Weekly Wrap-up: the one where we potty trained

This week has been intense! And that intensity is probably going to keep right on going through the weekend: we are potty training Dragon. He's doing great. On day 2 he was dry from naptime clear until bedtime. Turns out that, now that he's got it figured out what he's supposed to be doing on the potty, those M&Ms are pretty motivating. Daddy took Hero out for the morning on day 1 (Wednesday), and Dragon and Mom stayed home and just worked on peeing in the potty. He loved it when I got out my camera! I got some great ideas for doing it this time around here. Last time, with Hero, it was a process and he sort of grew into it. This time, Dragon had everything: he wanted underwear, he had control, he understands rewards... he just wouldn't pee in the potty. We got it done though! And now he's doing awesome. We're just doing days for now; when I asked him the one time if he wanted to pee in the night (he'd come into my room and was "awake" already) he just cried and cried. But daytime trained is great for a little boy just past 2! And, once the new baby gets here my budget will really appreciate not needing to diaper them both.

We had a bear that "peed" too; a medicine dropper helped create the illusion.

Hurray for salty snacks and "Daddy Soda"!

Jiggle that pee down; JUMP!!

In spite of all that craziness early in the week, we still got some good school done, especially late in the week. (We took Monday off to recover from General Conference before doing any serious work, Tuesday was full of appointments and a visit to Grandpa and Nana, and Wednesday was Potty Training Day.) We were supposed to finish up Story of the World volume 1, but we're not quite done. Still, Hero did a couple of great narrations. This is one of them:

One of the paragraphs in the story talked about the size of the battle. It was huge. There were 100,000 Celts, and only about 10,000 Romans, yet the Romans won. I didn't think that this had made any impression on Hero, so while he colored his picture of Boadicea I got out our base-10 blocks and our cuisenaire rods. And I showed him what it looks like to be outnumbered 10 to 1. He was suitably impressed. And we talked about how the organization of the Romans helped them, while the Celts just charged in without any plan. Still. Just imagining looking at a force like the blue one coming at your little white guys... intimidating. No wonder Washington was so adamant about the importance of discipline to the army!

Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable;
procures success to the weak, and esteem to all. -George Washington

We'll clean up a bit of math on Saturday, but otherwise, things are looking pretty good. Dragon is (mostly) staying dry; Hero got a good amount of school in this week, even if it wasn't on our usual schedule. His reading is coming along so nicely. I'm going to have to start getting some "Step 2" books to have around so that as he feels a bit more secure in the "Step 1s" and other easy books we've got, he's got something to grow into. One of these days, I'd like to take a trip up to Half-Price books to browse their easy readers all by myself. And, in the mean time, I'm making slow progress on organizing and cataloging my bookshelves. We're getting there!

Check out how other homeschoolers' weeks went at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers: