January Recap

 January has been a busy month for Ryan. First and foremost, he is (almost,very nearly) potty trained!  It has been a slow process but he is now exclusively in 'big boy underpants' during the day. He still wears overnight diapers at night. We had tried several reward systems for potty training (stickers,candy,etc) with only minimal success. What finally worked? Money. He gets pennies for using the potty, which he then happily deposits into his ceramic cow bank in the kitchen.
  After the Christmas season ended, Ryan had some trouble accepting the idea that he wasn't going to continue to get presents every few days. He started begging and crying for toys every time we went to any store. I finally told him that we didn't have money for toys but he did...in his cow bank. It was like a light went on in his brain, and he has become obsessed with saving up for a new squishy toy. He even decided against riding the penny pony at Meijer and opted to save the two cents in his bank instead.
   Preschool is going well. He loves his teacher, Mrs. Maggie. It is a co-op, so I work frequently in his classroom. This is  a good thing, because if I relied on Ryan for information about his class, I would be out of luck. On the days that I don't work there, I'm lucky if he tells me what his snack was and what toys that he played with while he was there. I get no updates on what craft they did, or songs that they sang, or even which kids were there. (By contrast, one of the moms of a little girl in the class said that she gets a full run-down of everything that happened, who was bad, who said what, etc.) Must be a girl thing. All of the other moms-of-boys said they get the same vague answers that I do.
     Forget Thomas the Train. So long, Bob the Builder. Ryan's newest obsession is the ocean. Ocean animals in general, but with a special concentration on anything with scales, gills, or a blowhole. He has two ocean books that we own and must read every.single.night. I also get a lot of books from the library and we sit and discuss the different types of sea creatures. He has the one book memorized, and he can identify many different types of fish by sight at the petstore.He really wants an aquarium, and I told him that he may have one when he is four. The countdown is on! Every day I am asked how much longer it is until he turns four. I told him it has to be hot out first, and that seems to be a measure of time that he can easily grasp. He was looking outside today and lamenting that it can't be hot out with all of this snow on the ground.
 He also tells me (about twenty times per day) that he REALLY wants to go back to the zoo to see the animals. He has also taken to having his squishies tell me too, usually in a high squeaky voice (when he's not blaming them for things that he got in trouble for,that is).