Potty Training Round 2

When Jalen reached about two and half years old, the day care that he attended at the time naturally started to potty train him.  They took him to the toilet about every 2 hours and encouraged him to use it in front of all his toddler friends.  When the school felt he was ready, they asked us to send Jalen to school in underwear (along with a couple of set of extra clothes).  After just a month or so (and a couple of accidents) we were diaper free with Jalen!  He kept his underwear dry day and night and rarely had accidents except when he waited too long to go to the toilet.  I was extra proud because I reached my goal of potty training Jalen before baby #2 was born.

This time around with Max, we started trying to get him to pee in the toilet around 2.5 years as well.  He showed little interest at first until we finally had a break through after Jalen showed him how to do it.  This was around last October so he was about 2 years and 8 months.  Max's school was a lot more passive compared to Jalen's old day care.  Whenever I asked them how Max did on the toilet at school they kind of just shrugged and told me that he wouldn't go.  This meant that we as parents had to take on a much more active role in potty training.  After the break through in October we decided to put him in Pull Ups and take him to the bathroom every 2 hours.  He did well and peed every time we took him but he wouldn't proactively go to the toilet.  It goes without saying that he wouldn't tell us when he needed to poop either.  After a couple of months and a few boxes of Pull Ups later, I decided to pull the plug on the expensive Pull Ups and went cold turkey with underwear.  Getting him to wear underwear was no problem since we bought a 10-pack of Cars 2 underwear from Costco a long time ago in anticipation of this.  He had 1 accident the first 2 days on the weekend.  When I sent him to school on Monday I was extra nervous and packed him 2 sets of extra clothes.  When I picked him up later that day, I was shocked that he was still wearing the same clothes!  The teachers said he did great but no poop.  Later that night, Max came over to me and said "uh oh, all wet".  He had peed in his pants.  After we took off his pants, he said "I need to go poo poo".  I was thinking, "could this be?!"  I sat him on the toilet and sure enough, a few minutes later he made his first #2 in the toilet!  This is a gross and most proud moment in a parent's life.  We hooped and cheered him on to give him all the positive reinforcement we could muster.  After that milestone, he stayed dry with no accidents (and 3 more poops in the toilet) until the following Saturday when he pooped in his underwear while we were visiting a friend's house.  Now it's day 16 with big boy under wear and no accidents at school so far (knock on wood).  He still wears pull ups at night but if this pattern continues, I'd be perfectly happy.  I'm already imagining the days in my future when I can leave the house without a giant diaper bag.  

Jalen's Limited Mandarin

Jalen is now almost 1 month into his bilingual English-Chinese kindergarten program and he has finally started to share some of his new Chinese vocabulary with us. For example, he knows his colors like red (hong se), yellow (huang se) and brown (kafei se); and he's learning shapes like triangle (san jiao xing) and circle (yuan quan). He is slowly starting to surpass his daddy in Chinese! The surprising part is that Max is starting to copy his older brother. The other day he said out of nowhere "dian dian tou" -- nod your head because Jalen had been repeating it in song.

First Week of the School Year

Last week was a busy week of transition.  On Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, Max started his first day at his new day care at El Centro de la Raza.  It's a bilingual English/Spanish daycare.  Before his first day, we brought him in twice to visit so that it wouldn't be such a culture shock for him.  He had a fairly smooth first week.  His teachers commented that Max knew just what to do when it came time to eat or sleep.  He was only fussy after drop off but then would be happy the rest of the day.  I guess Max is a day care veteran now that he's at his third daycare in less than two years.  I always feel a pang of guilt whenever I put him through a new transition but I also have to remind myself that kids are incredibly resilient and sometimes these transitions are harder on the parents than the children.

