I'm not admitting anything!

First of all, I quit caffeinated coffee. That's my excuse reason for taking a few months off from posting. I do feel a lot better in general but I don't seem to have much of a personality left. Hmmm.
Also, during the glorious summer and fall months, well to be honest, I had better things to do. And now I don't. So let me fill you in a little bit...
Apple picking, usually a favorite, did not go so well. Mostly because Isaac was in a really bad mood and didn't want to actually pick anything. No apples, no pumpkins. All he wanted to do was take the hay-ride, which we did, twice.
Not surprisingly, his very favorite outing this fall was to the trolley museum. They have an event (every year I think) where you can ride the trolley to a field, pick out a pumpkin and then paint it. That was ok. The kids seemed to enjoy the painting a little bit, although not nearly as much as I thought they would. They wouldn't go near the bouncy house but they had fun running around the field. Isaac kept wanting to get back on the trolley but I was trying to draw out the experience a little bit because I thought that after that it would be a short ride back and the outing would be over. Not so. First of all, the ride back was longer than the ride there. It turns out that it is just a long straight track with a loop at the end where the trolleys have to queue up before they can all head back in the opposite direction.
Secondly, it turned out that we were allowed to ride the trolley as much as we wanted as long as we only took one pumpkin each. No problem.
So, we waited for the open-air trolley (extra exciting) to take us back to the station for a snack and bathroom break and then we waited for the open-air trolley to come back and pick us up for a second trip. And this trip had a fun little twist!
When we got to the loop at the end of the line (we were behind one trolley and waiting for two more to show up) newly-potty-trained Isaac informed us that he needed to pee...badly! There was no way he was going to make it until the trolleys started moving again let alone until we got all the way back to the station. Sooo...

Here's my advice:

1. Always sit in the very back of the trolley so nobody can see what you're doing.

2. Ignore signs that say not to bring drinks on a trolley ride (we honestly didn't notice the sign until later) so that you always have an empty soda bottle on hand.

If you follow my advice you may just have happy ending like we did instead of a puddly one.

Happy New Year!

The things we get excited about...

Isaac is potty training! In case you hadn't heard. Not so much training though really as him deciding that it's worth the trouble to use the potty. Since he's known how for a while I think. I knew my laziness instinct to wait would pay off!
So that's my parenting advice for today. If you have a strong-willed child, you may as well just wait for potty training to be his idea. Unless you love losing power struggles. And unless your definition of potty training means training yourself to clean pee off of everything BUT the potty. It's a lot less work. Except for emptying man-size poops out of the little potty into the big one...
Sigh... he's getting so grown-up. The only things left that he doesn't say quite right are hangaburgers (hamburgers), pecks (beaks, as in, Do those seagulls have crackers in their pecks?), and cries (he get's very upset when I wipe the "cries" off of his cheeks while he's having a tantrum). I really hope he doesn't figure those out too soon.
Gracie is talking up a storm now too. Some of her favorite words are NO! and MINE! She's completely spoiled rotten. Yesterday we tried AS HARD AS WE COULD not to laugh while her Daddy was speaking sternly to her. We really really wanted to be serious and make sure that she knew what she was doing was unacceptable. It didn't work. Her face... she brings new meaning to the phrase "too cute for your own good".
We got her sleeping well for about a week and a half and now she's got a bunch of teeth coming in and stays up half the night. This is both of them "waking up slow" as we say in our house. For me that involves a couple of giant cups of coffee but the sugar in a sippy cup of juice does plenty for them.