The Crib is Like a Car and I Am Like a Group of Clowns

Kate still takes naps.  Maybe not every day, but often enough to be worth the effort.

The effort required is lying down with her while she falls asleep.  Which usually involves me falling asleep as well for a few minutes.  Until I hear one of the other kids coming upstairs, at which point I wake up in a panic and run as quietly as possible from the room to intercept them before they wake Kate up.  Any parent knows nap time is precious and worth some crazed tiptoeing and frantic silent gesturing.

But up until a couple days ago, Kate was still sleeping in her crib-turned-toddler-bed.  I am... not small.  So laying down with Kate was no simple task.  The bed still had rails on 3 sides.  It usually involved scooting her over as far toward the wall as possible and then laying down in the fetal position with my knees tucked up over her feet.  Then I would still be so close to the edge with my back end cantilevered slightly over the side that I would be in danger of falling out of the bed the second I drifted off.  To balance myself and hopefully prevent this, I would reach over her and grip one of the rails along the wall to keep from rolling off the side.  But it's hard to relax while gripping that rail.  Then Kate would fidget and violently cuddle me as she tried to settle down.  Meanwhile I used all my will power to keep from falling and/or sneezing because her hair was tickling my nose but I couldn't do anything about it because one of my hands was frantically holding on for dear life and the other one was locked in her death-grip cuddle.  And if I moved the arm she was cuddling before she was all the way asleep, it would rouse her and then take forever to get her to drift back off again.  Unless she was already mostly asleep, in which case if it woke her up TOO much she would decide that those 3 minutes of heavy lids was rest enough for her, and then she'd be nap-free for the rest of the day.  And once she would finally fall asleep and it was time to get up frantically jump up to intercept one of the other kids, I would have to carefully untangle my arm from her and my feet from between the slats and try to set them on the ground directly behind me with out falling backwards.  Usually if I managed to do this, somehow my feet would end up inside Kate's baby doll crib.  Which I would then frustratedly move FAR out of the way so that I could be sure one of the girls would move it right back in the way again the next day.

But over the weekend we did some furniture shopping, took down the crib, and put Kate in a twin bed!  I never thought a twin bed would feel SO spacious!  When I lay down with her now, I almost feel sad and nostalgic getting rid of our crib after using it with all three kids, but I'm usually too busy still fighting the cuddle-vice and the sneeze urge...

Bonk!

She walked around like this for awhile.  She thought she was SO funny.  Even when she kept running face first into walls and furniture.

Best $15 I Ever Spent

Someone FINALLY went #2 in the potty!  So off we went to let her pick out a present:

 

Of course - OF COURSE - she picked the pink fancy nightgown with princesses on it.  I keep underestimating Kate's capacity for cliche girly-ness.

Not until I had Kate did I come to truly understand that there are (at least) 3 different genders:  tomboy, ALL-boy, and girly-girl.

In other news, we're an all underwear house now!!!  Kate's pleased because all that junk in her trunk fits into her pants MUCH better now without the extra padding.

Pretty Much Sums Things Up

M finds me the BEST cards.

Mom Said I Had to Wear Shoes To Go Outside...

"No Mommy, I do it!!!"

My Favorite Little Bum

We went to the park with friends the other day.  It was chilly enough to need a coat but not a hat.  However, Kate insisted.  And she insisted on wearing her little backpack the entire time.  Add the jeans and tennis shoes and I'd say she was totally rocking the homeless person look, don't you think?

Photography Challenge Day #6 - From a Low Angle

 

I learned something about shooting in manual mode.  When it's a very dark cloudy day and you're chasing your toddler around your kitchen trying to get photos of her shoes, the lighting changes A LOT.  It's really hard to keep your photos properly exposed and your white balanced.  Especially when adjusting your settings will take 0.5 seconds and she will only stay in one place for about 0.3 seconds.  Maybe toddlers do occasionally call for not shooting in manual mode?  SIGH...

