You may remember this post, from a month or so ago, when Jonathan announced that he wanted to use the potty. Since then, he’s announced that he wanted to go potty about every other day. And each time, he’s sat on the toilet for about ten seconds, announced that, “it not work,” and got back up. That is, each time until this morning. Yep. This morning, Jonathan said, “I go potty,” as I was changing him from jammies into clothes. So I sat him down like usual. But this time, I could see him concentrating on what he was doing and . . . there it was! Peeing in the toilet!! When he finished, we flushed the toilet and did a little potty dance in celebration!

I don’t expect him to be out of diapers tomorrow, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

If you had told me the upheaval that could be caused in a household by a missing stuffed bear a couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. But when Bear went missing a month or so ago, it was heartbreaking to listen to Jonathan laying in his crib whimpering and quietly calling out “Bear?” “Bear?” Luckily, that only lasted a couple of nights. It was still a struggle to get him to bed for a bit after that, but he started carrying around his “How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight” T-Rex and we figured it would do while we frantically searched for a replacement for the now-discontinued Carter’s bear.

Then, miraculously, we found bear!! Sure that this discovery would be met with uncontained joy when we shared it with Jonathan, I got positioned with my camera as Miriam prepared to reunite Jonathan with his lost love. But when presented with Bear, I could almost hear the thought balloon that appeared over Jonathan’s head. “Look, no hard feelings, but I’ve moved on. Really, it’s not you, it’s me. I’ve found someone else.”

What Jonathan actually said was, “no way!” He shoved Bear aside, grabbed up his dinosaur, and walked off to play.

Miriam spent two weeks trying to dissuade me from taking Mikaela with me to the polls on Election Day. She tried to convince me it would be easier to take her along to early voting. But I guess I’m a traditionalist when it comes to elections. There’s something “magic” about the first Tuesday in November. So I took a day of leave on Tuesday, and picked up Mikaela from school after kindergarten early release. We headed to our polling place and, thanks to the magic of early voting in Kansas, were able to get right to the voting. I did the selecting, but when it came to time to push the “Cast Ballot” button I had Mikaela push the button. Such a small thing, but somehow, it just seemed right. It was important to me that she have a part in this election.

She was invested in it enough that we let her stay up and watch election returns with us (today at school she told her classmates that she stayed up and watched The President Show). We explained to her about the states in the map being colored in red or blue, depending on who that state voted for for President. She got noticeably upset when she saw Kansas turn red. I think she thought that meant she was stuck with John McCain as her President. We calmed her down and explained to her that it wasn’t over yet. It was way past her bedtime already, but we told her she could stay up and watch until there was a winner. The poor kid fell dead asleep at 10:55 p.m. - just about five minutes before the election was called for Barack Obama.

We shook her awake and gave her the news. She managed a dazed, “Woo!” and then immediately fell back asleep.

It was important to me that Mikaela was invested in this election. Last night was an historic moment for our Nation, and Mikaela will remember being a part of it.

It’s starting sooner than I expected, but as a Girl Scout “Daisy” Mikaela is selling Girl Scout cookies this year. If you’d like a personal sales visit, let us know and we’ll see what we can set up. Otherwise, we’ll bring the order form with us to Thanksgiving dinner. She’s taking orders through the end of November. Deliveries will start the first week in January.

And no, that picture doesn’t have anything to do with either Daisies (she doesn’t have her uniform yet) or Girl Scout cookies - other than, “How could you turn down such a cute salesperson?” But she just looked so darned cute in her Mulan Halloween costume, that I wanted an excuse to post the picture - there are more in the Gallery.

Thursday afternoon, Mikaela decided that she was tired of that wiggling front tooth. She grabbed it with a paper towel at AKK, and yanked it out herself. So far, the extra-wide gap in her smile doesn’t seem to be slowing down her Halloween candy consumption. And she’s looking forward to slurping Chinese noodles through the hole sometime soon.

