they decided to relocate, and failed to tell us that when we booked the reservation.  Since we had already paid for parking, we went across the street to ‘The Queen Street Diner’.  The food was pretty good, but not the best I’d ever had.  I wouldn’t be opposed to going there again, but it’s not at the top of my list.

The next morning we ate at Lola’s in Seattle for breakfast.  If you get a chance to go there, do it.  The donuts are amazing, and the potatoes incredible.

I’m back to normal hours at work after a couple of months of long hours trying to get some projects going.  We still have a lot going on, but I just couldn’t sustain those hours forever, and the switch back to normal hours is already having positive effects on my writing.  The words are coming easier, and my current book is coming along nicely.  I’m at about the 1/4 pole, and the plot line is holding to what I had planned out.  At this pace, the first draft should be done by the end of the summer.  I do have to go back and do some editing on ‘The Forgotten Road’ in preparation for the PNWA Writer’s conference in July, but that should only take me a couple of weeks, and depends on the availability of my ‘Book Doctor’.

One of the side effects of spring is that my TV watching drops down to almost nothing, and my book reading and movie watching (not the same as TV watching, even if it is watching a DVD) goes up.   I’ll cover the books and movies in another post, but I’ve been reading at almost a dangerous level, and it feels good.

The garden is just barely starting to produce a few leaves of spinach.  The weather has been down right cruel, and things are way behind.  We need some warm weather and some sun.   I had the sprinklers set up a few weeks ago, and I had to turn them back off as the gardens are just big mud pits.

Lisa is getting ready for a dance competition in Denver later this month, so I’ll have a weekend by myself with the kids, which should be… interesting.  I hope the weather is nice, but even if it isn’t, we’re getting out of the house at least one day, and doing something outside.

Anyway, I’ll recap books and movies later tonight, because, as always, my OCD requires I document my reading.