 

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is over.  Posts may or may not be daily.

My rules for my self are:
1 - Take everything in manual mode
2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

C'mon Scott, Your Baby Sister Can Do It!

Scott and Kate are quite the contrasting pair.  Scott being very reluctant to do new things by himself, and Kate being QUITE the opposite.  Kate seems to be quickly overtaking Scott in many areas. Yesterday was an interesting day of firsts in our house.

First of all Kate, my little pantry bandit, came wandering up to me drinking a contraband juice box.  Apparently she can unwrap the straw and poke it into the hole now herself.  Scott couldn't do that until, like, last month.  (Anyone have any tips on how to keep a toddler out of a pantry with double doors but the kind that latch up at the top?  All the lock type things I find for child-proofing won't fit around full size door knobs, but the regular knob ones are worthless since these knobs are just for pulling, not turning.  The rope set up we've tried fails on so many levels.  It's hideous AND cumbersome.  So cumbersome that I never remembered to re-weave the intricate knot around the knobs and therefore just stopped using it.)

Second of all, Scott learned to pedal a tricycle.  Yes, he is in Kindergarten.  He's been a bit of a late bloomer in this department.  Up until yesterday, he just didn't care to do it enough to bother.  Every time I would coax him onto a tricycle, he would try for a second and then give up because it wasn't instantly easy.  But Claire and the neighbors were having bicycle races up and down the street and he figured out he would never keep up on his scooter.  Yay for peer pressure!!!  So he was determined to head down the path towards mastering the bicycle.  He did great on the tricycle, so we tried putting him on his bicycle with training wheels, but that resulted in a freak out of epic proportions because it was "TOO HARD!!!"  Oh well, at least my 5 year old can finally pedal a tricycle a mere month or so after my 2 year old figured it out!

A Casual User

  
Kate is a casual potty user.

We tried potty training Kate earlier this week.  Originally I wasn't planning on it until she was much older, but it seemed like Kate had other plans.  So we gave it a go.

I don't know what we were thinking.  She didn't seem to mind when her underwear got wet.  (I think underwear is like an accessory to her, "YES!  We get to go try on another pair of underwear!")  She refused to go on the potty if I suggested it.  It was pretty miserable.

After two days of (confession!) me being in tears by late afternoon, we gave up.  Of course I'm wondering what I did wrong, but I think I have settled on not shouldering the blame too much myself.  Maybe she just isn't ready.  Maybe I'm just not ready for what it would take.  She's younger than Claire and Scott were when we potty trained them even though she's showing more signs of readiness than they did.  She talks, but nothing like Claire could at this age so I think there are some communication issues going on too.  I think we just need a little more time.

I've never been so happy to put a diaper on a child!  For now Kate seems to be content continuing to just use the potty when it's her idea and she's in the mood.  So most mornings when she wakes up and almost every night before bed, she gets the brilliant idea to use the potty.  Before I know it, she has stripped her diaper off herself and done her business.  Then she gets a few M&M's as reward and then we put her diaper back on.  And as long as I never suggest she use the potty, everything's good.  For now, this halfway state seems to be working.

  

When You're So Excited You Put Underwear on Over Your Clothes

We went back to school shopping the other day and while we were there I decided it was time to let Kate pick out some big girl underwear.  We went to the underwear aisle and I laid out all of her choices and told her to pick one.  She pointed at one.  Then another.  Then another.  So I tried to explain to her to pick just one and put it in the cart.  She picked one up, put it in the cart, then came back for another package and tried to put it in the cart too.

Obviously this was not working.  So I went ahead and narrowed it down to just three choices for her.  And told her to put just ONE in the cart.  So she proceeded to stack all three packages on top of each other and try to carry them all to the cart in one trip.  Ha!  Nice try Kate.

I know she's barely two, but I KNOW she understood me.  She was just trying to be tricky.  But finally I convinced her that she had to put all but one back and that did it.  She loves cleaning things up so we put all the others back on the rack and ended up with Hello Kitty panties.  Of course.

