Pee poop and nap driving

Well, things are getting back to normal after Rocket Boy's most recent trip to Colorado. He was gone Thursday-Tuesday (got back at 3 am Tuesday morning, ouch), and we all survived, barely.

It does scare me when he goes out of town, because what if something were to happen to us? What if I got hit by a car while walking across the Albertson's parking lot and had to go to the hospital? What would happen to the boo bears? I have literally no one I could call in the area. The closest person would be my niece, 2.5 hours away, and she's pretty busy, might not be able to drop everything and drive to Ridgecrest to babysit.

Anyway, Rocket Boy is home again, so I can stop worrying about that for a while. We both had a good night's sleep last night and feel human again, or nearly. It helps that it is not so hot, only in the low 90s.

Potty training is proceeding apace. It's interesting trying to train twins, because they aren't equally ready. Baby B is very into it; Baby A is not. Baby B happily wears "pull-ups," but Baby A cries at anything but a diaper. If I only had one child, say Baby B, he'd probably be trained by now, but if that one child were Baby A, we probably wouldn't even be starting for another 6 months or more.

Their term for going potty is "pee poop," which seems very descriptive. This morning they were watching me get dressed in the bathroom and Baby B suddenly said "Pee poop!" I assumed he already had a full diaper, but I said OK, you can do pee poop, and pulled off his pajama bottoms and his diaper, which was wet. Baby B sat down on his potty and actually went poop. That's the first time. I was so proud, I shouted for Rocket Boy, who came running. "What is it?" he cried in alarm. "Look!" I said, displaying Baby B's achievement.

The look on his face. Should have had the camera ready.

Pause for gratuitous cute photo:



To be honest, I'd like to fast forward a year or two until this potty training business is over. Not my favorite aspect of child raising so far. But then I think: what about teaching them to drive? Surely that will be worse. Let's see, that'll be in about 13 years. Rocket Boy and I will both be senile, of course, so perhaps my niece will be less busy by then and can come up to Ridgecrest and teach them.

Actually, Baby A will probably not want to learn to drive a car, only a "mo-cocko," which is his word for motorcycle.

I've been doing a lot of driving recently, because the only way I can get the twins to take a nap in the afternoon is to take them on a drive. Baby A falls asleep as we back out of our driveway; Baby B is snoozing about 10 minutes later. That means I have to drive for at least 100 minutes so that they can both sleep for 90 minutes. Fortunately Ridgecrest has some nice empty highways nearby, very scenic. On Sunday I took Highway 395 to Olancha, then turned around and came back -- about 100 miles total, a little less than 2 hours. On Tuesday I took 395 south to the Garlock Road, over to Highway 14, then north on 14 to 395 to Pearsonville, turned around, and went back to Ridgecrest -- about 85 miles total, maybe an hour and 45 minutes.

As I drove (while trying not to take a nap myself) I calculated that it costs me $10-12 in gas to do one of these trips. Compare that to the cost of daycare, where they do still take naps: about $44 for the two of them per afternoon. Of course, when they're at daycare I can do whatever I want, whereas when we are on a drive, I have to be driving. Oh, and then there's wear and tear on the car.

Speaking of wear and tear, today I had to take my car to the tire place, because my left rear tire was quite low. I bought a new set of tires from this place just a few months ago. Anyway, it turned out the tire had a screw in it, so they fixed it for $10 (got to figure that into the cost of those drives). I'm very glad the tire didn't burst when I was out nap-driving yesterday. But at least Rocket Boy could have come and rescued us.