Thursday, July 25, 2013

garden harvest!

oh man, my garden has started producing and i love it!!

this is where we started at the beginning of July...


now my lettuce:



and my beans, my delicious delicious beans!
i have been harvesting about a handful almost every night.

they are my delicious crunchy chip alternative
:) 


i'm linking up this week with Outside, At Home
the blog of two sisters who i love love love.


Friday, July 19, 2013

resolution update

back in January i resolved a few things to happen over this year.

here is the updated list:

1-to finally stop biting my nails for good -- disgusting habit, even more so when you are a nurse. blech.
update: well, they aren't being bitten, it's been about 2 months i think, but i go back to work next week, so we'll see if they last til then!!

2-to go outside with the girls in the winter! -- this is tricky for me, i don't like being cold and it seems like a 
tremendous amount of work to bundle up 2 littles when i don't want to be outside in the first place!
update: we went out a bit. proof: 
on this day Isla refused to let Megan sit on her lap



so she sat on Megan, then as we were coming home, the sled tipped, Isla barely fell out but cried like she was dying, and poor little Meggie basically did a starfish face plant into the snow, a poor little old man walking down the street jumped over about 3 snow banks and almost fell down to try and pick her up, small babies stuck face down in the snow i guess are a little alarming! anyway, when i picked Megan up she just blinked at me. This is a pretty accurate demonstration of first-born vs. second-born. 
just a little snow this winter

3-to get back into cloth diapering -- i was a cloth fiend with Isla, and i had a pretty decent start with Megan, but kind of fell off for awhile (mostly they get cleaned and then live on top of the dryer for weeks at a time!)
update: after a few fits and starts, we've been back on full time with Megan when she's not at daycare and with Isla during naps.  Yay!

4-to sew some things -- really i just want to sew, anything at all. 
update: sewed some amazing bunting for a friend's little nursery, and started a quilt! oh, and made some little face or bum cloths, hurray!

5-to read 40 books this year -- as mentioned here.
update: just finished my 13th, i would probably be further on if it weren't for the longest most disappointing finally give up JK Rowling book. 

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

thoughts on potty training

so.
we've been attempting potty training for about 3 and some months now.

it went awesome the first few days, than poorly then well for a month and a bit, then poorly and then very poorly.

what i mean by this is that Isla always did well when we asked her if she had to pee, but probably only told us she had to pee a handful of times.
she also has very rarely pooped on the potty.

this has been a frustrating time, lots of pees all over the place: our house, outside, and at friends's houses.

i found myself starting to be angry with her.

i was rethinking the whole potty thing when the last thing that happened was 2 visits in a row at the same friend's house she first pee'd on the couch and then the next time pee'd all over her friend's room... that was covered in toys. oy vey. (to be fair, the second time i told her not to pee on the couch, i wasn't specific enough...clearly)

i think the main thing was that i almost felt a social pressure to punish, and not that anyone was actually pressuring me... but, you know.

so i took a step back, and then this showed up in my facebook newsfeed.

toilet learning vs. toilet training.

i'm going to go ahead and say that i won't necessarily do all these things, but what stood out to me the most was this checklist


in reading this list i realized that she had not been doing a lot of these things, and in fact still wasn't.

i also needed to check myself, and if my reactions always seemed frustrated and angry, we had to change something.

so here's the thing i think, if she's not ready, she's not ready.

so starting Saturday we put her back in diapers (mostly cloth-yippee!)
and told her that she could use the potty if she wanted to, but she didn't have to.

we had a much more relaxing weekend, with a few trips to the toilet or potty,
and this morning she asked to wear a pull-up and has been pretty much using the potty on her own (go figure).

so we'll see how this week progresses, but i'm happy to not be stressed and very happy to not feel frustrated  or about something she can't control.

live and learn.

poor first born trial children ;)