Brother time

Eli and Connor will sit and babble back and forth in their own language and have a great time doing it.  I love having boys this close in age…they have so much in common and are best buds.  Praying they continue to be friends!

Eli’s Speech Therapy with Mrs Emily

Dinner with friends at Wilson Park

Cookout with Neighbor Friends

We LOVE LOVE LOVE our neighbors!  The Estes, Johnson’s, Machado’s are people we do life with regularly.  The summer is always a fun time to bring the fun outside and spend more time together.  So thankful for them!

Farmers Market with Papa

                  

We love the farmers market!  If we can’t grow it at home this is the place to get it.  The boys love running the paths through the flower beds and the local musicians!

Funny: Isn’t the first photo typical of how hard it is to get EVERYONE in the photo looking at the camera!  Either someone’s eyes are closed, touching their nose, or looking away… too funny!

Potty Training

My Eli is finally potty trained!!!  We spent a lot of time trying different approaches to helping him learn.  We tried sitting on the potty until he goes.  See picture above…no success!  We tried sitting him on the potty every 20minutes throughout the day….didn’t work!  We tried incentives like stickers, sweets, toys…none of that worked either.  One day we decided we would only put cloth training pants on him so he could “feel” the dampness or poopy and want to put it in the potty instead.  Nope didn’t work either!   I was tired of cleaning up all the messes and didn’t want to discourage him by these continued failed attempts!!!  I began to wonder if he was really ready.  He acted interested but was he really ready?  So Brad and I decided to try one more approach…I call it the 3 day potty training boot camp!  :)  We went for 3 days without underwear (couldn’t leave the house) and when he needed to go he had nowhere to put it BUT in the potty.  We would put a pull up on him at night but during the day…it was just his bare bottom!  By the end of the 3rd day he had learned to put everything in the potty and he was SO PROUD of himself.  He would say Momma, I’m a BIG BOY now!  It was worth it to see him love his success.  So… of course, there was no going back to pull ups during the day at that point.   I wanted to help him continue to move forward in his potty training success!  Because he was only accustomed to his frog potty we had to take the potty everywhere we went for a couple of weeks.  We wanted to take small steps. Once he was used to going regularly on the potty we introduced him to the big potty.  This was no challenge and he took to it pretty quickly.  He still needs a little help with his pants and wiping clean.  I am so proud of my big boy and I just adore how proud he gets when he sees his success with this!