I have not read or even bought the final Harry Potter book. I am looking forward to reading it but just don’t have the time right now so I can’t even buy it. I know that if I do I will not put it down. Anyway, Alice’s blog had a link to where you could take a quiz and find out what house at Hotwart you would be in. I would be a Hufflepuff. What are you?
Having a toddler is a blast. Challenging at times, but overall so much fun.
Katherine, you are really becoming a master communicator. I am so glad that we decided to do sign language with you. It took longer than I had hoped for it to catch on but now you are doing so well. Not only is it fun to see you do signs for all the animals when reading a book, but it is also so practical as you have many words that sound the same but with the sign we know exaclty what you want. It really helps ease frustration. I look forward to you learning even more. Today after swim lessons someone saw me signing with you and they hesitated but asked if you were hearing impaired. When I explained why we are doing sign language with you even though you are hearing, they were so impressed and thought it was a great idea.
You love the sign for “swing” (see above photo). What amazes me is how many different things you realize swing. When we went to visit Charlie, you saw his baby swing and signed. At Nana’s house you went to your room to see the swing and signed. Of course every time we are at a park you find the swing. When we read a book with a monkey you do the monkey sign followed by the swing sign. Today it was rocking in the rocking chair that prompted you to sign swing. I guess it is a swinging motion.
My favorite sign that you do is the sign for “dirty”. it is my favorite because it has made me realize that you are aware of your diaper and when you are using the restroom. You do the sign for dirty and point to your diaper and say “poopoo” and usually either you already have a dirty diaper or you dirty it pretty soon. I am now trying to take you to your little potty when you do this and we have had some success. It would be great if you were potty trained early.
You are very aware of what is dirty and what is clean. Today you took off your diaper cover, said “dirty” and walked from the den to your room to put it in the diaper champ. Amazingly you knew to put it in the hole and to turn the handle so that it disappeared. It was a cloth diaper cover though so Mommy had to get it out. Now we know where to look when something is missing. You have also started to throw trash into the trash can and then you sign “thank you” because that is what we always say next.
As an infant you never had any kind of special binky or lovey. There have been several times that we tried to get you to attach to a blanket or animal by putting the same one in your crib all the time or traveling with the same one. You never seemed to care at all. Recently however, you have finally become attached to two things.
If you take a look at this picture of your stuffed animals and blankies, which one do you think is the likely lovey? Katherine, when you saw all of the animals in your crib, you started crying, “bear, bear, bear”. You wanted in the crib. You grabbed your favorites and threw the rest out.
A pretty dramatic way to tell mommy which one is your favorite. “Mr. Bear” and the pink “play silk” are your favorites. You usually carry them around as a pair even wrapping Mr. Bear in the play silk. Mr. Bear and the pink play silk were not my first choices of loveys because there were several cuter ones but I guess I am glad you finally have one if it helps you to go to sleep in new places. We will see. They help you fall asleep at home.
You want to be such a big girl now. For a few days you did not want to get into your high chair. Instead you want to sit in a regular chair. The problem is that you often want to stand in the chair. You can climb on up by yourself so we are learning to make sure the chair is always pushed in. We are trying to make you always eat in your high chair and it has helped to lower it so that you can sit at the table without using the tray.
You are really enjoying coloring. Last week I bought you a small table and chairs set at IKEA and we leave your special toddler crayons and paper on the table so you can explore it. You think it is a lot of fun but your favorite is to use my pen and my paper.
We are having to work on discipline a lot more which is no fun. You have an independent and strong willed streak which is probably common to all 17 month olds. I love seeing your independence but it is not fun when it manifests itself in disobedience. I pray that your daddy and I would be able to know how to best discipline you and help you to grow into a godly woman.
I have a Razr phone. I have taken photos with it every once in awhile. Mainly they have been to put a face with a name in my address book. Well, I have taken some pictures with the phone that I want to use on the blog. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the photos from my camera to my computer. There are no directions in the manual. I plugged the phone into the computer using a USB cord and it said I needed to install software. There was no software included. I searched online and just got more confused. It seems that the easy answer is to email it to yourself but that costs money. I tried it anyway and they did not appear in my inbox.
