Movie Madness

My first reaction to the massacre at the Aurora, CO movie theater early yesterday morning was, "Not again." One of my sorority sisters worked at Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora in 1993 when another gunman went on a crazed, though systematic, elimination of the employees. (Story here.) Thank God she hadn't been at work that night. Then, of course, there was Columbine in 1999. Though these kinds of incidents aren't localized to only Colorado, it seemed strange to me that Aurora was the site of a second attack of this kind.

Particularly, as others have said, because it seems so random. The Chuck E. Cheese incident was perpetrated by a former employee, Nathan Dunlap.  Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were students at Columbine High School. Though it's still early in the investigation, there doesn't seem to be any connection between the suspect, James Holmes, and the Century 16 movie theater. 


There are many who are trying to figure out why and who to blame. But all I want to do is hug my friends and family and tell them I love them. It's tempting to stay locked up safely at home, but that's not living. (And not necessarily safer.) We'll get through this the same way we've gotten through other hard times: with faith, family and friends. Praying for the victims' families, the suspect and his family, and all the law enforcement for healing and peace. 

The Race by D. H. Groberg

Today at church we talked about facing opposition. When we were preparing for communion, the speaker gave a synopsis of the poem, "The Race" by D. H. Groberg. I thought it would be great to share with you all, so here it is:

Potty Training: Part Deux

So they say that the second kiddo is so much easier to train. I don’t know who "they" are exactly, but that’s not been the case at our house. Part of the reason is due to the fact that when S was that age, she was at an in-home daycare with an older woman who only had 3 kids. They were all the same age, so when she was potty training, it was her focus for all three of them. I did the 3-Day plan (which didn’t work, BTW, though it was a great jumping off point), and then we sent S to daycare in underwear with a couple of extra outfits. Things went fairly well in the long run.

The in-home daycare they are at now is with a different woman who is also wonderful, but has 8 kids in her charge. She doesn’t have the time to devote to potty training, so requires the kids wear Pull-ups until they are mostly accident-free in underwear at home. Pull-ups are just expensive diapers. Fine for naps and bedtime, useless for potty training. And intensive weekend training isn’t enough to get Baby R accident-free in underwear. Naked? 99% successful. Panties? Maybe 10%. Obviously she can’t be naked at daycare, but putting her in underwear all weekend and then in Pull-ups all week is just confusing. So even though we’ve technically been training for a month, we’re at the same point we were with S after about a week. I’m trying not to stress about it; as we always hear, it’s not like she’s going to go off to college in diapers.

The best part about it is that for some reason she started calling it "peep" - "Mama! I went peep!" So funny.

On the plus side, we seem to have hit a breakthough this weekend by switching the treat/prize from peep-ing on the potty, to NOT peep-ing in her clothes, and making it to the potty. We'll see how this week goes at daycare.