New School for Dad, New Potty for the Boy

I haven't written in quite some time so I thought I would. I found out recently that I'll be starting my new school in May. That means that after nine years and no degree to show for it I will leave be saying goodbye to Utah Valley State College. A lot of times when we move on to something new we have the tendency to talk trash of our past stages. I don't really have any bad feelings about UVSC, though. It's been good to me and I've learned a lot. I should, I've passed 117 credits and have withdrawn from 30 or 40 more, largely due to moves across the country or stupidity on my part. UVSC has its flaws like any school but all in all I enjoyed my time there. I'll finish out this semester for financial aid purposes and then be done with it. I'm on to Westwood College Online where I'll be pursuing a Bachelors Degree in Game Art & Design. Yup, I'm gonna help make video games. At least there's a good chance I will. If I end up in a similar field where I'm able to make 3D creations (aka modeling) then I'll be equally pleased. Hopefully I'll finish at Westwood before I turn 30 and then I can get into my career of choice.

On an unrelated topic, we attempted to potty train Anders yesterday. We chose a bad day to do it, though, because we went out and about yesterday morning. Katrina and Addie went to a Women's Conference in Orem and that lasted like four hours or something. So Anders and I were looking forward to some 'guys only' time. We hopped in the sweet 91 Accord wagon and drove all the way down the street to Wally's World (Wal-Mart) where we bought Anders some flippin' sweet shoes. From there it was on to the always exciting land of Spanish Fork. Spanish Fork. Who named that place? I digress. We froze my gym membership since I have decided that my education is more important than my health right now. Then we went to Kmart where I purchased a lamp to use with my photo tent that I've been working on (to help me shoot photos of my pens and such at nilscreations.com) and from there we went to a 10:40 AM showing of Curious George. That was especially cool for three reasons: 1) It was just Anders and I in the entire building. Other than employees there were no other souls in the entire place so when Anders asked if we could leave four times I encouraged him to sit whereever he wanted and he thought that was cool so I stayed where I was and he occupied most of the seats in the front row. 2) I like animated films and this one had a cool look to it. It also featured music by Jack Johnson. You gotta love Jack Johnson. 3) It was great Father-Son time. There's nothing better than hanging out with your boy. I had fun and Anders did, too.
From there it was on to Burger King for lunch. Whopper for dad, nuggets for Anders. I'm always amused at the staff of fast food joints. It's as if they're oblivious to the fact that there are customers present. They yell strange things, stand around talking, throw things, mock one another or whatever else they learned in Jr. High School and they don't seem to notice that they're being watched by seven people in the eating area. I'm proud to say that I've worked at McDonalds, Burger King and a Sandwich Shop so I know all about it. I hope I never forget the valuable nonsense I learned in seventh grade just in case I work at one of those places again. One can only dream.
When we got home it was time for potty training. I explained to Anders how it was all going to go down and he seemed pretty cool with it. Off went the diaper, on went the Thomas the Tank Engine undies. After a while he said he had to pee so he sat his bum down on the 'You pee in me and I'll sing you a song!' throne. Nearly 30 minutes went buy and still no pee. If he had peed he surely would have missed, though, because he spent much of the time squirming around. Later on he peed his undies while I wasn't looking. His undies were wet so he stayed in them and got a taste of the discomfort that comes with that. Later he peed again, I cleaned the floor up again and he stayed in his undies. Then it was nap time and I should have put a diaper on him but I didn't think about it so he peed some more. By the time he got up, we were babysitting our neighbors' daughters so we put a diaper on him and called it a day. So from this experience we have gained practice cleaning pee up from the carpet (as if we needed more), a little more laundry to do and a three year old who has probably learned nothing about potty training. Katrina is going to try again tomorrow and the next day and so forth and I'm sure she'll be much better at it than I was.

Well I'm all typed out now so I'm going to post a few photos. First is Addie. It may look like she has jelly on her nose but unfortunately it's a scab. She fell down three or four stairs face first and got rugburn on her little nose. It's sad but she's been a trooper about it.






This picture may look strange but if you click on it you'll see a better view. This is how much of a geek I am. This was taken at 12:51 AM a few days ago. The cool thing about it is that I didn't alter this image in any way. I set my camera's shutter speed to 15 seconds (a super long shutter speed), turned out all the lights and got my flashlight with a blue lens on it. I took a dozen or so shots like this, then Katrina came home from her stamping party to find me in my underwear with the lights out and the camera set up. I quickly showed her the pictures to erase any suspicions that may have arisen. :)

Here's Anders playing some coloring games on the computer. It's pretty cool to see him using the mouse and playing games on the computer. He still has a hard time with certain aspects of it but all in all he's doing pretty well. Aaaah, my little geek in the making. Mwuhahaha! I'll have him building websites and modeling characters in 3D next year.






Katrina and the kids. :)