Potty & Potter

wow twice in one day

So friday afternoon I was chatting with my neighbor, she has two little girls and is 7 months pregnant with her third, a boy. We were talking about potty training because I know she had issues with her older daughter who is now 5. The younger one was potty trained except for nights soon after her second birthday, this past spring. The older one took until several months after her 4th birthday, and even now still has accidents. My neighbor says is her way of manifesting her jealousy. She intends on sending a couple sets of clothes with her to school when she starts kindergarten in the fall. Mostly because the baby will arrive a month into the school year. She said that the big backslide occured because three things happened almost at the same time. 1) The younger daughter arrived 2) they moved and 3) her husband started to travel for work and was gone a few days every couple weeks. She said she dealt with it by just letting it go and letting her daughter win because she was just making herself crazy trying to get it to happen.

So I talked with Ken that evening before leaving for work. And we figured out that Alex's backslide started about when Ken started traveling for work on a pretty regular basis. Last spring we had gotten to the point where he'd sit on the potty no problem, he'd tell me he went/was going right away. That was the first thing that stopped, then he started refusing to even sit on the potty.
So we decided to back off until November when Ken won't be traveling again until March/April. Monday Alex started a two week day camp at school. And what do I see on the page that we get the end of each day. He used the potty all day. 7 hours at school not one accident but at home I still have to check him every couple hours. This definately reinforces the idea that this is a kind of passive/agressive reaction to Ken being gone so much. This and his fear of the dark becoming more pronounced in the last few months.

Friday was of course the release of HP7. I went into work at 7:00 pm. And was put incharge of the trivia hunt at the party. At about 10:30 I was sent out to relieve the people handing out bracelets for people wanting to pick up their copy after midnight. At eleven I was brought in to give me a register and take a very brief break, enough time to chug a bottle of water and use the bathroom. At 11:30 we were trying to clear the store enough to allow people to line up. Then the fire marshal and the police arrived and told us to clear the store completely have people line up outside and then bring them in. This took until about 12:15, with much bitching and complaining by people at the front of the line. (Why they cared I don't know, we were bringing people in by ticket number they recieved with their bracelets, so they'd still be one of the first 50 in line) Things moved very quickly from there and we were completely done by 2:45. Clean up took until 4am. We didn't really do much anything lying around was either stacked on the info desk or a library cart and the shelves straightened so that nothing was actually lying on it's side. We found out shortly before we left we weren't the only store that had to clear the entire store before opening the boxes.

I have my copy sitting here waitng for me to finish reading 6 again. I'm about half way through. That's about it the baby is awake so I must get him. I might get back on when he goes down for his second nap before we go get Alex.