Happy Birthday, Daddy!!

HAPPY

BIRTHDAY

DADDY!!

Here's Grace's special rendition of the birthday song! She gets a little choked in the end, but she makes a nice recovery! :)

It's been a POOPY day!!

We had a first in the potty training department today. Grace had a little accident right after she sat on the potty. This incident was very similar to potty training a puppy. For those who have been through that, you'll know exactly what I mean. Your puppy finds a good spot, starts circling, and then before you know what happened, there's a huge mess on the floor. This is exactly what happened with Grace today. She JUST got off the potty and we headed to her room to get a pull-up. She got behind her bed, gave me a weird look, and squatted! Her first response was, "Oh Mommy, poopies!" I couldn't help but laugh!! And it all happened in the blink of an eye. So instead of flipping out, I decided to get a video of it to eventually show her when she's 16! HAHAHA! The first video is immediately after "the incident".....I was SO happy I had my phone sitting on her bed. The second video is showing Grace "helping" me clean up the mess. Enjoy!!

I finally broke down and did it......

Our trips to the grocery store are becoming more and more difficult the older that Miss Independent gets. I try to make these trips as fast as possible, but let's face it, sometimes you just need to load up on all of those snacks, frozen items, etc. that you don't need on a weekly basis. I can usually keep her content with her bowl of bushies (goldfish), but that only lasts until around the 4th aisle when Grace wants to start opening everything I put in the cart.

Kroger usually has samples around the produce and deli areas. The samples can range from apples and pineapple to cheese, ham and olives. Grace starts saying, "apples, Mommy" as soon as we pull into the parking spot so you can bet I say a little prayer that we'll walk in and see those waiting for us! Believe me I know it's going to be a good day when Kroger has their apples out....it's the little things in life people! :) You see I can get two pieces of the apples and that tends to last Grace until the midway point of our shopping trip. At that point, I'll call an intermission, run back over to the produce, get one more sample, and finish our trip without too many problems.

And then there are the days when Kroger has NO samples at all!! Grace's reaction can range anywhere from completely fine to "Mommy hold you" as soon as we hit the produce section......NOT GOOD!!

Enough rambling and onto the point I'm trying to make. Like any other grocery store, Kroger has the carts with the car attached for kids to ride in. Grace sees them and points them out every time we're there. However, I was VERY hesitant about letting her get in one since I knew there would be no going back to the "regular" shopping cart. Well today was a day that I needed to load up on all the extra groceries and I knew it would be a long shopping trip. I decided to break down and let Grace try it out. Before all you germaphobic family members and friends cringe at the thought of letting your child ride in one of these, please know that I wiped down the entire car with Lysol wipes! Now just take a deep breath! :) Much to my surprise, there was a seatbelt in the car!! YES, she couldn't escape!! She did great until we got to the soup aisle and I heard the dreaded, "down Mommy" coming from the car! I had to start pulling out some Indy 500 moves to keep her entertained, but overall she did pretty good. So what if she didn't eat a good lunch due to the bushies, pineapple, and Cheerios she ate while shopping. And maybe Grace was even laying completely sideways yelling, "down, Mommy, down" by the time we finally paid. It could've been worse, right!?!?

My next approach is to let Grace walk and use the mini-carts that are perfect for her size. However, I'm sure our shopping trips will get at least an hour longer and cost quite a bit more (after she starts putting all kinds of goodies in her cart) after we start that! :) I'll keep you all posted on how that goes!

My observant and honest toddler

Grace is extremely observant about the world these days, and as any toddler would be, is VERY honest about what she sees. During my pregnancies, I develop skin pigmentation issues that result from spider veins bursting from the extra blood that's flowing through my body. I started noticing little red places on my face around my 5th - 6th month of my first pregnancy. They started to spead like chicken pox and by the end of my pregnancy they were on my face, chest, arms, and hands. It wasn't too bad since I could cover most of them up with my winter maternity clothes. Everyone told me not to worry and they would disappear after I gave birth. This was only PARTIALLY true since a few spots still remained on my face.

During this pregnancy, the dreaded "red spots" started making their appearance earlier than my 5th month! This is leading me to the point of this post. This morning, Grace was in the bathroom with me standing on her step stool "helping" me put on my makeup. I leaned down close to her face to give her some sponges when she looked at me and said, "Mommy are you alright? Did you hurt yourself?" It took me a minute to figure out that she was talking about my POLKA-DOTTED face!! Poor thing! You should've seen how concerned she looked. After a lengthy explanation that included pregnancy, babies, and birth, she looked a bit confused but quickly changed the subject.

Can the warm weather PLEASE come NOW so I can get some sun on this pasty white skin and my daughter won't think I'm bleeding from my face!! It should be an interesting pregnancy since I obviously won't be able to cover up my chest and arms in the dead heat of summer!