We proceeded to the checkout and as I thought we were about done checking out I looked over and realized that somehow Kate had gotten the package of underwear out of the cart and had opened it.  She had pulled three of the six pairs out of the package and was carefully unrolling them.  I quickly grabbed the package while she screamed in protest, had the checkout clerk scan it, then quickly gave it back to Kate.

By the time we got the car loaded and I was ready to put Kate in the car, she had managed to put her legs through the leg holes of two pairs of underwear. I went ahead and buckled her into her car seat still clutching her beloved package of underwear.  When we got home, she had four pairs of underwear put on as far as she could get them while still sitting buckled in her carseat.

Later when M came home, I told Kate to show him her beloved new underwear.  It took us all a moment to locate them.  She had taken Claire's new school backpack and had loaded it up with all six pairs of her new underwear and had been toting it all around the living room all evening.

I'm thinking she likes the underwear...

 

Thanks, But It Would Be Better If You Would Just USE THE TOILET!!!

Why must motherhood involve so many graphic discussions of poop?  I'm sorry for this, but a) this is a pretty funny story and b) this IS my life, so if you want to hear what I have to say, it's gonna be smeared with poop every now and then.

Kate is showing all the signs of being ready to potty train.

Take just now for example.  She had a poopy diaper and I got out the supplies to change it and tried to call her over, but she refused to come.  Before I could manhandle her into coming over, I was pulled away by one of the other kids for a few minutes.  When I came back over, she had laid herself down on the changing pad.  She had taken off her own pants, set them nicely down on the floor next to her and had opened her diaper.  I found her in the act of trying to wipe the poop off her own bottom with some wipes.  There was a huge pile of about 10 wipes covered in poop as well next to her diaper on the changing pad.

Really Kate?  Could you just let me do it?  If you're so keen on taking care of this stuff, then why is it that every time you tell me you want to go on the potty, I help you sit down and nothing happens?  You brought it up, not me.  I have been stalling until you were a little older, because the idea of potty training a just under or just over 2 year old who barely talks makes me tired just thinking about it.

On the other hand, has this approach ever been tried?  I mean, diapers are expensive, but the worst part is the hassle.  What if I just train Kate to change her own diapers (but do a better job at it, of course - 10 wipes is a bit excessive for the average poopy diaper) instead of trying to coax her body to learn how to go when she's sitting on a potty?

Genius.  I'll let you know how it goes ;)
  

Contrasts

Scott still asks me to open everything for him.  Every granola bar package.  Every candy wrapper.  Every peel-back yogurt lid.  It's an area I think we need to work on this summer before he starts Kindergarten.

Kate, on the other hand, is quite resourceful.  In the time it took me to load my groceries onto the belt at the store the other day, she managed to reach into the basket and grab a package of yogurts.  This in itself was quite a feat because I pile everything on the opposite side of the cart from her.  She has a tendency to hug loaves of bread to death and such.  I'm sure people go by my cart and wonder why the side nearest the handle is nearly empty while the opposite end is like a teetering Mr. Everest of groceries.

After she grabbed the package of yogurts, she managed to pull one of the cups free from the carton.  Then she managed to peel back the lid.  When I turned back from the conveyor belt to make sure I got everything out of the cart, I saw Kate sitting there eating yogurt with her hands.

Lately when Scott asks me to open his bag of cookies, I tell him he can only have it if he opens it himself.  After all, Scott, your baby sister can do it!

Maows and Bows

Kate turned two!

She still obsessed with all things girly.  But she shows a definite proclivity for cats and hair bows these days.

Her name for cats is the sound they make, which she says, "Maow."  She has a little stuffed cat she likes to sleep with and when she asks us to find it in the depths of her blankets in her crib, she always pleads, "Maow."  M and I decided to name her little cat Chairman.  Now we both get a nice chuckle when we go searching for her little Chairman Mao.

