A Beautiful Day For the Zoo

Tuesday was SUCH a gorgeous day! When we left for the zoo at around 1pm it was 65 degrees. BEAUTIFUL! And my car said 75 degrees on the way home, so apparently, it only got better while we were there. :)

I decided we should go to the zoo since we have a year-round pass. I called to invite my parents along too, and of course they wanted to spend the day with their sweet sweet granddaughter!

Going over naptime was OK - considering that's when the weather was the best...but probably not the BEST decision - based on how tired children get when they aren't getting their nap. She did fairly well, although she was scared of EVERYTHING. And I'm sure that had the most to do with being tired. She tends to be a little afraid of animals, but she was freaking out pretty badly. Yeah, she was tired.

It all started in the Children's Zoo where animals run free and you can feed them. Well I know Molly doesn't enjoy that. But whenever my parents are along that's where we go first. And of course a big ugly shaggy sheep came right up to Molly begging for a snack and she panicked. That was the beginning of her scares. Then on to the amphibian house. LOL She was scared of everything there too. We would push her up to the glass of an aquarium and if the turtles or fish came too close, she'd start crying and trying to get away. Some good did come of it though! She learned the word TURTLE!!! Yay! And by the end, she didn't seem so afraid of the turtles. Haha!

The day ended when we were in with the apes and one particularly liked Molly and followed us all along the window and was even signing to Molly a little bit. Molly - unimpressed. She wanted to GO!!!

I did capture some pictures of things she was not afraid of though to share.

She was NOT afraid of this turtle. I don't believe she saw it..but she wasn't afraid of it! Woohoo! (Did I mention that EVERYTHING in and after the amphibian house suddenly became a turtle???)


Also not afraid of whatever turtle she was looking at here. :) Isn't she lovely though?


This is a bison turtle. I'm sure it looked much like a rock to her the way it didn't move at all.


She also didn't see this turtle. But hey...not scared of it!


She may have been scared of this zebra turtle. I'm not sure. I was trying to get it to turn its head for a better picture. But I heard my dad call it a "horsey" several times while she argued "turtle." The poor girl is bound to be REALLY confused one day.



Here are a few of her enjoying getting to be her independent self.





And while she WAS at first VERY afraid of the gorilla turtle statues, she warmed up to them after I stuck my finger in the nose of one and told her I was getting his boogers. Oh the things we do to help our children get more out of life.




Then she fell asleep within two minutes of being in the car, and the rest of the beautiful day was blissful.

Adventures in Potty Learning

As you may or may not know Molly is completely in LOVE with Dora.

Ok there may not be total truth to that. She WAS completely in LOVE with Dora until she received, I'm sure, pretty close to EVERYTHING that was ever made Dora. Including this Potty Chair

Now she has fallen in LOVE Blue from Blues Clues. Of course.

This potty chair happened to be on clearance one day in November for 15 bucks. It's a 3-in-1. So you start out using it as pictured, and then when she gets big enough to get on the big potty, but still small enough to fall in the big hole in the big potty, you take the top off and the green cup out and use the top on your big potty and then the bottom flips upside down as a step stool to get on the potty and to reach the sink to wash up. Way cool. So I snagged it that day. I thought we'd just toss it in with her Christmas gifts. But we then decided it's not really Christmas gift material, plus she had 17 other Christmas gifts already just from us. So we just put it the bathroom to let her start getting used to it being in there.

Richard and I take turns bathing her. And one night on his turn he started sitting her on it for a few minutes naked before he put her in the bath. He fixed her up with a little book and she was great for a couple minutes while her bath ran. Then gets up and gets in the tub.

He told me he was doing this, so I decided to try it on my bath-giving nights. It didn't go over as well for me. She just stood up right away or got mad each time.

Mind you, we don't think it's necessary to push potty learning at this point, so when she would stand up or get mad, I happily let her.

Well in the last week or two she finally started letting both of us put her on the potty chair before bath. And a couple times she has even gone to the bathroom asking to sit on the potty chair. (Of course, she sits down and points to her bath toy bag because I let her play with her Pooh and Piglet bath toys that she can only play with in the bath or on the potty. LOL. She's in it for the Pooh, not the Poo.)

