Mushed Together

These girls are hard to keep up with. My mind is spinning with all the things I am trying to remember to record, and I am just plain tuckered out tonight. I'm out of energy to try and craft organized posts, so the last week is about to get mushed together, much like my brain, in random tidbits before it is erased from my memory completely.

-Jillian has been asking about Wee Wednesday's at Sargent's (aka "gardening class") since we did it last summer. The time finally came last week to go to 'gardening class', and I signed A up as well. It was the first time she's been to a class like this and I could tell she was pretty proud of herself. She did a good job keeping up with the big kids, and we enjoyed learning about the difference between annuals and perennials, and exploring the nursery with a scavenger hunt.

Selecting rocks on the scavenger hunt

-Grammy was here from Wednesday to Monday, and we all enjoyed her presence. The girls got a lot of extra attention, craft time, snuggles, toe/fingernails painted, and they had an extra person to play their current favorite pretend game together--princesses. I had a hard time keeping it all straight, but I'm pretty sure Adrienne was Princess Amber, Grammy was Hildegaard, and Jillian was Princess Chloe. Again, hard to keep up. Matt and I were able to attend the welcome dinner for the new radiology residents one night, and also enjoyed a second date night out to a quiet dinner and then over to the Taunton's for a fun and hilarious night of games and chats. If you need to laugh, I'd recommend playing both Quelf and The Game of Things after a couple of cocktails. Tear-inducing laughter for sure.  Grammy was also a huge assistance in potty training Adrienne. More on that in a bit. Thanks, Mom, for always giving of your time and love.

-This week Jillian is enjoying an Angelina Ballerina dance camp at a local studio during the morning hours. I am looking forward to the performance on Friday. I registered her for this in March, and then suddenly Sunday morning realized that I should probably get her some ballet clothes/shoes, since the last time she did any official dancing was before Adrienne was born. Ah, the life of a procrastinator. Thankfully Wal-Mart (if you can believe it) has a pretty impressive Danskin section that allowed me to take care of the little problem in a less than 5 minute stop. Check. My little dancer is enjoying dictating to me which color of outfit (black or pink) I should set out for her while she sleeps so she can put it on first thing in the morning. Despite this uncharacteristically somber picture of her, she is having a ball.

-The girls have developed into quite the little singers in the car. I have managed to get them hooked on my current favorite song ("Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros), and they both know it by heart. I love hearing them duel as they try to see who can sing it loudest. Adrienne is now spontaneously bursting into song. In fact, instead of sleeping she is upstairs singing "Alabama, Arkansas, I do love my Ma and Pa" as I type. It is quite a catchy tune...


-I am cautiously optimistic that Adrienne is potty trained. Currently, I am putting her in a pull-up for nap and overnight only, and in underwear the rest of the time. I upped the ante and am now giving her 1 "potty treat" for going pee and 2 for poop (in the form of an M&M or Skittle). After an accident at RAC Kids Club yesterday and one on the way home from swimming, she had an accident-free day today! When I exclaim how proud of her I am she always compliments me right back, "I am proud of YOU, Mommy!!" She really is quite hilarious about it all. When she has to go potty, she uses her code phrase--"I need to get potty treats". That's my cue that she has to poop. She will then sit on the potty for quite awhile and give me the play by play--"I have poopies in my bottom. I need to push my poopies out". After she goes I will ask her if she is done, and I often here "I have more poopies in my bottom". If she's done, there is clapping and an exclamation of "Yay, I did it! I get potty treats!".  She is certainly not shy about bathroom time.


-Jillian's level of sass is pushing me to my limits. It is very hard to teach her what it means to be respectful, and I can just see her intentionally pushing us to see if we will follow through. After a pretty rough afternoon, she finally laid her frustrations on the table: "Mom, I am just tired of being bossed around. I really am. I don't like to do what you ask me to do because it's  not what I want to do. It's not fun. I get bossed around all the time!" Lord, help me now. I hope everyone reading this is praying for me. Seriously.


-Adrienne continues to be so, so silly. She makes me smile and laugh with nearly every sentence that comes out of her mouth. I'm not sure if it's her little nasal voice, or the maturity of the conversations (probably some of both), but she is just hilarious. All of the following came out of her mouth this afternoon:

• "Oh, Mommy, I love your shirt! Did you paint that?" (in response to a solid purple workout shirt I had on)

• "Oh my goodness, Jillian! Look at this mess in yo room!" (when she walked into J's messy room)

• "What's the matter, Mom?" (when she saw me trying to get my folded-up contact out of my eye) and then "Here, I kiss yo' eye" (and she did)

• "Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get across the playground " (her version of the joke Jillian shared immediately prior. The real answer, of course, is 'to get to the other slide', but A's answer is definitely a plausible scenario)

• "I need a haircut". She says this anytime you touch her hair.

• And at bedtime, just as I was putting her pajamas on her, she stopped me, grabbed her chest, and said, "Deez are my boo- boos, Mommy. Do you see my boo boos?" I am sure that discovery came after a conversation while I was dressing this morning. Adrienne pointed to my chest and laughed , which led Jillian to educate her that those are my 'boobies'. And there you have it. Adrienne now has 'boo boos'.

-Matt was being goofy as we took the girls upstairs last night and made mention of the catwalk area above our great room. I could hear Jillian questioning him and laughing as he pretended to be a cat on the catwalk, and then she quickly shouted downstairs to me to make sure he was telling her the truth "Mom, Dad says this a cat bridge! Why do we have a cat bridge in our house?!?!?" I actually like her term better than the correct one.

-And finally, my favorite story of the day. The girls were having a rare cat-fight free moment and had quite the play scheme going where they were pretending to go on a picnic. Adrienne suddenly shouted that she had to wash her hands before they 'ate' and went running for the bathroom. Jillian hollered, "It's OK, Adrienne! I have hand sanitizer!" And that's how you know you are passing your germaphobic tendencies onto your children, folks. They can't pretend to have a picnic without having pretend hand sanitizer. I am both proud and ashamed.