jonesing for another 3-day weekend

We're not excited about going to work tomorrow. It's been a great weekend.

This morning we took advantage of the aftermath of the storm and took Baby outside to play in the puddles. She had a great time and we did, too. Took lots of pictures. Borrowed a lesson from my cousin and managed to get her hair into pigtails with the help of certain candies that start with the letter M... (and can't lie, there is some pain in my heart that I used chocolate as a bribing award, but it worked!).

The Hater went to see the Thunder play this afternoon. He was bummed that they lost.

After Baby's nap I took advantage of him being gone and made a lovely mess. Started working on Mother's Day presents. Learned a lot after Christmas crafts - mostly that I need to give us far more time than I think we need.

bleary-eyed

The faultless plan was a bust. At 4:38 this morning Baby decided that it was five o'clock somewhere and that it was time to get up.

Thank goodness for redness reducing eye drops.

I may be driven back to drinking caffeine if she continues the early morning reveille.

decadent

We had another fabulous day today that started about 4:55 am. Baby's alarm clock has been going off earlier since we moved her to the big girl bed. Bless her heart. I tried keeping her up a little later tonight, but that just didn't fly at all. She kept saying, "Mommy, (insert her name) tired." I kept trying to change the subject and talk about more exciting things and she'd raise her voice and say, "Mommy, I sleepy!" "Bed!" I ended up keeping her up about 20 minutes later tonight and she was pitiful by the time I put her down - she cried, which she rarely does, off and on for about 30 minutes until she finally went to sleep. I'd almost rather just let her get up early because it just seems tacky to make her stay up when she's ready to go to bed. We'll see in the morning if this torture made any difference, but I'm not holding my breath.

The last month or so I've changed her nighttime routine to include saying the Lord's Prayer. For about the last week she's been saying the last couple of words of every phrase with me. Today in church she said just about the whole thing when we prayed it as a congregation. I was so excited I wanted to jump up and down and run the aisles, but seeing as how that's not a tradition in my church, I just quietly beamed from my pew.

At the end of about 97% of the services we end with the same song. It's upbeat and I'd never heard of it before we started going to this church (which really is saying a lot - I know a lot of hymns!). Anyway, out of the blue today she started singing with us... and sometimes matching pitch! I can hardly wait for her to sing with me. She sings with me some now ("Sing" is her favorite - circa Carpenters), but she's getting better at matching pitch if it's a whole note.

After church we hit the grocery store for some staples and then we went out for lunch. I took a gift card that we'd received for VD. I'm back on the Weight Watchers wagon, so I knew ahead of time what I could get -- and it was really good. At first I didn't think that Baby was going to eat, but she scarfed most of it down. This girl could eat her weight in oranges if you'd let her. Anyway, when it came time to pay I put the gift card down and the lady came back later to say that it was empty. I laughed and told her it had been a gift from my mother-in-law. She thought it was funny, too. Baby laughed, but that's only because she likes to laugh when everybody else does.

So our adventure after nap was baking a practice batch of oreo chocolate cake. I like to cook, but I'm not a baker. I don't do sweets. This is a recipe that Sister sent me - it's complete chocolate goodness. And the icing , oh the icing, homemade icing, had crunched up chocolate in it, too. This is the first time I've ever used confectioner's sugar in my life, and I liked it. I've got a half dozen cupcakes iced in the fridge to take to work tomorrow to see if they're worthy for a birthday #2 celebration. The rest of it has been frozen. If it's approved by my distinguished panel of coworker judges then I'll have one of the four birthday party celebrations done.

I took the obligatory pictures of Baby licking the beater, placing cookies in the baking cups, and using the wooden rolling pin. She really wasn't as into the whole cookie/chocolate/icing/sweet thing as I thought she would be. After supper tonight I tried to ask her if she wanted to try some of her cake and she was certain that she didn't. She wanted a popsicle, specifically a green one. She settled for red and I'm thinking that I should have more of those when we have our parties because she's more likely to want those. At about 30 calories a pop compared to all of the chocolatey goodness in the cupcakes, I'd much rather let her have a green one.

crabs and duct tape

Gross.

Baby and I took advantage of our new diapering situation and played at the mall today. She ran, I ran, we had a great time. She played in the petri dish for nearly and hour and I took some fun pictures. The best part about being the early bird at the mall is that usually that means we get the petri dish to ourselves and we can be extra silly. Sometimes big kids who are really entirely too big to be playing there will run in and be far too rough (coincidently, these are usually the kids whose parents just sit there and say nothing about their rough play around the little ones or their inability to share).

We ate lunch at the food court and on our way out I found a new skirt that I just had to have. Actually, I found it yesterday when I got out of work early, but I thought about it all night and decided to go back and get it. Baby didn't mind humoring me because this particular store also has a large section of hermit crabs. They kindof give me the heebie-jeebies.

She konked out before we left the parking lot. Actually, it was before we even got to the end of the row where I was parked and before I could turn to the road behind the mall.

Before we left for the mall we killed a little bit of time by getting out the duct tape dress, et voila, it still fits! (Actually, it's still a little big -- so we'll have more opportunities to dress it up later this summer.)

an amusing aside

So guess who looked at me shortly into supper tonight

and declared that she needed to poo poo?

The universe cracks me up sometimes.

Pottypalooza Round One: Things Learned

The Hater and I had a very long heart-to-heart last night. When we kickstarted potty boot camp Baby had several definite signs that she was ready to potty train. Unfortunately, most of these disappeared in our second week of training. Here we are a month later and we're not convinced that she's physiologically or developmentally ready for this step.

Nobody failed. No disappointments.

Really it's not that big of a deal. Just like the fooler, we'll try again in a few months.

I was anxious to tell day care since they've been so insistent that we persevere, but she agreed quickly without me having to go through my well-rehearsed story. Baby wore diapers today and did fantastic, really enjoyed being able to participate in all of the group activities. I went to work very much relieved.

The best news of all is that we can spend more time playing now! It was 77 and windy this afternoon and we played hard at the swingset. Mostly she crawled around under the picnic table looking for clumps of dirt to label as "rocks", but we also attacked the slide and gave lots of love to the neighbor's dog. We came back and The Hater had burgers on the grill. I could get used to this!

I've not yet decided what our exciting weekend adventures will be. We've not really been out of the house in the month that we've been doing this, other than to go to church or day care. As of now we have call for rain both days, but we'll see how that pans out this weekend. It's all up in the air for now, but I can promise you that we won't be home all weekend. Nosireebob. We're going to celebrate being 100 weeks old.

That's right. Guess who turned 100 weeks old this week! What Nana said was true, "The days are long but the weeks are short." And what a wonderfully blessed 100 weeks we've had.