On Wednesday, Jalen started kindergarten at Beacon Hill International School.  The morning was pretty hectic where all the parents crowded in the class room with their iPhones and digital SLRs snapping away photos like the paparazzi.  There are 3 kindergarten classes and they're all in a big open room with bookshelves and easels as dividers.  It must have been pretty overwhelming for Jalen. When the class bell rang and all the parents were being ushered out of the class so we had to say good bye to Jalen, he quietly shed a couple of tears.  But he just bravely wiped them away and tearfully said good bye.  Initially, Jalen was assigned to the all day English kindergarten program.  We had hoped that he would be in the Mandarin immersion program but since we moved in May and kindergarten registration happens in March, we ended up as #3 on the wait list.  Then on Wednesday afternoon we got the call from the principal and received the news that Jalen is IN for Mandarin immersion.  So from Thursday on, he gets English and social studies in the morning then after lunch he goes to Mandarin immersion where he learns math and science in Chinese.  After he got home on Thursday, I asked him if he learned any new Chinese words.  He said he learned a lot of Chinese words but he doesn't remember any of them.  Haha.  We just need to be patient as I'm sure he'll pick it up in no time.  I'm so excited that Jalen will be learning Chinese consistently.  I better brush up my Mandarin as well so I can start speaking to him in Mandarin at home more.

So now we face a brand new world of bilingual education (can you imagine when Max starts speaking Spanish?) and public school education.  Next week there's a kindergarten potluck where the parents can meet each other.  Then later in September we have our first PTA meeting.  I'm trying not to think too much about it so that I don't get overwhelmed.  It just seems that there's always new transitions so I just need to start accepting change as the norm.

Max's Limited Sentences

Being a second child means that Max is constantly being compared to his older brother. I remember when Jalen was about 2 years 4 months old he really turned the corner and started talking in full sentences. He'd say things like "I want to sit next to you". Max, on the other hand, is still in baby talk mode. He says a lot of things but only I can understand them because I "talk" to him everyday. He is talking in 3 to 4 word sentences though and here are some examples:

I need help
I wanna go bye bye
I ride bike!
I wanna watch TV
I'm bao bao (full)
I want nai nai (milk)
I'm sorry
I want wafu (waffle)
I don't want it
I play cars!
Bye bye choo choo train!

Scenes From the New Daycare

One of the benefits of the new school, Bright Horizons, is that they send frequent email communications including pictures each week.  It's a new thing that we didn't have our old school and we've been really loving the ability to peek into their days at school.

Here's Jalen in his class on his first day.  He's still a little shy, but he loves coloring.

Here's Jalen on his trike.  The daycare features a small, grass-less, playground which is a departure from the suburban daycare.

Here's Max on his first day, tentatively looking at the toys.  What you don't see here is a big window overlooking the Space Needle and a, uh hum, gentleman's club.

Jalen's 5 Year Stats

Last Friday we took Jalen to his 5 year wellness check up.  Jalen is growing great: 46lb 3oz (75 – 90%) and 45.5” (95%).  He has always been on the tall side and it’s exciting to see that he hasn’t slowed down one bit.  His BMI is also healthy at 15.7 (50 – 75%).  Since Jalen doesn’t know how to swim yet, the doctor advised that we should get him lessons soon so that he learns within the next couple of years.  

We’ve had some sleep challenges with Jalen since the beginning of the year.  He had always been a good sleeper and he’d been in his own room since about 2 months old.  However, in the last few months he’s been having a hard time either falling asleep in his own room or staying asleep.  We had always been firm about not sharing a bed with him but we’ve had to pick our battles after too many sleepless nights.  We’ve tried all kinds of different rewards and punishments with mixed results.  Since one of his key complaints is that he wants to sleep with someone, we’ve moved Jalen into a room with Max.  This has worked well for the most part except on the nights that Jalen would accidently wake up Max and all hell would break loose.  Some nights Jalen has slept on the floor of our bedroom because we wouldn’t let him into our bed and he wouldn’t go back to his room.  Lately, things have been a little better where he would stay in his room and not wake up anyone until at least 6:30am.  His reward is that he could play with his favorite toys (Transformers) and watch his favorite shows (Transformer cartoons on Netflix).  However, I’ve noticed that Jalen makes very calculated trade-offs when it comes to this reward system.  You see he goes to school all day on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.  On the night before those days, he’s more likely to break to rule and come into our bed.  That’s because there’s very little time, if any, to enjoy his reward the next day.  Whereas on the nights before a non-school day (he stays home with Grandma on Tuesdays and Thursdays), he is more likely to follow the rule since he’ll have all day to enjoy his reward.  This theory has been proven at least once.  I’m really hoping that he’ll grow out of this phase and go back to sleeping well without us.  Until then, we’ll just have to keep refining our incentive system to outsmart a 5 year old.

