Yesterday marked day three of the Captain’s successful Poop In The Potty campaign. He’s been peeing in it for a while but pooping was the final frontier. We finally got him to overcome his fear of pooping using Sir Monkeypants’ patented technique: bribery. We bought him a new train and displayed it prominently in its box, and told him he could open the box when he produced a poop. Man, he couldn’t get to the potty fast enough. After pushing and pushing with much enthusiasm, there was a present for me in the potty and a present for the Captain in the box.

This pretty much completes potty training at our house. Now the Captain can handle everything himself except putting his underwear back on. We haven’t even had a wet overnight pull-up in about week. I can’t believe that just last week I was telling my younger sister how hellish potty training is, and how she should just skip it with her own son until he gets tired of changing his own diapers at 11.

Gal Smiley is already interested in sitting on the potty (and getting the candy that comes with a successful deposit). A diaper-free life looms before me, and I’m pretty excited. The only drawback is that I won’t be able to make any more posts about poop!

Last night I went to register Captain Jelly Belly for nursery school. It’s just two hours, three days a week, but since he’s a little shy, and I’m a little overly protective, we figured it was good for both of us if we started to ease him into the idea of going to school.

The whole registration experience was surprisingly like the stuff you see on sitcoms set in New York or Los Angeles, where families rush to get their kids on waiting lists and wait for hours in lines and fight to get a spot. Luckily I have a good friend who warned me about the event. First of all, there’s a package of like, 20 forms that you have to fill out. Then you have to have copies of your kid’s immunization records, and copies of your own ID so they can do a police check (so you can take your turn being the in-class parent helper once a month). Then you have to give them a whole set of post-dated cheques to pay the tuition, fundraising amount, and registration fee.

I got there more than half an hour before the doors opened and was third in line, but within a few minutes there were about 20 people in line. Eventually a woman came out to hand out numbers, and there was plenty of joshing around — I did get my number 3, but people later in the line were clearly budding and pushing to get a higher number. When the doors opened we rushed in to try to grab a spot. Kids who were already in the 2-year-old program got to pre-register for the 3-year program, so already there were only six spots left in the 3-year-old program that we wanted to get into. A pre-screener checked my package to make sure everything was filled out and all my cheques and attachments were present — anything missing or wrong, and it’s the back of the line for you. Then I spent several minutes aggressively protecting my place in the line — lots of people hovered near the front of the line, ready to jump in if the opportunity presented, or pretended to be registering for a different program in order to be ushered to the front, only to try to line jump. It was nuts!

After I took my turn (and won one of the spots), I saw another friend of mine in line who really had no idea what was going on. She’d shown up hoping to register but didn’t even have a package, let alone all the attachments and cheques, and by then, there were at least 25 people ahead of her — there was no hope of getting in. She was quite overwhelmed but there wasn’t anything I could to do help her. In the cutthroat world of preschool registration, it’s every Mommy for herself!

Gal Smiley just ate a crayon. A whole crayon. Lime green.

It was definitely a grosser cleanup than any poop, barf, or pee leak I’ve ever had to deal with. She had lime green goo all over her face, hands, shirt, and pants, not to mention completely embedded in her teeth. I had to wipe the inside of her mouth with a wet cloth but she still has green teeth when she smiles.

She was pretty excited about it before the cloth thing, though. I guess the secret to getting her to eat green beans will be to put them in a crayon wrapper!

Loblaws Superstores have introduced their own fashion line called Joe Fresh. Totally adorable little skirts, t-shirts, shorts, and even jeans. Nothing is more than $39. I’m loving it! I think it’s a great idea to pick up something trendy — one of those full skirts on the ubiquitous Old Navy ads, or a shirt in a funky colour — for not much money.

Last Tuesday I had to go shopping for new jeans, something most women hate, but it turned into one of the most pleasant shopping experiences I’ve ever had. The Eddie Bauer was pratically deserted (it was a Tuesday night), and a very nice salesgirl gave me exactly the right amount of support and care, without being too pushy or in-your-face. She helped me find the right style and size and told me they looked great (so key to the happy jeans purchase). During checkout she talked me into getting one of their points cards — no cost to me, and, bonus, they keep the card there on file so I don’t need to carry it around in my wallet — so now I’m one step closer to getting free dollars to spend at their store. Oh, and plus, the jeans were on sale. Awesome!

