Jackson and Christmas

Instead of giving you a play by play of what we did and what happened on Christmas, I'll just give you the "gems" of the day.

We had to wake Jackson up and tell him that Santa had come. He woke to find a new CD player plugged in and ready to go. His response, "Where's red CD player?" (His first one was red.) Luckily he soon moved on from that thought and is just happy to control his music.When it was time to open presents under the tree, Jackson refused. He pouted and whined that he couldn't go to his room and play with his CD player. What kid doesn't want to open presents?! Here he is sucking his thumb, mad at me for making him stick around for the festivities.
Of course, next year maybe he'll be more excited. We should have let him open them on his own accord, when he wanted.

Finally, our most favorite gift of all . . .




Jackson is potty-trained! Okay, so we have some fine-tuning to do, and we definitely have to work on the night-time training (but not for a little while), but my child can tell me when he needs to go, and he usually makes it. My advice to you is wait until your child is really ready. If you try once, and it's just too frustrating for you and your child, wait a few months, and try again. I wasn't really sure at first how this attempt (#2) was going to go until we started off. It's been pretty easy to deal with because HE WAS READY!! I know we all get confused at what ready means, but he was. We went cold turkey from diapers to underwear during the day (nighttime is still diapers for a while), and he could handle it. Yes, there were accidents, but not too many, and he understood what it meant to go on the potty and after three days he learned to recognize when he needs to go. He hasn't had an accident for a few days now, and I'm sure he'll have more, but they are few and far between. Hip, hip hooray!!

P.S. Matt has been soooooo helpful with all of this. I'm so glad that he's been around this week as we've been working with Jackson. What a dad!