I bought a TON of this stuff, I wonder if any of mine will end up on the list.

Awhile ago I came across a toy organizational system that seemed like a really cool idea, albeit a tad bit complicated, but complicated is where I live. If you want to know more about the toy library check out want what you have.

I started out with the toy library goal in mind and as is often always the case with me, I discovered halfway through the process that I do not possess the necessary materials/tools to make it work. Given that realization, I opted instead for a simply more organized playroom. It took a friend and I two full days to bring it together.

This is the playroom in progress.

Using the omelet argument, the first step, after assessing the damage, was to break every egg within reach. We started by emptying one small container at a time and then quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. So we dumped many out at once and started the process of sifting through the piles.

The middle of the room shown above was filled with baby toys that my 3, almost 7 and almost 10 year old kids no longer needed. Yes we are a bit late in getting rid of them, but in my defense, having had our 2 boys first, it’s been slow going in getting our little girl enough things that were “hers”, without cooping the boys toys and we wanted her to have enough things to play with.

After clearing out the baby toys, we then went about the task of finding a dedicated container for each of the categories of toys remaining. This same friend had helped me organize this playroom years ago and as a result we still had lots of pretty cartoon images for most of the containers as well as a labeling system I’d used prior to her involvement. We had containers labeled Music, Blocks, Cars and Trucks, Legos, and a few drawers labeled for our two train sets. We also had containers labeled Animals, People, NOT People (for humanoid like things-robots monsters-stupid little fast food toys that can’t be put in the other two categories) and of course Random Little Things (for the things that can’t fit into any category).

Having 5 kids (my 3 and her 2) pretty much constantly interrupting us took quite a bit of our time and productivity, but I think we did a pretty decent job our first day.

The end of Day 1

Day 2 will post tomorrow.

Starting Wednesday, Albertsons has the following deals:

Nabisco Oreo cookies $1.99 each

Tombstone Pizza 2/$7

There is also a deal where if you buy two Tombstone Pizzas at the above price they throw in a FREE box of Oreo cookies!

One down 2 more to go.  Now you don’t have to pay for your first box of Oreo cookies. Now for the milk. 

Meadow Gold is on sale for $2.38 a gallon.  I don’t consider this a worthwhile price, but there is always the chance that they have other gallons of milk for my minimum required price of $2 or less a gallon.  Besides, if you are planning to buy a gallon of milk there anyway, it’s not an extra purchase. 

Two down, one more to go. 1st set of cookies are taken care of and you’ve gotten a gallon of milk.  Now you only have to buy a single other milk product in any size. Nesquik bottles are usually only $1 or so, or you can buy another small sized milk to complete your purchase.  Then pick up another package of Oreos and you’ve got your free pack!

I’m not sure how flexible this is, technically you have to buy one and would get the lower price free, but since the Oreos are already free, I’m not sure if you can get a pricier package for the coupon Free item.  I’m going to see how this works and I’ll let you know what I’ve discovered…provided there is a worthwhile price on milk that is.

Sorry for the photo quality, I’m still relegated to using my iphone camera instead of a real one these days.

I have to admit I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get any full size items this time around, but they did give me a coupon for a free product (though it’s not clear if I have to buy one to get one) and 4 other coupons to share with other people for $2.50 off.

That being said I am beyond excited to try this product! I have really odd hair. It has these really nice tendrils after it dries from the shower (if I don’t brush it) or a fairly decent wave if I do, but the one thing that I can’t escape is frizz, fly-aways or other forms of static.  I live in Colorado the land of no humidity and I generate enough static all on my own that I’ve been known to actually kill alarm clocks just by touching them. Needless to say I prefer to only use this power for good ;) 

I have in my bathroom cupboard right now, no less than 5 (possibly more) different anti static products. Some require to “style your hair as usual” which assumes that I plan to use other products to style. Others require me to use on towel dried or damp hair, this is a particular problem for me as I find that my hair behaves best if I do not try to wash it and then style it right away.

got2b Smooth Operator smoothing lustre lotion lets you know that you can style afterwards as do the rest, BUT it will let me use on towel-dried or dry hair, and this just might make it doable for me.

I’ll keep you posted.