Last night, I was running her bath water, and asked her if she wanted to sit on the potty. She said "No." But she meant Yes. LOL She's answering No to everything right now...you have to listen to her tone or just know what she really means. haha. I sat her on the potty and gave her the toy she wanted and then I kept putting my hand in the bath water and dribbling a little onto her legs. She sat on the potty for a few minutes and then was finished. She really enjoyed the water dribbling though and wanted to do it to herself.

As she stood up, I noticed there was PEE in the potty chair!!! Yay!!!!!!!!

I squealed and told Richard to come look! I probably freaked her out a bit, but I gave her tons of huge hugs and just kept carrying on how big a girl she is. I was so excited! I showed it to her, and showed her how we dump it in the big potty and flush and wash our hands.

Oh I am so excited! Of course, I think it was a fluke. The timing happened to just be right...but I have hope now because I can see a light at the end of the tunnel! And I still don't really plan on pushing too hard, because I still don't feel like she knows the sensation means it's coming. This morning she was running nude and twice within 15 minutes she peed on the carpet and didn't seem to notice until she heard the noise. Then I put a diaper on her and it was wet within an hour. So she's definitely not holding her urine for the two hours or whatever they're supposed to be able to go pee-less. I'll just keep an eye on her and let her cue me in when she's ready for us to really start potty teaching. But these are the first steps!!! Yay!!!

Good Car Troubles?

Yesterday after work I went by my parents' house to pick up Molly, but I needed to run to a store down the street before I came home. My mom graciously offered to keep Molly while I did that. I got in my car, started it right up, and drove to the store. I was in the store for no longer than 5 minutes. When I went back out the car wouldn't start, it did nothing. So I went back in and asked a guy if he could jump my battery. He did and it started right up. I went back to get Molly and left the car running so we didn't have to deal with that again. I got home nicely.

Last night we were loaded up to go play at the mall and once again it was dead. So we jumped it and took it to Walmart to get a new battery. When we were telling the guy our problems, he said it would be about an hour and a half wait. We debated, but then he added that our car should be too new to be having battery issues, so we might just want to talk to the dealership and maybe it would be under warranty still.

We went back to our car and it was dead again. But thankfully, they could jump us with a battery they had there.

This morning I called the dealership and he said that this WOULD be covered under our warranty! WOOHOO!!! So I'm supposed to take it in today. I think I'll have to find a neighbor who will jump me so I can get there. But I'm just so excited to have a car problem that isn't going to cost me half of my savings!!! Yay!!! (Hopefully I don't get back on here later tonight to tell you that they found it was something else that isn't covered! LOL)

Weight Issues

I'm going to make my first weight complaint blog here. And I know for some of you, you will be sick after reading it because it's pretty pathetic. But bear with me here.

Ok here's the story. So I've never really had much of a weight issue. I think through high school I weighed about 135. Which for my height was on the higher end of "normal." Then in the last 3 months of high school my weight catapulted to 170. At that point I was definitely "over-weight." But it didn't last long, even though it wasn't taken care of properly. I just quit eating until I was down to about 120. It took about 18 months before I realized I was pretty much as small as I would get, and decided to start eating normal portions again. Then I leveled out at about 135-140. I think that's just what my body was made to weigh.

At the beginning of my pregnancy I weighed 142. At the end of my pregnancy I weighed 177. Within a few months, I was back down to my 140. Right where I should have been. But THEN we ran into the issues with Molly's allergies, and I quit eating all of those foods and quickly dropped to 120. Molly was weaned the day before Thanksgiving, when I just couldn't fight the temptation anymore and really wanted to eat some cake or pie or something like that. (Gosh, I'd really expect myself to remember that better after 6 months of not eating the "good" stuff.) I expected myself to dig right into Thanksgiving and Christmas foods and be back to my 140 in no time. And all the time of losing weight because of Molly's allergies I kept holding off buying too many new clothes because I knew it was only temporary. So I just kept drowning in my size 8's.

But here I am now, two months later, eating a ton, and not healthily as often as possible (in hopes of getting where I should be sooner) and I've only gained 3 pounds. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? I'm terribly nervous still to go spend a bunch of money on a whole new wardrobe, but Lord knows I need to. I just know a month after I do, I'll either put back on my 20 pounds or else end up pregnant again.

What to do? What to do?

PS...yes I realize some people would give a left kidney to have this weight problem...but it's real to me. (And probably the worst part is that I can't even fill an A cup any more...which means in a year's time I went from a D (sure I was nursing, but still) to an A-. Ridiculous!

(OK now I'm done complaining!)