Where did my baby go?

Damon's been working a lot of "manager on duty" weekends, so he took Wednesday off last week to do fun family stuff. One thing on the list was take Abby to the park. I've been going on and on about all the things I've been amazed she can do there, so Damon wanted to see it too. The first thing she went to as soon as we got there was the "rock wall." Damon was completely shocked to see how easily she was able to climb all the way up. It hit him like a ton of bricks that she's no longer a baby, but a ful-fledged little girl. The most difficult lesson we have to learn as parents is to let her try despite our fears. We know she may fall, but all we can do is try to support her without getting in her way while she learns. We can no longer protect her from everything, but have to let her try on her own. Abby is fearless so it's such a hard lesson for us to see her accomplish something we never thought she'd be able to do. We so want to tell her she can't climb that because we're afraid to watch, but we let her try because we don't want her to take on our fears. We don't want her to learn to be afraid, to think she can't do it. I love that she doesn't think she can't do something, but is willing to try new things despite the challenges, and hope she will always be that way.

Busy Busy

I've been really busy lately, so here's a quick update on things I keep meaning to write about.

1. Not last weekend but the weekend before, we took Abby to a Wiggles concert in Denver. SO. MUCH. FUN.
2. We ended up making a little vacation out of it and spent the night in this really cool new hotel right in the heart of downtown. Every floor was decorated in a different genre. Ours was the television floor. The 13th is the horror floor.
3. The next day, we went to the aquarium. They have a restaurant with a huge tank that takes up one wall. We got quite the surprise when a diver swam by waving at all the kids!
4. The weather has been fantastic here, so we've been to a different park every day this week with our playgroup friends.
5. Abby was sick all last week, so she ended up sleeping in bed with us. It's so nice that she can just crawl into bed with us and go right back to sleep instead of dealing with trying to get her back to sleep for an hour.
6. This makes travelling so much easier. We had 2 queen beds in the hotel, and she stayed up until 9:30 when she climbed into bed with me and was asleep within minutes while Damon and I watched a movie.
7. I've been made an assistant organizer for our moms group. We have almost 200 members, so I've been put in charge of making sure everyone actually shows up to the events they agreed to come to. This has been taking up every spare minute of my time.

I remembered some things.
8. The house: outside is stuccoed, and the deck is being worked on today. Inside, the walls are all sheetrocked and they're going to start doing the rest of the wall stuff early next week. We lucked out that the weather has been so gorgeous. The fact that there's no power or heat (which was the big since it was so cold) isn't slowing them down much.
9. The residents here put on a St. Patrick's Day golf-cart parade. Damon, Abby, and I got to ride in the front cart with the "grand marshalls." Everyone decorated their golf carts with St. Pat's green. There was one couple who dressed as a bride and groom. She wore white pants and top, tiara and green veil, and carried a bouquet of fake flowers. They even attached toilet paper rolls and empty plastic containers to the back of their golf cart! A local news station even came out to film the parade.

I'm sure there's a bunch more I forgot right now. Pictures are here.

What her hair looks like when it's fixed up

I swear one day she didn't have any hair, and the next she suddenly had too much! I'm still not-so-patiently waiting for the sides to catch up with the rest of it. (As always, there are a bunch more pictures on flickr.)

Potty Training Revisited

Abby's doing a great job of training herself. Seriously, all we do is praise her when she goes and she does the rest. A couple weeks ago, she was playing in her room naked after having just taken a bath when she went running to the bathroom. The entire time I'm in there with her she's chanting, "Peepee woom, peepee woom." I could clearly hear her peeing in the toilet, so I was confused and asked her to show me when we were done. Sure enough, she takes me right to a spot on the floor. Apparently, she'd started to have an accident but stopped herself and went to the bathroom instead, so there were just a few drops on the floor! That's the last accident she's had.

We've now graduated from walking around completely bottomless to wearing panties accident-free in the last few weeks. When we're home, she spends about half her time in just panties and the other half in a diaper and pants, but she's spending more and more time in panties. I usually put her in panties until she decides she no longer wants to wear them and brings me a "big girl diaper" (Pull-Up). As long as she's not wearing pants, she can work the Pull-Ups in the bathroom too. She now insists on being changed the second she pees in a diaper, so it's much easier to put some panties on and let her use the toilet.

I did try to put her in pants and panties last week once, and she did well for awhile. Until I had to change her clothes twice in a half-hour period. Then it was back to diapers. I tried again this morning, and it went much better. No accidents! When she wakes up from her nap, we'll try again. I'm still terrified of taking her in public without a diaper on. We'll wait until she can comfortably wear pants without accidents for awhile before trying that. Until then, she's pretty much house-trained already.

Bed Head

House Update

For safety reasons, the workers have to stop working whenever we're there to see the house, so we hadn't been in yet. They've been working every weekend we've been out there. Finally this past Saturday, we were able to go inside the house and walk around, so I took a ton of pictures. You can see them here if you're into that sort of thing.

We have our framing walk-through with the project manager tomorrow. When we first met with him shortly after they broke ground, he said he'd be able to give us a closing date at the framing walk-through. Back then, it seemed so far away. It's hard to believe we're already at this point! After this walk-through, they'll start sheetrocking the walls and it'll look more like home.



A little something for the grandparents

I got in trouble for not posting pictures...

So here you go. I had these up on flickr from our trip to the zoo last week, but I haven't taken any others recently, so this will have to do. Abby had such a great time that day, and kept talking about feeding the giraffes crackers, the "beezas" (zebras), and the ephants that we took her back a few days later, on Saturday.