Well it would appear I was a bit overly ambitious when I thought that I would have something worth reporting every day. The last two days dd has failed to be anything but irregular.  One day I averaged about an hour or two between her being wet, and yesterday she went through two outfits in the time it took me to change her!

Today I brought out a brand new set of Tinker bell underwear and reminded her enthusiastically that they existed.  Then I casually mentioned that it would be really sad if they got all messy like her current set, so we’d better just set them aside to wait until she wasn’t having anymore accidents read not using the potty at all, a suggestion from the book. She was thrilled, and even went on and on about how she will have new underwear and she’ll get to ride the “horsie” (an incentive from daddy) once she’s dry.

Based on her drive to achieve these things you might expect that she would be interested in staying dry today wouldn’t you?  But, alas not today.  She sat on the potty each time she was wet (as is required) while I went to get her new clothes, but no matter how many times I checked and saw that she was dry and suggested that she may want to use the potty, she calmly refused each time.  *sigh* Well I just have to hold out hope that she’ll move past her resistance phase in time for her to have some successes before our trip. 

*fingers crossed*

If you are interested in trying to win the vacuum shown below check out Musings of a Housewife and try your luck

and be sure to let me know if you win!

By the way, for those interested, I have included a list below of the things that have NOT worked for us in the past. At least not for long.

• Giving a small treat (like an M&M) whenever she went – it worked briefly but over time that effectiveness waned.
• Giving a small treat (M&M) when she sat on the potty and more of the same if she went at the same time, even more if she was dry. 1, 2 or 3 M&Ms – again, success at first and then she gave up.
• Going back to the issues with my 2nd child (OCD) and the fact that nothing motivated him enough to go, until we gave him a toy car ($.20 or so each car), we decided to try the same with my daughter.  In her case it was a fairy or fairy related item.  We bought a set of jewelry items that came with 3 fairies and she could only earn 1 fairy a day, but the rest of the items were available anytime she used the potty – this was so successful we went through almost 3 packs of fairy items…then we upped the ante.
• Flush with the success of the previous method, I informed her that she would only receive a fairy item if she went without me putting her on the potty. – For 2 weeks straight, one and a half at home and half a week in our RV (on spring break) she stayed dry (except for BMs). She was dry in a diaper and dry in underwear, she was doing great! Then we got home and she regressed.
• The incentives stayed the same, but after a week of not going and nothing but accidents, I moved to a more aggressive approach. Naked time…all the time. Being that it was still snowing and quite cold at times, outside didn’t really work, and I didn’t want to destroy every square inch of my carpet, I put out a towel for her to sit on and kept her naked from the waist down.  We played games, read books, ate meals, but wherever she went she had to sit on that towel – it didn’t work.  She frequently wet the towels as I switched them out one by one and by the end of the week (when most people I hear see success, she soiled the towel :(  So much for that approach.
• Which brings us to now. She wears underwear everywhere she goes except at night when she wears a diaper to bed. I protect her clothes as best I can and the rest of the house by putting plastic pants over her underwear.  Sometimes she goes, sometimes she doesn’t, some days there will be 1 maybe 2 accidents and other days she’ll go through every pair of underwear she has. And of course me not putting her on the potty has just meant that she doesn’t use it at all.

I wonder how this next approach will work.  I’ll be sure to keep you all posted as I continue my efforts in potty training

This is one of 6 shelves in my basement filled with various items (most of which I got free or cheap, with coupon deals).

Above this picture is all of my crackers, pretzels, fruit snacks and such. Drinks are further down.

To the right and on the opposite side of this image is more cereal than I know what to do with (and quite a bit more that I can’t even fit, is waiting for a place to go.

All the way across this room is a freezer so full I can barely open it

We had tornado warnings on and off for a good part of the day and like I said, we don’t get them where I live.

We had just finished grocery shopping for the lunch the kids were going to eat that day (poor planning I know) and after I pulled in with a cracked windshield (due to hail) the sirens went off and we had to leave our groceries in the garage and go downstairs.

I have 3 ravenous children 2 of which have high levels of anxiety.  Take no lunch and add the fact that the house was being pelted by fragments of ice, and you have a recipe for some pretty freaked out kids.