Then today we went to the Toys R Us, and it was one of the worst shopping experiences I’ve ever had. We went there specifically to shop for bikes for Captain Jelly Belly — his grandparents want to get him one for his birthday. This week’s flyer from TRU had a couple models on sale that we were interested in trying out. But when we got there, we found several sales staff pickup up the display bikes and moving them into a “staff only” section at the back of the store. I tried to stop a guy by telling him we were interested in the model he was carrying, and he just said to grab a purchase card from it, and I pointed out we’d like our son to try it out, and he just said, “Sorry,” and continued walking away with it, with no explanation. It turned out that they had been rennovating the store, so the closed off area was newly finished and due to reopen, so they were moving their stock into that area. But why were they moving it during open hours? Why didn’t anyone offer us an explanation? Why were they moving stuff that was specifically featured in this week’s flyer? And Jesus, couldn’t the guy at least have put the bike down for like, 30 seconds, so we could put the Captain on it for a test run?

We were pretty mad but we wanted to look around for some stuff for our nephews, so we stayed, but that added a whole new level of ire. Several teenaged clerks were chatting and/or flirting and completely ignored me when I asked for help finding a few items. When I finally got one guy’s attention he pointed vaguely at an area on the complete other side of the store, then went back to talking up the girl clerk he was clearly much more interested in. Sorry to interrupt, guys! My apologies for actually trying to, you know, SHOP AT YOUR STORE DURING NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS.

I wanted to complain but convinced me to, “Complain with your dollars,” so we just left the store empty handed. But suckage! I’m almost as angry as if I’d stayed up late watching CSI. Geez!

Last week while watching The Amazing Race:

Eliminated Girl on TV: I got to go around the world with my sister, and that’s more than a million dollars could buy.

: I’m pretty sure a million dollars could buy you a trip around the world with your sister, lady.

A few days ago we had our carpet restretched, so we had to empty all our bedrooms of furniture. When we put it all back, we put the rocking chair that we keep in Gal Smiley’s bedroom on the opposite side of the room. We use the chair when she cries at night to rock her back to sleep.

This morning I have a big scrape and bruise on my arm. It appears that, at 3 a.m., it is really hard to remember that the chair isn’t where it used to be.

Many thanks to Sir Monkeypants for not laughing when he came to pick us up off the floor. I even got scrape sympathy this morning :).

A couple of days ago we were watching men’s curling on TV, the gold medal match between Canada and Finland. This is the name of the Finnish skip:

Markku Uusipaavalniemi

Although I know that looks like I sat Captain Jelly Belly down at the keyboard and let him type some random letters, I am not kidding. Right now the Finnish men’s hockey team is playing for gold and half of their team jerseys have similar vowel-packed last names on them. Those crazy Finns!

Yesterday we rented Red Eye (cute little thriller) and Colby Donaldson of Survivor fame had a small role. It was very strange seeing him in the movie after seeing him on reality TV. I’ve heard from many famous actors how people think they “know” them because they know their characters, and can’t make that distinction. But watching Colby made it clear to me that I can make that distinction for a normal actor. With Colby, I do feel that I “know” him, and trying to buy him in a pretend role was too strange. It was like seeing someone I know on the big screen trying to be a CIA agent — I’d be too aware that, “That’s my friend!” I found I was too conscious of watching Colby do the actor thing to have him just blend into his role. Any other actor wouldn’t have been a big deal at all.

Interesting…I think Colby has definitely come the farthest of any reality show contestant in terms of building an acting career, but I don’t know how far he can go when everyone is distracted by seeing him in a movie.

I just read about this link on EW that tells you the number one song on the Billboard chart for any date since 1940. On the day I was born, “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family was number one, and I’m pretty excited about that. Sir Monkeypants gets “One Bad Apple” by The Osmonds which is how I know we were destined to be together – I love that song.

What’s your song?