Please stop helping John McCain be President - he just does stuff for rich people.

by Mikaela

While getting out of the car, Miriam’s finger got caught in her keychain, which in turn got caught by the car door as the door slammed shut — on her pinky! Ever the dutiful Mommy, Miriam wrapped up her hand and delivered Mikaela’s stuff to the JCC before calling me and having me meet her at the ER to get her finger examined. With an assist from Zaydie Larry, I got to the ER in time to hear the diagnosis - the radiologist saw a very small break at the end of Miriam’s pinky. In addition, it was cut all the way through the nailbed, so the ER doc put three stitches in through Miriam’s nail and put her on antibiotics. With pain meds onboard, I took Miriam back to her office for her afternoon client appointment (I used to the time to do some overdue server updating).

After the client meeting, we went together, in Miriam’s car, and picked up the kids at the JCC. It was Miriam’s car, but between the new stitches in her pinky and the pain meds, I was driving. As we pulled out of the JCC parking lot with the kids, Jonathan pipes up from the backseat, pointing at me and saying, “Mommy’s car! Mommy’s car!”

It took a minute to register, but he was concerned because he knew we were in Mommy’s car, but Daddy was driving it. So I told Jonathan that yes, it was Mommy’s car. But that she was giving me a turn to drive it.

Jonathan thought about it for a moment, and then he pipes up, “I have turn?”

To which Mikaela replied with a horrified, “NO!! That would be dangerous!”

Yesterday was the final phase of Mikaela’s birthday extravaganza celebration. Seventeen of her current kindergarten classmates, plus three of her old preschool buddies and Jonathan took over Elite Gymnastics for a couple of hours. As the oldest kid in her class - and therefore with the first birthday of the year - we didn’t want to be the first ones to make any of her classmates feel excluded, so we invited the whole gang. It looks like we’re lucky so far - they didn’t really break up into cliques, all of the kids seemed to play well together.

The kids had a blast in the foam pits, the treehouse, the long slide, the bounce house, and especially the zip line. With 22 kids plus a few adults at the party, Mikaela’s traditional princess birthday cake gained a ballroom floor and a red carpet. The guests all enjoyed the ice cream and cake, and Mikaela came home with quite the birthday haul. She seems especially excited about her new Barbie collection. Now we can start deflating for a bit - at least until we start gearing up for Jonathan’s second birthday here in a couple of months.

I was surfing through the archives, testing out this new theme, and noticed that I’d done a development update post for Mikaela at 22 months, so I figured a similar update for Jonathan would be interesting. Following the format from that post:

1. Vocabulary - I don’t really have anything concrete to back this up, other than my own perception, but it seems to me that Jonathan’s vocabulary is broader and more advanced than Mikaela’s was at this age. In addition to being on target with possessives (”my”, “Mikaela’s”, “your”), he identifies by correct name a number of different kinds of dinosaurs (Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops, Myasaurus, and Iguanadon, at least).

2. Cognitive Development - Jonathan counts to seven in English, and to five in Spanish. He’s just starting to sing along with the alphabet song. He has a well-developed sense of humor, acting goofy to get a laugh, and he loves the “oops, I’m a sugar bowl” version of the “I’m a Little Teapot” song. Jonathan has been identifying colors correctly for months now. When he’s unsure what the correct name for a color is, he always guesses “purple”. He loves having books read to him - one of his favorite things to do is to climb up onto my and Miriam’s bed, pull the covers up to his chest, and announce, “read books!” He even does “voices” like Miriam and I do when he reads along with some of his favorite books (notably, “But Not the Hippopotamus”). Oh, and he recognizes a Jayhawk on sight, and identifies it by pointing and shouting, “Rock Chalk Jayhawk!”

3. Physical Development - Jonathan is a little monkey. He climbs over just about anything in his path, including sofa backs. He loves running around on the trampolines at Open Gym at Blue Valley Parks & Rec. And he can jump off of two feet and get off the ground. Jonathan’s pretty good at throwing a ball, and not so adept at kicking just yet. And he can stack wooden blocks - but he’d rather knock them over.