Poop, Snot, Barf

Sorry for the unattractive title, but these are the inevitable unpleasantries of motherhood... made especially fun when you get to deal with them all at ONCE. Hence, the lack of blogging in the last week... I've been "up to my elbows" as they say =).

First, the potty training. Eli has been officially in underwear for two weeks now. Really, it has gone more smoothly than I could have hoped. After all of our half-hearted attempts to start, I just had to let go of diapers cold turkey. And guess what - not a SINGLE pee accident in all that time! And he's gone to church, the store, and friends' houses! Wow. I still have to remind him and take him throughout the day, but if I forget for a few hours, he will just hold it rather than pee himself (and he won't tell me he needs to go, lol). But the poop... OH. THE. POOP. I have had to clean up poop out of his underwear EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. He refuses to tell me when he needs to go, and never produces on the potty even if I sit him there for a half an hour. He sneaks away somewhere quiet (usually playing trains) as soon as I am busy (ie. putting Owen down for a nap). He has a sticker chart, bribery chocolate, and knows as soon as he poops on the potty he will get a NEW TRAIN, and yet, no success. Ugh. Thank goodness for my diaper sprayer! For those of you unfamiliar, it's like a kitchen sprayer that hooks to your toilet tank - I use it for spraying poop off the cloth diapers, and it also works great for messy undies and little training toilets!
And since we are discussing nastiness, of course winter illness brings on even more! Owen ended up with unexplained diarrhea for a couple of days two weeks ago. It figures that I had recently re-committed to cloth diapers full time and we had no disposables in the house. After hosing diapers out all day, I called Brad at work and begged him to bring some home with him! We lost a few nights of sleep over this illness, because it seemed to hit hardcore in the middle of the night.

Owen recovered from the diarrhea and had a good week last week, and then this week got a major cold. The WEIRDEST thing though, is that after I put him to bed on Sunday night, he woke up and puked ALL OVER the bed, himself, and nearly missed Eli. I thought he was getting the flu on top of it, but he was fine the next day. I washed up all the bedding (you know what a task that is), only to have him to it again the next night! Again, fine the next day, and the next night, then Weds night he lost his cookies all over MY bed! The best we can figure is that he was just having a little gag reflex to the thick cold secretions when I'd lay him down. Ugh. Washing bedding 3X in one week is NOT fun, not to mention getting up in the middle of the night to clean puke off of a crying kid and then try to find somewhere clean to sleep. Thank goodness for Brad and his help - the poor man was on-call and getting woken up all night by his pager as it was. Last night was much better - no puking, and Owen slept pretty well most of the night. So hopefully we are OVER IT.