August 2007
Our big news for August is that Lily's partly potty trained! She moved into a new room at day care, and they started potty training August 13th. On August 23rd, the teachers said she used the potty all day and had a dry diaper each time. She kept asking to go to the potty for the next several days, both at school and at home. By the 29th, her teachers told us to start bringing her to school in big-girl panties every day. So now we're flying without a net! It's going pretty well. As is typical for most kids, she's a lot better at predicting when she has to go Number 1 compared to Number 2.
One habit Lily's adopted this month is that if we're all out shopping and Mommy goes in one direction, Lily tells me, "Don't worry about Mommy. Let's go this way." She says this all the time. This is quite irritating to the woman who gave birth to her!!
Lily likes a boy at day care named Cai. She and I were playing with cardboard tubes. She was looking through one, saying, "I see Abby. I see Cailey." I played along and said "I see Cai." She put down her tube and said, "Give me that!", taking my tube and looking in it. We also heard from Cai's mom that he yelled at her for being in his way and he couldn't see Lily. The mom said, "Why do you want to see Lily?" Cai answered, "She's cute!"
Lily's hair is long and the weather is hot, so most days Michelle puts Lily's hair in
pigtails or braids. This is one of her braids days.
We bought Lily a whiteboard and dry-erase markers, which she colors on almost every day. She also colors in chalk on her blackboard and with crayons on paper. I don't think she colors any better now than she did a year ago, but she does it more often now.
On one of our frequent visits to the Children's Museum, Elmo was there hosting activities and taking pictures with kids. Our history with Santa Clauses and Easter Bunnies told me she was not about to sit on Elmo's lap, but we did get as far as standing a few feet from him (while Lily clung to me for dear life). She also got Elmo drawn on her cheek.
Michelle's company invited us to watch a local minor-league baseball game in the comfort of their posh air-conditioned box seats. Lily, Cailey, and Madeline had a really good time playing together. In the third picture, Madeline is sitting with her dad in the attached outdoor seats. Lily got to meet the team mascot, Rocky, in the fourth picture.
Our park visits had to be early in the morning this month, because by noon or later the swings and slides are too hot to touch. One morning there were just two other kids there besides us. Lily was the only one swinging, but once they saw how high she was going and how much fun she was having, they both came over and started swinging too! (Michelle's pushing one of the other kids.)
Often when I take Lily to the park, I'm pretty tired out by the end of it, especially in the summer heat. Michelle was with us on this month's visits, and she played a lot with Lily, but you can tell she was getting wiped out too!
Here I am goofing around with Lily. The nice thing about having Michelle there is that I get to be in some of the pictures!
In the past we've had to help her slide down a pole in the park. She can't reach it from the platform, so we still have to lift her toward it, but now she can slide down on her own.
There is a curved bar on the playground that she often likes sitting or hanging on.
We fed the ducks and geese at the park. One weird-looking goose (third picture) kept walking up very close to Lily (which she didn't like), so I kept shooing him away and eventually gave into extortion and gave him lots of food to stop him from walking toward Lily. While Lily was looking at the water flow by, she said, "Hey, we're moving!" (We weren't, but if you're not looking at the stationary land you might think so.)
When I walk out to get the mail, Lily comes too and picks up a free newspaper that comes to our house, saying it's "her mail". Here she is using the newspaper as a blanket. This will be good practice for when all of us our homeless later because of our many frivolous purchases!
Here are Lily and Mommy watching TV together.
When Lily naps on the weekend, I usually nap too!
They had a cowboy theme day at day care, and this was Lily's outfit.
Lily can catch and throw balls short distances. This means that at the tender age of two, she is already more athletically skilled than I am!
Here's the information sheet we got from day care on the 23rd, saying "Good job, Dry All Day", and showing that she'd gone potty four times. We gushed over her big accomplishment for days, and we let her have ice cream every time she potties at home. (It's Weight Watchers ice cream, and she never finishes it, so hopefully she won't get fat from our potty training.)
This month marked a big change for Cameron. He "graduated" from day care and started kindergarten. They had a graduation ceremony at day care, and his "nana" (Susan Peugh) made cookies shaped like graduation caps.
