Y it's time for school already!

The alphabet is winding down with the end of summer. We are trying to take advantage of the nice weather while we still can and have been spending as much time outside as possible. I tried to involve the great outdoors in our letter project this week.

We first started off with our traditional big letter Y to hang on Spencer's door. We punched holes in the Y and then Spencer strung yarn through the holes. He concentrated really hard on threading the yarn through the holes and he seemed to enjoy the practice in hand-eye coordination.

Our next project centered around learning about our yard. We took a beach bucket and walked around the yard filling it with random things, like leaves, grass, weeds, flowers, etc. We filled an old spice container with sand from the sandbox. Then we sat at the table on the deck to make some projects. We squeeze Elmer's glue all over some cardstock and stuck on our objects from the yard. Spencer's favorite part was sprinkling the sand like it was glitter. The pictures turned out better than I thought. This was a fun project!

The items we collected from the yard.

Creating the masterpieces.

Sand as glitter.

This week we also started school. I'm not sure who was more excited, me or Spenc. Every Friday morning we attend an Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) class through the Winona school district called Toadally Twos, which is strictly for two year olds. It's in the same classroom as his class last year for 12-24 month olds and has many of the same kids and teacher. Spencer was a bit on the shy side today, but I know it won't take long before he's off and running around like last year. Along with this class, Dave will be taking Spencer to Daddy and Me two Tuesday nights a month. I think that will be good for both daddy and son, especially once the baby comes. Also, Thursday nights we have a ECFE class through the Lewiston school district and Monday nights we have Evening Song. We definitely keep busy during the school year!

We have been introducing the potty to Spencer for quite a few months now, setting him on it in the morning and night. Sometimes he'd pee and sometimes he wouldn't. Recently he has shown more interest in it and has on a few occasions let us know he has to go to the bathroom. Because of this we decided to seriously tackle potty training. I made weekly sticker charts and hung them on his bathroom door to track his progress. Each time he peed, he got to put a sticker on the day of the week. He also got to choose a piece of candy to celebrate his success. At first he was doing great, peeing in the potty a few times a day. Then his progress teetered. He hasn't peed on the potty for a whole week now. Another toddler mom said her potty training book suggested a technique where you potty train part-time with big boy underwear, so I decided to try that. I ordered Sesame Street underwear online to try to motivate Spencer with his favorite character, Elmo. Part-time underwear training consists of putting Spencer in underwear a few hours a day at the same time everyday. Once he is successful in wearing underwear during those few hours, then you increase the amount of time he wears underwear until eventually he is only wearing underwear. The undies came on Tuesday, so we started our first night of part-time underwear training. He ended up peeing on Elmo the first night, but he didn't pee on him the second or third night. We will continue to try this method in conjunction with the sticker chart and see how it goes. If we need to stop for a while and try again later, that's OK.

He wanted to put on every single pair of undies over the top of his shorts.