Our boy is potty trained!

Well, I must start this blog with some really good news....our little (now big) boy Jakob is now potty trained! Yes, we said, "bye bye diapers" on Friday, May 30!

I decided to use a method that my cousin Julie used to train 4 of her kids in 1 day. It is from a book called "Toilet Training in Less Than a Day." Basically, you load the kid with all sorts of drinks in the morning and salty snacks and teach them about going to the potty. Since they have to pee so much because they have been drinking, there is so much repetition that they get it very fast. I started at 9 AM on Friday and by 11:15, Jakob had his first pee with his poop following shortly! I was so happy because around 10:30, I thought I was going to have to call it quits because Jakob was crying and screaming and throwing fits, but I powered through it and stayed positive and it all worked out!

We, of course, have had some accidents, but they are getting to be fewer and fewer. We are also not putting him in pull ups at all (not even at night) as I don't want to have to train him out of those. For now, it means that i just get up a couple of times a night to put him on the potty and then put him back to bed...at least until he can hold it a bit longer. The underwear he has is Bob the Builder (and also Diego from Dora the Explorer) as they were the only ones in his size. It is funny, though, because I kept telling him, "Don't get Bob wet, keep Bob dry, don't poop on Bob." So now, we refer to Bob a lot and I have a feeling that the name Bob might carry forward with him into adulthood to describe that part....oopps.

Anyways - enough potty talk, but thanks again to cousin Julie for all of her help and encouragement through the process! I would highly recommend this process to anyone you know who needs to potty train a child.

Jakob has also been enjoying his daycare (or school as I call it). They always do something fun or interesting each day (i.e. a guy Rick comes to play a guitar each week, they go on 1.5 hour walks to a park nearby, they make necklaces, etc). They try to get the kids outside as much as possible as long as the weather is nice, so that is really good. Jakob also really likes his teachers and I think he likes the other kids (hard to tell as I don't get to see them playing).

We are also very happy about the grand opening of our park just 1 block away! There was always a park there, but they just updated all of the equipment, so it is twice the size it was and there is a lot more climbing equipment for Jakob. I actually volunteered last week to help, so I was unloading all of the equipment off of the truck. It was a great opportunity to meet some other parents in the neighborhood as well. Turns out that out of the 8 kids in Jakob's school, 4 kids live on our street!

Wayne has been keeping busy at work and I have 1 week to go before I return to work. I am a bit nervous about the return, but am sure that it will go fine. Trying to balance work and home will be a bit of a challenge, but I'm sure once we get into the new grove it will be fine.

Lastly, we had our first post adoption placement report this week. Basically, a social worker came to our house and asked a bunch of questions about how Jakob was adjusting, his development, eating, how we are doing, etc. She then writes the report, sends it to our agency, and then that gets sent to Russia (along with 12 recent photos). Everything went just fine. We are happy to report that Jakob has gained 6 pounds and grown 2 inches in the 3 months we have had him!

Well - that is all for now. I'll try to post again once I have returned to work.