Sally Sells Sea Shells

Milo woke me up this morning around 4:30. After twenty minutes of trying to wrestle him back down, we finally just got up for the day. Huck wandered out of his room (yup! HIS room! He's been sleeping in his own bed all night for the past week!) and joined us. So I cooked up an Apple Pancake Puff, brewed up some coffee, and felt sorry for myself. We had a poor attempt at potty training the day before, and I stayed up way too late reading about potty training techniques.
So after reading some info from a friend, I have developed a whole new approach to potty training. A more focused, serious approach that will require more attention and a clear plan. We will start real undies and say bye-bye forever to diapers in two weeks! I'm a little nervous, but I think this new plan is going to work.
Which brings me back to today. We headed out to WalMart to buy a whole bunch of Big Boy undies (our new technique requires throwing away every last diaper in the house), new sheets for Huck's bed (we're doing daytime and nighttime training in one go), and a waterproof bed pad. Both of the kids were sooooo good for me in the store! Usually it is a battle of wills and both of them are constantly trying to escape from the cart, but today they were just perfect for me.
We were done shopping by 10:00 AM, so instead of sitting around the house, I decided on an impromptu trip to Mother's Beach. This is the beach/park where we had Milo's birthday party (see Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky! for details on that), but at that time we never actually made it to the beach part of the beach because there happened to be an end-of-school-year giant party going on that same day. So today I thought it would be fun to go back and sit in the sand and make sand castles. I didn't bring any swim diapers or swim trunks because I figured that we wouldn't go in the water.
I was really, really wrong about that. After about ten minutes of making and destroying sand castles, both of the boys started heading for the water. At first I just rolled up Huck's pants, thinking we'd just wet our feet a bit, but soon Milo plopped his little butt down right in the water, and Huck followed suit, his jeans soon were weighed down with water and sand and were falling off of him. After an initial "Oh, crap!" moment, I just gave into it and we had the best time. They were so cute playing together and laughing hysterically and splashing in the harbor. Huck was super excited about the boats and kayaks that would come by, and Milo loved to sit at the edge of the water and dig with his little shovel and watch the wet sand go plop plop plop. I felt like it should've all been recorded on Super 8 film.
The three of us were an absolute mess, but it was the most fun I've had in a long time. I stripped them down to diapers, showered them off and used our one sandy towel to semi-dry my poor, shivering babies. We rushed back to the car, changed into dry diapers and nothing else, and I drove home barefooted. They had a nice warm bath and got to splash around even more in the tub. Then it was grilled cheese sammiches and juice all around, and we all cuddled down for a nice long nap.

Then I woke up and Michael Jackson was dead. How's them apples?