Weekend Intelligence: Adventures in Potty Training

Alternate title: "We're gonna need shampooer after this..." This nice, long Labor Day weekend was the weekend we decided to start Clara on the potty. This means my parental duties involve at least twice as much fecal matter as they did before, and with about four times as much excitement about it. So, in typical weekend intelligence fashion, here are the highlights.

In Game:

I'll start with this part, since it's easiest. Keri and I pretty much tore into BLM all weekend. At nearly every opportunity, we went out to get some experience. When we had enough people, we'd hit Mt. Zhayolm and kill wamoura larva. When it was just us, we'd go to our faithful standby of clocktower rats. We're now less than 10k from 74: there's light at the end of the tunnel!

Aside from that, I farmed Whitegate for Retrace and Teleport requests in between farming zeni for ZNM. I even did one mercenary job of escorting a RDM through Castle Oztroja to get his crest for limit break 3 (ability to gain levels 60-65). That was a cool, quick 30k. I made about 80k overall, but spent some of it upgrading gear and leveling Alchemy, which I have nearly capped on Vitriol.

We also completed Apocalypse Nigh for Keri and Vudian, the last two members of our mountain climbing static that needed it. Fight went much more smoothly this time around, and I'm glad that I can completely close that chapter of my adventuring career.

Soulfire decided that Labor Day Weekend was a good time to try to do some Kirin sets. While several key players/jobs were out on vacation. Yeah. Good idea. The result was a 4 hour Kirin session where we only popped 2 sets... That's right: average 2hrs/Kirin... That's like watching paint dry. We simply didn't have the numbers and spent most of our manpower zombie-zerging the silly thing. One member stated he watched all of Blazing Saddles in the time it took to pop Kirin and bring him to 25%. We really shouldn't lowman things like Kirin. If we did things like that at Jailer of Love, people would be howling...

House and Home:

Labor Day Weekend is named such, not as a celebration of the working man and well-earned repose from said work, but because you labor HARDER that weekend. -.-; I must have pushed through 7-8 loads of laundry, and a good chunk that workload was sheets. Clara's sheets. More on that later... On top of this, we got a nastigram from the homeowners' mafia about our yard, so I needed to work on that as well.

DeAnn had an interview with a company that does basically the same thing she's doing now on Saturday. She said it went very well and they would be sending an offer letter sometime in the next week. I'm really looking forward to her having a new job lined up for when her current one expires - we'll both be able to breathe a sigh of relief. She also had an interview for a contractor position on Friday that sounded promising as well.

D decided that we were going to begin potty training proper this weekend. Since she's gotten into the habit of taking wet diapers off and throwing them across her room from the crib, we have been introducing her to the idea. But this weekend was the big start. We sat the potty chair in front of the TV and gave her all kinds of fluids and foods and waited for nature to do its thing. And waited. And waited. I swear I lost more brain cells watching Cartoon Network's Labor Day Pokemon Marathon than I ever did in college. While this was going on, I was doing yard work and laundry and trying to keep a toddler seated on the pot. Not an easy feat, but I think somewhere in there I unlocked the secret of being in 2 locations at once.

The house is starting to show some scars from the adventures, though. Particularly the carpet. In one instance, I turned around for 15 seconds to fold a sheet and put it up in the linen closet, and Clara decided to jump up from the potty with an ear-piercing shriek, run to her bedroom and pee on the carpet the whole way there. Another time she sat on the potty and farted for nearly an hour, only for me to give up and go get her a pull-up. While doing this, she got up and took a dump right in front of her bedroom door. And then there was the after-nap diaper lobbing. She soiled her diaper after Sunday's nap, which she promptly took off and lobbed across the room, landing soiled-side out against the wall. After that, she peed on all her blankets and pillow at the head of her bed, then went to the foot of her bed and pitched a soda can sized loaf there. Yay, even more laundry. -.-;

So that went on all weekend long without any real progress. Somehow, all weekend long, she managed to go to the bathroom on everything else in the house except the potty. I've gotta have patience with this though - just gotta think about all that change I'll be saving by not dropping it on diapers. And to her credit, she did go to the bathroom on the potty during dinner on Tuesday, after the weekend was over. We had a pretty big celebration and made a big deal about bringing it to the big potty and flushing it down. She was really mesmerized by that, so we're gonna have to watch her to make sure nothing goes down the ho~ole that shouldn't.

Between potty training shifts, laundry, gaming and the occasional blissful nap, there really wasn't much more to my weekend. The everyday chaos, while it can be a nuisance and makes for really good blogging material, is worlds apart from the crisis-mode where we started out. What we experience day-to-day now is nothing compared to the constant joblessness, the fear of living in a dangerous neighborhood and the sickeningly hot, inefficient (and thereby expensive) apartment that used to be our reality. Even with D's job ending this month, she's had some REALLY promising leads lately, and I'm loving my job. As D put it the other day, "Looks like we've hit the middle class full stride."