is half a million projects at once too much?

I owe some posting here.
We had a great trip last week... short and sweet. I have some pictures I should throw on here, but it's such a hassle with this little netbook I'm still stuck working with, so maybe later.

The last two days (in between watching the weather updates while tornado sirens go off) (seriously... enough with the storms already-- it's almost November!! i'm kind of tired of 80 degrees by now.) I've been in hard core unpacking/organizing/decorating mode. I mean even more hard core than normal. In the next two weeks I have a birthday party and possibly three different houseguests staying here all of which kind of require the use of a functional house, you know? I'm pushing hard to get at least the family room, kitchen, entryway and two main bathrooms done.
Oh and Halloween? When's that?

I was distracted tonight by rush redoing Sawyer's birthday party invitations, which I thought were made up and ready to go two weeks ago, and ended up starting over from scratch. But they're ready to send out tomorrow, so all is good now.
Should probably do a little party planning while I'm at it. Sneak peak?...
















Camping party. Complete with tent and campfire and s'mores.
Super excited.

Speaking of party, Sawyer just brought home not one, but two more birthday party invitations from school today. That makes a grand total of seven birthday parties he's been invited to.
We've only lived here for barely over six weeks!! Crazy. Apparently 90% of the population of Nashville was born within two months of each other!
Not to mention four family members' birthdays we did while we were there last week.
Sheesh.

i'm putting on the mommyblogger hat for a moment

I've been debating writing this... it's one thing to blog about your kid's struggles and achievements with potty training in general... everyone goes thru that and they're usually young enough that it's all just cute and toddlerish and part of life and can be kind of endearing to have recoorded(after the fact).

But this is different and older and seems more, I don't know, private. Probably because he's older. And he's sensitive about it... the type of thing that comes up in heart to heart talks lately.

But I still need to hear opinions and advice, and I know it's something a lot of kids go through and part of life, so here it is. And hopefully he'll forgive me when he's a teenager.

Sawyer's been wearing underwear for almost three years now. We still used pull-ups at night. When he was first potty trained, he wasn't even close to staying dry at night and I didn't care about nighttime... Savannah did the same thing. She was daytime pottytrained at two years old, but wouldn't stay dry at night. By three-and-a-half years I started pressuring her to wear underwear at night and we did the whole limit liquids, wake her up to go before we went to bed at night, etc, etc, and she still couldn't do it. She just slept too hard and couldn't make it all night. I finally, after months of laundry and early morning alarms, decided it was us being night trained, and not her and I gave up and said so what, pull ups are fine and we were all much happier, slept much better and she started staying dry naturally all by herself by her 4th birthday.

So I didn't even have nighttime dryness on my radar with Sawyer at all. I didn't care, it'll happen when it happens, and all that.
But then last summer, when he was three and a half, he started asking to wear underwear at night. He still didn't have dry pull-ups in the morning, but he wouldn't drop it, so we finally put him in underwear at night... and amazingly he stayed dry! From day one he would stay dry all night (minus the random accident here and there, but really it wasn't even once a week) and I thought we were done with pull-ups forever.
This went on for a good three or four months.

And then he stopped taking naps.
And suddenly we'd find him every night having accidents again.
Every. Night.
No matter what he'd had (or hadn't had) to drink, no matter if we went in to wake him and take him to the bathroom, no matter what.
My take on it was since he was no longer napping, he was just too tired and sleeping too hard and not waking up to go. So after a few weeks of trying and/or waiting for him to adjust, I finally said we were going back to pull-ups. And he was fine with it. We were all fine with it.

The thing was, even though he was wearing pull-ups, he was still wetting his bed. As in soaking thru the pull-up. Almost every night. Which was odd.
And then this spring, when we started making a few long road trips to Nashville all the time, I noticed he always had to go to the bathroom a lot. A lot. Apparently, this kid is a racehorse.

After one especially rest-stop-filled trip (seriously, five stops in under two hours, and still didn't make it in time for the last one. a wet carseat two hours into a six hour car trip?? not a fan.), I started trying to connect dots with the whole having stayed dry at night for months, but then suddenly not, and wetting so much at night, and now noticing how much he really goes during the day...
I called the dr. and we went in for some tests.
Everything came back normal however and she said it's just him and his habits and not to worry about nighttime at all... he was only four.
Which I totally agreed with. Agree with.