And one more thing.......Grace now sleeps with a pillow in her bed. She has always been a child that likes to bury her head when she sleeps. So you can only imagine how she can worm her way into a cuddly pillow and wake up with a fantastic set of bed head. Yesterday after her nap, I instantly started cracking up when I went to get her after she woke up. Check out the pics to see for yourself! We needed more than a little Johnson's Detangler to get rid of that bird's nest!!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Knoxville!!

While some people look for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, we simply look for a pot o' goldfish!! Ok that was bad wasn't it!! HAHAHAHA! Have a green beer for me people!

Updates......

It's been a while since my last post, and I have some updates to pass along.

Potty Training:

I am happy to report that Grace is starting to get this whole potty training thing!! She had 3 successes during the first week, and I thought we were going to have to put it on the back burner again. But much to my surprise, she started going more frequently and now will go (or at least try) every time we sit her on the potty!!! HOORAY GRACIE!! At first, we would hear just a little come out and then we would all get so excited the rest would never make its way out. But now, she is an old pro and will get most of her potty out!! She isn't to the point of telling us when she has to go, but we're getting closer!! I think Grace's favorite part of potty training is when she flushes the potty, washes her hands, and then streaks across the house!! HAHAHAHA!! I never get tired of seeing that little toosh bee-bopping around!!

Moving Update:

For those of you who don't know, we put our house up for sale on Monday, February 22nd. We had 2 showings that Wednesday and got an offer from the first person who came through our house!! Here's the catch.......we don't have any place to go!! The buyer initially wanted to close on March 24th, but settled on the following terms. We have 14 days (until March 12th) to find a house for us or she can walk away from the contract......no pressure there!! Sure we could always go to an apartment and put our stuff in storage while we find a house that meets our needs. But, quite frankly, I would rather poke myself in the eyeballs than have to move twice......especially being pregnant and having a 2 year old to take care of. Can you all understand where I'm coming from here?!?!? So, we have been looking at houses almost daily trying to find what we're looking for. We found a couple that we were interested in, but other buyers got to them before we could. I have my fingers, toes, arms, and legs crossed hoping that we'll find our next home by Friday!!

Pregnancy:

My pregnancy is moving right along. I can't believe this baby is already half-cooked! We had our big ultrasound today. And we're having a..........................................................

did you all think we would cave and find out!?!?!?!? Well we didn't, but dang that is tempting when you're in the ultrasound room! The ultrasound went great! The baby weighs 11oz now and all his/her anatomical parts looked and measured right on!! We got to see a little face, tiny feet, and a hand waving at us. The poor little booger had the hiccups too! There is nothing more amazing than seeing your baby up on that screen and knowing that in 4 short months we'll actually be holding him/her!! I'm feeling LOTS of little movements now and my appetite has hit the roof. I decided to take belly shots every month during this pregnancy and will post those here soon.

I wanted to pass along a couple pictures of Grace. She LOVES school buses and starts screaming "cool bus" every time she sees one. Much to my amazement, there was a "cool bus" parked outside Kroger a couple weeks ago as we were leaving from our weekly shopping trip. The driver was nice enough to let us on board so I could show Grace the inside. She got to check it out and sit in an actual "cool bus" seat! She wasn't too thrilled until we got back in our car. It must've taken a few minutes to sink in because on our way home all she kept saying was, "I sat in cool bus mommy!" The top picture is Grace standing on the cool bus steps!

Grace's finger ends up in her nost A LOT these days. Her usual response to me telling her to "please remove your finger from your nost before I vomit" is exactly what you see in the second picture!!

Events at Sherlake

Today our playgroup went to Events at Sherlake. It was our first time trying this place so I was excited to see how Grace would do. Essentially this warehouse was made into a gigantic bounce house for kids. Grace usually isn't intimidated by anything of this nature, but she wasn't too sure when we walked in. It was loud due to all of the machines pumping air into each bouncy thing. I don't know if that scared her a bit, but it took her a while to get warmed up. She wasn't interested in the little kids area so we took a walk around to survey the goods. We ended up in an enclosed bounce house where Grace just sat and watched the other kids jump around. She got up a couple times, but quickly came back and sat on my lap.

And then Grace found the slide..........................

I'm not quite sure why this felt different to her, but she LOVED it!! She went right up the steps and sat on my lap for the first trip down. And as you can tell from the picture above, she quickly started mastering her olympic downhill belly slide!! I sat at the bottom taking pictures while Lauren and Amy helped all the kids up and down the slide, and I was busting a gut watching their faces as they came down!!!! They each had a look of absolute terror as they came down, but started laughing as soon as they landed......HILARIOUS!! We had a good time, and highly recommend this place. Two hours of play time usually = LONG nap time, right!?!?! haha

Thanks again to Lauren and Amy for helping Grace up the steps so I could get some shots!!