Jack's Birthday

 Jack turned 3 on Saturday! So far, 3 has been treating him well although, in our house, we tend to sail through the so-called "terrible 2's" and instead trudge through the "defiant 3's". Jack is right on course for an, ahem, interesting third year.

He had a very low-key party on Saturday with three of his friends here. Naturally, we got torrential rains that day, so all of the kids were cooped up in our house. It went well though and Jack enjoyed having the party be all about him. We cleverly employed the help of Anna's bestie to be here for the party, to keep sister from trying to micro-manage her brother for at least one day out of the year. 

Dinosaur cupcakes

The party spread: some of Jack's favorite foods (minus the mini corndogs, which were in the oven when I took this picture)

Then, the day after his birthday, more changes: the crib and changing table/dresser (and nursery rocker) all left to go and live with my cousin, who's expecting her first baby this summer and Jack's room morphed into a "big boy room"! I was really expecting to cry as the last pieces of "baby" left my house, but I didn't. I did have a moment, when we were cleaning out the dresser. I opened the drawer that had housed the diapers when each of my kids used that dresser. That drawer always made a distinctive sound and I could tell (no matter where I was in the house) if someone was getting a diaper out of that drawer--be it middle of the night or during the day. It was just one of those sounds that will always define babyhood in our house--sort of how smelling a familiar smell can take you right back to a place in time; that sound was the "diaper-changing" sound for 5 years. Alright, so now I'm crying.

Big boy room!

Speaking of diaper-changing, we're finally hitting the potty training hard with Jack. He's been irritatingly resistant to the idea and just generally a turd about the whole thing. Once one turns 3 though, there's no excuse to continue to pee and poop in one's pants, so he's been wearing underwear for a few days now. As a result, I've been washing no less than 7 pairs of underwear each day. We've tried bribing him with candy--that doesn't work. He's unbribable. Neither is he motivated by sitting around in soggy underwear. This one will be a challenge. The good news is that I have a great carpet steam cleaner and we have a leather sofa in the family room, so there's really not much that he can ruin during the course of this potty training process. My next plan of action will probably be to act like I just don't care what he does. If I know him as well as I think I do, that might actually be the ticket.