But over the last few months, turns out Sawyer doesn't agree with it.
Turns out it really bothers him that he can't stay dry at night. Like to the point where he's embarrassed about wearing a pull-up at night. He's frustrated with himself and wants so badly to "be a big boy."
Which took me by surprise.
I mean, I can understand that coming from a seven year old or something. But a four year old? He's really upset that he's going to be turning five and is still wearing pull-ups. Like really, honestly upset. This is a Big Deal to him right now.

So after a few heart-to-hearts about it, we decided to just bite the bullet and do it.
I talked to a friend and she said that her dr had recommended setting an alarm for 12:30/1 o'clock in the morning (something about a natural sleep cycle or something??) and getting him up to go to the bathroom... doing that for like two weeks straight and getting his body into the habit of at least partly waking up to go and eventually at least deciding if he needed to go.
So that was our plan.

But here's the thing.
We're taking him to the bathroom before we go to bed at 9:30/10 and then getting up and taking him again at 12:30... and we're still having accidents. Sometimes he's already wet by 10 o'clock. Other times he's dry for the first trip but then wet by 12:30. Other times he'll stay dry all night.
And he's so stinkin' happy when he does.
But SO disappointed when he's not.

And my biggest issue is that he's not even waking up when he's wet. He's laying in a huge puddle, but he's completely out and clueless until we wake him up to go to the bathroom and get changed. So in my mind? It's not going to work right now. He's just not physically ready.

But how do I get him to accept that?
I don't know what else to say to him to help him feel that it's all okay... that he is still a great big kid and no one else cares at all if he still needs a little extra back-up at night. He's just fixated on this and I'm not sure what to do.

I'm relieved we're going on a trip next week because it's an excuse where I'm saying he HAS to wear a pull-up (being in other people's beds) and we don't have to deal with it. Even though he's let me know numerous times he's not happy about that.

Anyway.
All that to say... anyone have any advice?
Anyone who's been through this have any ideas or new tricks on trying to help him stay dry at night?
And most importantly, any ideas on how to talk to him and help him understand that it's okay if his body isn't ready to keep underwear (and a bed and sheets and a quilt!!) dry all night.
Anyone?
Help!

so i know i promised house pictures...

...and I do have them. But they're on my big camera and I'm still working at not-quite-full capacity here on our little Netbook rather than my laptop who is still on an extended leave of absence or the desk top which has still not been set up since the move, and of course I have no idea where my card reader cord thingie is, so I can't get the pictures up online right now.

I do, however, have other pictures and updates of goings-on and should probably get those in here before we flit off on vacation our trip to Oregon next week and I'm even more hopelessly behind.

Let's see... where to start?
This past weekend we went camping... in our backyard! Well, to back up even more, a couple of weeks ago, our friends the Robertsons, had made a trip to just north of Nashville for a weeklong annual camping celebration with friends up there and we were invited to join them. We did go up there to spend a day (nope, no pictures of this one) (and the kids had a blast- the campout was on a family's property and they had goats and chickens and tons of room for the dozens and dozens of kids to run free... so many kids and we all had a fabulous time of fellowship together!) but didn't feel like we had it together enough to pull out our camping gear and take a few days off of the house stuff. The kids however, have been asking about camping ever since.
So this past weekend we were talking about doing a backyard fire and s'mores with our friends here and it somehow turned into an all out campout. Our friends needed to fulfill a overnight camping badge soon for boyscouts or something or other and we all ended up just camping out in our backyard! (No pictures of this one either.)
It was tons of fun... we had a big fire and cooked hot dogs and s'mores and the kids played and played and played and we sat around the fire and then the dads and kids headed for the tents and the moms headed to our respective houses to sleep soundly in our beds. :)

The rest of the weekend we spent on some easy projects, visited the library and the park and had a movie night. (hmm... no pictures of this either.)

I know I have some pictures of something around here...
Hold on, let me check my little point and shoot card...
Oh, Sawyer's field trip!
We went to the pumpkin patch with his class... it was a great farm and we had the perfect weather and a fabulous day!
(and sorry, this are full-sized un-edited as I have no photoshop on here!)

i should probably make note...

We adopted a new money sucker member into the family.















Maybe it's the novelty of driving a vehicle with actually less than 100K miles on it or one where everything actually works... but I am officially in love!
Aside from having to replace a screw-impaled tire on the way home from purchasing the car, we've had a smooth honeymoon period. We've actually become fast friends; the combination of coming off of three weeks of being tied to the house and feeling spoiled with the luxury of a new(er) car has had me driving it way too much for my wallet's sake...

unsettled

So, Hi.
No I did not forget that I have a blog.
I actually think of it every day.
Welcome to the land of "oh I'll just blog tomorrow...."