So, if you have a Razr and know how to get pictures from the phone to the computer, I would love some input. Either post a comment or send me an email.
I wanted to share my new favorite thing about blogs for my blog community out there. It is surely old new to many of you.
I am technically challenged. I am so glad that my hubby and my brother in law are around to help me out. My friend Amy (La Villa Gringa) also has a husband who is more technical than her. She told me that he set it up so that she could read all of her blogs from one page. I vaguely knew that she was talking about subscribing to their RSS feed but when I had tried it before, I could never figure out where it went. Again, technically challenged. So, my sweet hubby helped me figure out how to set up Google Reader.
Google reader is so cool. Go to www.google.com/reader to set it up. Literally follow the directions. You add subscriptions to the blogs you read. Then instead of checking all your blogs each day, and then wasting time on the ones that have not been updated, you have all in one place all of the updated blogs. So I open the page and without navigating away can read all of my updates. Sooooo cool and a big time saver for those of us who like to follow a lot of blogs. For some reason some of my friends blogs will not subscribe (Chrys, Kane, Shannon) so I have to remember to go back and look at theirs on my own. Regardless, I thought I would pass the tip on and maybe it would help some of you out as well.
Will, Jaime and Sophia were in town this weekend. Will had to come into town for work. Jaime and Sophia were not going to join him but since he works for an airline and they can come free, they came as a surprise. I knew about it a few days prior because I need to go pick them up with a car seat base. We beat mom and dad to the house so Jaime and Sophia hid on the back patio. Mom and dad were so excited to see them.
Don’t you just love those blue eyes?
We had a very enjoyable visit. Last time they were here for dad’s surgery so it was a more stressful visit and we spent a lot of time at the hospital. This time we were able to go out to eat, grill out and visit the arboretum and spend a lot fo time just hanging out.
The Sunglasses Women
Butterfly
Walking with Nana
Looking at the fish
I think I want to give Sophia a hug.
Katherine was very curious about her cousin. When Sophia was on the floor, Katherine did try to lay on top of her and she tried to pick off her strawberry birthmark. Luckily Sophia was pretty good natured about it.
Time to Read
We are currently owners of only one house! We sold the house that Sam bought right as we started dating and we lived in for the first 8 months of our marriage. We rented it out for three and a half years. It was a learning experience to be landlords but we decided not to continue it. Today we closed on the house. We have a great realtor so if you need one, we’d love to refer her to you.
I know it is not time for my usual long monthly post but there are just so many fun things that Katherine is doing and so many pictures that do not really make up enough material for a post on their own so they are all combining to make one long post.
The biggest milestone for the week does not have a picture to go with it. Isn’t that just the way it is? Tonight Katherine’s dinner was 100% big people food and 95% self fed. She ate green beans, lentil soup (not really soupy though), rice with cheese, ravioli, grapes and cottage cheese. Mommy helped her to feed herself the cottage cheese with a spoon. For those of you following our eating struggles, this is huge!
Every day I am amazed at how much fun it is to be the mommy of a toddler. At least most of the time, there are some frustrating moments as well, but they are a learning experience for both of us.
Bubbles - Katherine loves them. It is even one of her new words. This week she has been adding about one new word to her vocabulary each day. They include: bubbu (bubbles), baga (bagel), chesh (cheese), tee (teeth), beees (beans), buhd (bird), and woof (duh! it’s woof, like a dog). So, I thought I would be a lazy mom when I saw this bubble maker at Target. It had pictures of kids Katherine’s age making bubbles all by themselves. No mommy sick and tired of blowing bubbles. You put the liquid in the reservoir and the toddler pulls the handle causing the bubble wand to raise in front of a fan. Great idea!?!? No, it stank. I could barely get it to work and Katherine just held the handle down constantly so the bubble wand did not get any more bubble juice on it. Oh well, it has been returned.