The Big Move

I've been away from our blog for a while because we've been busy with our big move.  Everything happened pretty quickly.  From the time that we got the idea to move in with Rick's mom, to finding a renter for our Bellevue home, to putting a deposit down on a new daycare, to scheduling the move date only took about a couple of months. 

We were lucky with finding a renter quickly but it also posed a challenge.  Originally, I wanted to move right before September so that it would line up with the school year.  I imagined Jalen would start in kindergarten and I'd have some time to find Max a new daycare.  But the renters wanted to move in ASAP, so we settled on May 1.  Rick and I scrambled to look for a daycare for both Max and Jalen.  I knew it was going to be pretty tough getting full time care for Max since he's only 2 and not yet potty trained.  Most places were completely full.  I only toured 2 centers, a Bright Horizons downtown near my office and another center called Little Eagles also near downtown.  Bright Horizons is a chain and I had toured one of their centers before when I was looking for care for Max as an infant.  It's very nice but also really expensive compared to our current daycare.  Since our choices were so limited and we had to make a decision quick, I settled on BH because of the quality of the center and its proximity to my office. 

Once we got the daycare down, we needed to figure out what to do with our stuff.  Rick's mom's house is 5 bedrooms with a full basement but she already has a house full of furniture and so do we.  So we had to decide what to keep for use, what to store, what to sell and what to dump.  We posted a bunch of stuff on craigslist and had some luck early on. We also got help from my parents and borrowed a truck to move some stuff before the moving date.  On top of that, Rick filled our SUV each night and made almost daily runs to his mom's house after work to drop off stuff.  Even so, on moving day we filled a full 24-foot truck.  Rick and I spent 9 hours organizing and working alone side of the movers.  After the movers left, we spent all night unpacking the essentials so that we could actually take a shower and have linens to make up the beds for the kids.  That was one of the longest days of my life.  Then we spent all of Saturday cleaning our Bellevue house to get it ready for the renters.  We then spent all of Sunday unpacking so we could do basic things like making breakfast and do laundry. 

Coincidentally Rick's mom planned a trip to California to visit his sister for 2 weeks during our big move so she missed out on all of the mess.  For the week following our move, we had to figure out a new routine of drop off/pick up and commuting to/from work.  Jalen is only in daycare Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays now (to save some money), so on one of the days Rick took him to his office to spend the day there.  I took the kids to daycare by riding the light rail and it was quite a challenge to herd 2 kids through the streets of downtown.  Downtown traffic is very congested during rush hours so carpooling with Rick isn't a great option either.  It's definitely different from what we were used to.  Our old daycare was just a quick 5 minute drive from our home on our way to work and I didn't realize just how convenient and nice that was.  We're still trying to figure out what our new routine will be.

On a positive note, the kids are adjusting really well to Bright Horizons.  I took Max and Jalen to visit the center twice before their official full day but I was still nervous that Max is not going to last the full day.  When he started in daycare when he was just one year old, he cried and didn't eat at all.  We had to pick him up early from school because he was too upset.  His new teacher Lucy at Bright Horizon was nice enough to send me an email to let me know that Max was doing great, not crying and ate all of his lunch.  It was a huge relief for me!  Jalen was shy in his new class but by the end of the week he already made new friends.  When I was picking him up on Friday he was play punching with a boy named Sam and we couldn't even break them up when his dad was picking him up as well.

We moved our dining table a couple of week before moving day and the kids loved eating at their picnic table.

The whole house pretty much looked like this on moving day.  We just put things wherever we could.

We had the movers unload under the car port so we could move the boxes into the right rooms.

After a long day of cleaning on Saturday, our Bellevue house is all ready!

The place looked so big when it's all empty!

This was Max's last day at his daycare and his best buds Cordell and Henry gave him big hugs for bye bye.

Max's first day at his new daycare.

Max's new class has just 6 kids and 1 teacher.

This is an exciting and also stressful change for us.  I'm looking forward to our new environment and enjoying living in the city again.