And here we are three weeks later.
Even my husband's been on my case about when am I ever going to blog again. :/

I am not kidding or exaggerating when I say this house/unpacking/organizing/decorating thing has taken over my life. Eat, sleep and breathe it. Really.
But the sad thing is, you probably wouldn't know it from looking around here. It's a long and slow process... one step forward, two steps back, and I more often than not feel like I'm just going in circles.

I mentioned before how this house is so different than our last mostly in the form of NO STORAGE. And while I kind of pride myself in us not having a ton of stuff, or at least making good use of what we do have.... turns out we have a lot of stuff. And nowhere to put it all.
So I'm having to be tons of creative, and while we've been ruthless in going thru our stuff and weeding out a bit, it's been a challenge to figure out how to store all this stuff amongst our living spaces. And I like clean, simple, uncluttered living spaces.
Games, craft supplies, books, books, books, sewing machine, office supplies, etc, etc, etc.
Incorporating them into our decor or better yet, tucking and hiding them away, has been -is- an ongoing hurdle.
And doing it while trying to not spend money? Ugh.

Suffice to say, we don't have one single room in this house "done" yet.
Four weeks in and nada.
Which is so different that our last move. A month in last time and I had a good half dozen rooms done; painted, unpacked and decorated.
Uh, yeah. Not this time.

Also last time? We had met and hung out with and gotten to know a ton of friends already.
This time? Notsomuch.
I feel like we're I'm holed up in this house all the time.
We were actually going to invite a family over for a fire and s'mores last weekend but ended up starting painting the family room instead.
If I'm not working on a project, I'm thinking about a project or trying to thrift shop for a project (addiction to craigslist in full force).
I'm feeling like I have ADD when it comes to this house... I can't get everything done that I want to get done so I flit around from room to room doing little things I can and starting things before other things are finished and it's getting a little out of hand.
But I know from experience from the last two moves... if there's something I want done I want to do it right away if at all possible. Or if it's at all possible to at least get anywhere close to what I want. Instead of putting it off and saying someday and then either never doing it or finally doing it years down the road and saying, 'that was so easy, and makes such a difference, why didn't we do that a long time ago??!?
So I'm trying to be creative and inventive and this big house is consuming me.

But that's just me.
The other people living in this house apparently have lives to live. Sawyer's already been invited to three birthday parties, SJ's been to one, they've been over to play at friends houses and they're always out in the backyard. They've each already had a school field trip we've gone on and we had a park playdate with Sawyer's preschool class this week.
And Ryan of course has been working and getting out and actually socializing.
We did go out and have pizza and a mini game night with the one family here we know last weekend.

I just feel like I need to get our house together... like I need to make our home before I can focus on being social, meeting new people and making new friends.
I don't know why that is this time. Maybe because opening our home and being hospitable is so much of how we are social. It's like I don't know how to function without a house.

I do love this house. And I really love the potential of this house. Right now I feel like it's all work and stress and wanting things that I probably can't make happen right now, but I'm trying to make it work for us and get it to where I do love it.
I want my family to love this house. I want it to feel like us. Like we belong here.

Anyway.
Now lately my brain is not only full of house stuff, but now I'm trying to figure out Halloween costumes, decide whether or not I can plan Sawyer's birthday party in time and with no money and to top it all off we decided to take a trip to Oregon. Next week.

At least it'll be a week off from thinking about my house!

I did take pictures though... and I'll hopefully get around to sharing them later today.
Not that I expect y'all to have been waiting on pins and needles, but I know how it kills me when someone moves into a new house and I'm just dying to see it, especially when it's long distance and I'm just waiting, waiting waiting for pics of the new pad. And for some reason I know a lot of people who've moved this year so I speak from experience. And I'm not talking just the pictures from the listing, but real pictures from a real perspective and with all their real stuff in the house. Not to mention any names (ahem!) but I'm just sayin'... we all love house tours!!
So whether you've been waiting with baited breath or just hugely rolled your eyes at me, I'll get some pictures up here by the end of the day.

Meanwhile I have about 24 loads of laundry to fold (seriously, I have never actually put any clean laundry away since we moved in... we're still "building" our closet and Savannah still doesn't have a dresser and Sawyer's closet door is broken so our guest bed has become our clean clothes catchall) and more to wash and I have trim to paint and I should probably finish vacuuming. And I'm babysitting all day so I should probably go check on those boys. They're a little too quiet upstairs...