No outfit is complete for Kate without a bow in her hair.  Preferably a clip AND a bow.

Whenever she sees me sitting writing something on paper, she insists that I draw her a cat with a bow.  

Logical birthday theme?  The most famous cat WITH a bow of all. Hello Kitty of course:

If you find yourself wondering how I made these buttercream Hello Kitty cupcakes, feel free to read on.  Or if you don't care, that's fine by me.  Go on your merry way.

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I used frozen buttercream transfers to make the little Hello Kitties.  I've always wanted to try this technique.  The results were fabulous (if I do say so myself) and it was suprisingly easy.

First, I found an outline image of the Kitty herself, made it the right size and copied it as many times as I wanted cupcakes.  (I didn't have to mirror the image like you normally would because Hello Kitty is ambi-drawable.)  Then I printed it off and taped some waxed paper over it.  I put it on a cutting board and then went at it with a tube of black frosting and a simple round tip.

I outlined the whole image first:

Next I switched to red frosting and colored in her oh-so-important bow:

 Then I filled the face in with white:

All the frosting color changes would have been a pain, but thanks to this idea, it was easy and not very messy at all!

Then I took the pink frosting I was going to frost the cupcakes themselves with and piped around the outside of Miss Kitty to support her little whiskers.  The main idea here is to think backwards.  Pipe the things you want to have look like they are on top first and the things you want to look like they are on the bottom last.  As my last step I piped a layer of the same pink as the cupcakes over the whole thing to give it some beefiness.  When I was all done I got my finger wet so it wouldn't stick and pushed down all over the design to make sure everything was flat and as air-bubble-less as possible.
 

Then I popped them all in the freezer for about an hour.  When I took them out, they easily came off the waxed paper in one piece.  In fact they were small enough that I could just pop them off the waxed paper and stick 'em on the frosted cupcakes like stickers.  Delicious buttercream stickers.

Peek-a-boo Pet Door

We don't have a pet, but there was a pet door out to the garage when we bought our house.  One of these days, we really should replace that door.  But until then, it sure is useful when Kate wants to check up on what M's doing out in the garage.  She is very disturbed by lawnmowers and always points at ones that are running and says, "Owie."  So this way she can see what he's up to when he's doing yard work without actually risking contact with the evil mower of pain and destruction.

Silence Isn't Golden, It's White and Really Hard to Wash Off

I had one of those, "It's quiet... too quiet" moments and went looking for Kate.  She was in the living room which is designed to be "safe" for her, so how bad could it be?

I called her name and she came toddling toward me.  I saw she had a little mess on her hands:

I smelled Desitin.  Clearly someone left the closet door open and she had gotten into the diaper changing supplies.  And she had a bigger mess on her foot:

So she played with the tube of Desitin and got some on herself.  Not too bad.  I can take that.  Phew.

Then I walked around to the other side of the couch to find the lid for the Desitin tube and saw this:

Kate had decided to change her baby's diaper.  That baby doll must have had some wicked diaper rash:

Girly? Yes, But Also She's a Firecracker

She brought both these items to us and demanded we help her put them on.  Then she wore them around for a long time!

But I'm sure she'd be disappointed to know that she's much too cute to be scary...

 

  

Fire Ants, How Do I Hate Thee?

Let me count the ways:

Never mind.
I lost count...

My Girly Girl

Kate is ALL girl.  Her favorite shoes right now are these babies:

Today, she insisted on wearing them to the park.  I tried to explain to her that heels just aren't a good choice for the playground.  But she didn't listen... just like a typical 21 month old, sheesh! She stumbled around the wood chips on the playground for a long time before she finally admitted defeat and insisted on going barefoot.