Bag Lady - Katherine loves to carry any kind of bag around. She carries her toy purse and beach bag, her diaper bag, mommy’s purse, her lunch bog, the Easter basket, grocery bags . . . You name it, if it has a strap, she finds it and throws it over her shoulder. She will be a great shopper some day. Watch out daddy.
Trouble - I don’t think I already posted this picture. You see Hooligan is eating her food off of the carpet with an empty bowl beside it. Hmmm that is odd. I bet you can guess what happened. Katherine dumped the bowl of food on the floor. She has been told many times not to do this so guess why she is not in this picture. She is in time out.
Dress up - The other morning I was getting ready and Katherine came around the corner looking like this. She had grabbed one of my shirts out of the laundry (clean thank goodness) and tried to put it on. Her head got stuck in the arm hole instead of the head hole. She has also tried to put on mommy’s shoes. She cannot dress herself yet, but she is getting much better at helping to dress and undress herself.
OCD? - Katherine has a certain place for a few certain toys. I shared before how the Little People parrot and bunny always end up in Katherine’s kitchen cabinet. Now the Little People flamingo and x-ray fish always get put on the kitchen table. At the end of the day we put all the Little People in a basket but somehow these always make it back to their homes. I wish she was this particular about all of her toys and that their homes would be in the toy baskets.
Kisses - Today I was laying on the floor playing with Katherine. All of a sudden she came over and gave me a huge, slobbery kiss. She kept doing it over and over. I am sure it helped that we were really praising her and making a big deal of it. Then she laid on the floor and got to laughing so hard. I would tickle her and then pretend I was going to tickle her. It was so funny.
New Hair Do - Memorial Day we went to the Dallas Arboretum for a children’s concert with Sara Hickman. It was a wet day! The concert was moved indoors but we had our picnic on the lawn. It was more wet than we realized and Katherine and her cousins got quite dirty (nothing a little Biz bleach couldn’t take care of). As we were finishing our lunch, it started to pour and we all got wet. Sam and I decided to give Katherine a new hair do - a mohawk. What do you think?
A new take on the common playground is the sprayground. Basically, a bunch of sprinklers spraying water and kids playing in it. A new one opened in our area last summer but we never went because Katherine was not yet sitting or mobile. This week we met some friends there for the first time. It was a blast. Katherine really enjoyed it. She went right out there to explore and then would come back to grab my legs. Then she would explore a little more and then run back to mommy. I have a feeling that we will be going there often this summer.
I have had several people email or tell me that they received their email about a post and then it was not on my blog. I am aware that two posts were lost as the server that hosts our blog was updated. My web hosting service (George) is looking into it and either those two posts and their comments will be restored or I will repost them later. Anyway, until I know everything is back to normal I will not post. Sorry for the disappointment for all of my faithful readers.
Uncle Will and Aunt Jaime brought this shirt to Katherine when they came to visit last week. It says, “My Mom’s Blog Is Better Than Your Mom’s Blog.” I thought it was pretty funny. It is a bit sassy. Really though, blogging is not a competition. I love reading everyone’s honest thoughts - sometimes funny and sometimes thought provoking-always fun.
Blogging has been a lot of fun for me. I have always kept a scrapbook but this is different. There is a lot more writing and journaling. This is a great way for me to keep track of Katherine’s first year (and now beyond). It is also a great way to allow friends and family to keep up to date on what we are up to as well.
When I started my blog, I knew a few other people who were into it. The main person was my college friend, Chrys. I started reading her blog and the blogs of her friends. Then it was weird when I would meet her friends and we already knew all about one another from reading our blogs. In our gym dandies class there are several of these virtual friends that I now know IRL (in real life). Check out the blogs of Chrys , Erin , Kirsten , Tara , Sundee , and Karla .
Now it is fun because in the last 2 months I have had a number of other friends who have started blogs. Finally, an epidemic! Check out the blogs of Amy , Lauren , Jen , Laura , Kim (in Africa) , Jill , Erin , Gretchen , Kim (in NYC) and Heather .
And if you are reading this and you do not yet have a blog, what are you waiting for?