Fortunately I have my stockpile. I was able to get some relatively healthy crackers, some cheerios and with a quick and I mean QUICK trip upstairs, containers for the cheerios, and a bag of apples and water bottles. There were enough gaps in the warnings to allow me to make us more comfortable later on. I brought a laptop down and some movies and books for the kids to read, and our basement is furnished so we could all watch the weather updates in safety and comfort.

It could have been much worse.  And had that happened, I’m confident my stockpile would have seen us through

There are a number of sites that can help you to get a better idea of what you should have in your stockpile (or food storage) it’s all the same to me. One of the ones I like best is FSME or “Food Storage Made Easy”, Check it out for some good tips and even a weekly email breaking down all the steps to having a YEAR’s worth of food stored up.

In a stroke of luck the other day I happened to find a potty training book that promises to tailor itself to the temperament of your child.  So far mine tests pretty strong willed. There is some debate as to the difference between strong willed and stubborn in a child, but since I have yet to find references to stubborn that don’t bring me back to strong willed, I’ll have to go with my closest option

All of this struggling and stress has been unbearable. I can’t win, I can’t even tie.  For the past 3 days I have taken the “resistant child” approach.  I have put the entire thing in her hands. She gets herself changed (as best as she can) and I don’t put her on the potty anymore.  I don’t even ask her if she needs to go.  I do remind her as often as I used to ask that she needs to tell me when she needs to go, and for 3 days she hasn’t gone in the potty once! I’m not really sure how long this approach takes to make any headway, but I’m now worse off than when I was making her sit every 20-30 min or so.  At least, then she was going some of the time.

Tonight I sat down to read my latest find Stress Free Potty Training and they had some interesting ideas.  Like most things you’ve probably discovered on this blog, I can’t really do exactly what they suggest, because it’s not feasible.  One of their suggestions is to have “Naked time”. Well, I’ve done “Naked time” and it failed miserably.  She’s not unfamiliar to the potty so the idea of just kind of slipping it in there, is pretty unrealistic.  So instead, when I got her ready for bed, I asked her if she was ready to do her “before bed potty time” this, by the way, was something I came up with on the spot and it had never been worded this way before.  I did say it with a lot of enthusiasm though, and she went for it!

She sat on the potty for probably around 5 minutes (longer than ever without prodding) just chatting away and then I got the idea to see how long she would sit.  One of the “Naked time” suggestions is to make bath time last an hour where the child is just naked in the bathroom but not in the tub yet.  I went with that suggestion and grabbed some books to try to keep her on the potty, because after all, naked time, not withstanding, the point is to have them on the potty. We made it through 1 1/2 books with me reading and the two of us trying to find words she recognized.  By the end she had probably sat on the potty for 30 min.  She didn’t go at all, but it’s a start.

After she went to bed, I started thinking of the next thing I plan to do to get a better idea of what I am dealing with, and I realized that it’s possible that someone else is out there going through what I am. If this blog is about anything it’s about showing you all that you can struggle, you can have NO idea what you are doing and you can still succeed, if you work at it hard enough.  I’ve decided that during this month when I go at toilet training full boar (before we go on a month long vacation, bad timing I know) I’m going to share the tips and tricks I end up using along the way, as well as what has worked or not worked in the past and moving forward. Hopefully someone out there can benefit from my previous and current failures and discover a way to avoid my pitfalls in potty training their child. After all, that’s what I’m here for, to help you learn from my mistakes

I apologize for the length of this post, I tend to go overboard when explaining some things. And of course, because I am such a HUGE fan of alliteration, I’ll be calling this series: Toilet Training Trails and Tribulations.  Hope you enjoy!

The Eyeshadow line is called Smoky Shadowblast, it comes in 6 color combinations and is in an eye shadow stick and has two different tips. I got the Tempest Blue combo. The first tip is a rounded end for shading the entire lid, and the second is a tapered one for lining the crease and upper and lower lids.

The Lipgloss line is called Shineblast and comes in 16 shades. I got the Sparkler shade. You use the “ShineSculpt” applicator that is supposed to hug your lip contours for a smooth application and give you 4x the shine.

Along with these pieces of makeup they sent me a bunch of $2 off coupons too!

As a Bzzz Agent you get the following benefits: (From their site)

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