The other day she wore these all morning and then I forced her to let me take them off for her nap.  She went to sleep for about 2 hours and then I heard her just waking up, so I went in her room to get her.  When I got to her crib, she looked at me while still rubbing her bleary eyes and the first thing she said was, "Shoes?"  (And she meant these yellow heels, oh yes she did.  I tried playing dumb and offered her sandals.  She wanted NONE of that.)

I'm really not sure there's anything more comical than these little thunder thighs ending in those shoes.  I'm sad because her little chubby feet can BARELY squeeze into them anymore :(

And bows and clips?  She loves them!  Claire will refuse to leave the house rather than be caught dead wearing a ribbon in her hair.  But Kate requested this hairstyle awhile ago:

Claire and Scott have this set of magnetic pieces that build cars.  The wheel pieces have treads on them that they discovered can be removed.  Whenever Kate finds these removed car wheel treads, do you know what she does with them???

Wears them like bracelets.

For hours at a time!

She's not even 2 years old yet, but we've known all along that Kate is super girly.  Her first word was "shoes."  You wanna debate about "nature vs. nurture"?  Once you have 2 girls that you raised pretty darn near the same and one turns out like Claire and the other turns out like Kate, there is NO question.  They come with their own little personalities.  And the personality on this one is cracking me up!

You Learn Something New Every Day...

And Today It Was Two Things - Both of Which I Preferred Not Needing to Know

Today was one of THOSE days.  This afternoon as we were all getting ready to take Claire to soccer practice, I ran upstairs to put some laundry away.  Kate came upstairs with me and somehow located several Sharpies and had a little fun.

Bad News:  She did all this while sitting on my bed.
Good News:  The duvet we currently have on our bed is solid black, so we'll never even know if she got some on there. 
Bad News:  Her feet are STILL covered in black marks.
Good News:  Her legs were spared.
Bad News:  Her legs were spared because she was wearing leggings, which got Sharpie on them.
Good News:  The leggings were dark blue.
Bad News:  Not quite dark enough blue to disguise the black marks entirely.  And they were new.  This was only the 3rd time she had worn them.
Good News:  I learned today that, just as the internet suggested, isopropyl alcohol DOES remove fresh Sharpie from clothing.
Bad News:  It takes lots and lots of isopropyl alcohol and lots and lots of clean rags.  And I had a cut on my finger.
Good News: Thanks to the leggings being dark blue, I think I got enough of the Sharpie out that it isn't too noticeable.
Bad News:  While I was elbow deep in rubbing alcohol, Kate found a bottle of lotion that Claire had decided she no longer needed to keep in her backpack now that the dry winter air is gone.
Good News:  Kate didn't get lotion ALL over the house.
Bad News:  The cap WAS open and it was on her hands.  And a little on her dress.  And all around her mouth.
Good News: There was still lotion in the bottle, so she didn't drink all of it.
Bad News:  I don't know how much lotion was in the bottle to begin with.
Good News:  I now know how to call poison control. 
Bad News:  We were late to soccer practice. 
Good News:  It was "Mint Chocolate Chip" lotion, so Kate smells minty fresh now.
Bad News:  The diarrhea she might get from potentially ingesting lotion will probably be not so minty fresh.

Effect and Cause

Last weekend was general conference for our church.  Over the course of the weekend, we got to hear from the leaders of our church via internet broadcast in several 2 hour sessions. 

It's wonderful, but not always easy with the younger set.  Really, Claire and Scott did surprisingly well.  Kate did pretty well during the first session on Saturday morning, then she was asleep for the second session.  But by Sunday morning, I could tell she was wondering, "Why are were doing this again?!?!?"

After a while, a restless Kate started folding her arms and acting like we were going to have a prayer.  At first I thought she was misinterpreting the talk as a prayer.  I'm sure when you're in the middle of it, a prayer and a talk don't sound that different to a toddler.

Then I realized I wasn't giving her enough credit.  She was trying to end the meeting.

Normally at church we have a closing prayer, and then the meeting is over.  So if she could just get us to start praying, then this long boring meeting would be over, right???