Who's the Smartest?

David was asking Daniel a bunch of questions about his new classmates the first week of school.......Who's the nicest? Who's the funniest? Who's the prettiest? When he got to "Who's the smartest?" Daniel said, "Me!"

David: You? How do you know that?
Daniel: Because the other kids ask silly questions.
David: Like what kind of questions?
Daniel: Like they'll ask, 'What's your name?'
David: That's not a silly question. They've never met you, and that's a nice question to ask a new friend. You don't ask them their names?
Daniel: No. I just read their name tags.

Mommy Look-Alike

The other day I was sitting at the table with Katie. David came by and gave me a big hug. As I was holding on to him, Katie started getting mad. She said, "Daddy, I don't like that!" David said, "But this is my wife." Katie was quick to respond with, "Well, it looks like my mommy!"

Boys' Camping Trip

 

David and Daniel took a camping trip to the Abilene State Park in May.  Daniel had been begging to do this forever.  He was ridiculously excited as they pulled out of the garage and kept reminding his sister how she was too little to go camping, but that he was big enough to do it.  They made chicken fajitas on their little cooktop stove.  They went hiking and saw an armadillo, deer, and many, many cardinals.  The night got extremely cold, and they'd wished they had taken warmer clothes/blankets, but they survived.  At one point during the night, there was apparently some sort of large animal right outside their tent.  They could hear it, but Daniel was too scared to let David turn on the flashlight and determine what it was.  Hoping it was a deer??  They cooked eggs in the morning, and Daniel told me that eggs when you're camping taste a lot better than the eggs you can cook at the house.  They weren't roughing it all that much as David brought his coffee maker and hooked it up so that he would enjoy the rest of their day.  ;)  I was glad to see the two of them get to spend time together.  

Jonestown Trip

 

We went to Jonestown, TX with David's side of the family in May.  We rented a pretty home there and spent all weekend at the community pool.  The kids both did well in the water.  We don't exactly have natural swimmers on our hands, but by the end of the trip, they both could have stayed in the pool all day.  Daniel took longer to warm up to swimming than Katie, but eventually Abuela convinced him that it wasn't so bad.  He pretty much stayed on a noodle all weekend and had a blast.  Katie loved jumping in off the side and did this over and over and over.  There was also a very shallow end of the pool that Katie and Daniel could walk in without any trouble.  Katie loved to sit and fill up buckets with water.  It was a very relaxing weekend!

 

The time that wasn't spent at the pool was spent back at the house we rented - eating (and eating and eating), playing cards, and competing in a water balloon toss game.  Daniel learned how to play Crazy 8's and joined in a few of the grown-up games too, making him feel extra special.  The whole weekend was definitely time well-spent, and it was nice to have such secluded time with our family.    

Potty Training

We potty trained Catherine back in May.  I need to write this post for so many reasons, but mainly to remember that potty training is very hard the first few days, but it gets easier.  Persevere!

Katie and I started potty training on a Saturday.  David and Daniel had gone on a camping trip, and we were home alone that morning.  We had been reading several potty training books and even watched a few potty videos the week before.  Then on Saturday morning, I decorated the bathroom with balloons and a sticker poster.  She got her "big-girl" panties that she had been pining over, and I hid all the diapers.  We started going to sit on the potty every 20 minutes or so, trying to have a few successes.  I don't remember now how many accidents there were that day, but they outweighed the successes.  It's always so frustrating to have the kid sit on the potty and do nothing for ten minutes and then pee the second he/she gets off it.  Argh!  Anyway, we did nothing but potty all weekend long.  David and I even alternated mass times so that she could stay home and potty instead of going to mass.  It was a breath of fresh air to be away from the bathroom on Sunday morning for me!  She continued to have accidents Sunday.  At one point over the weekend, she started crying and crying for a diaper.  She didn't want to use the potty like a big-girl, and she didn't want big-girl panties.  It was very hard to see her so upset.  :(   

Then Monday, I had to go to work.  I told the sitter to have Katie sit on the potty every 30 minutes or so and prayed for the best.  When I got home that afternoon, the sitter said that Katie had refused to sit on the potty.  What?!  And that she had had to abandon the 30 minute schedule because Katie wouldn't do it.  What?!  But that there had been no accidents all day because when she had needed to go to the potty, she just told the sitter.  WHAT?!  Katie figured it out in three days!  In retrospect, I think that Daniel was about the same way (with his pee.........#2 was a whole different story with him). 

This is not to say that we didn't still have accidents.  Scratch that - we still sometimes have accidents.  But overall, she got it figured out in three days.  It took her a few more days to figure out the poop thing, but not bad.  Then it took a few more weeks to transition out of stickers and candies as rewards. 

I still say potty training is one of the hardest things you'll have to do with your young child, but hopefully I'll remember with baby #3 that it's not hard forever.  Just a little while.  Better yet, hopefully that's the case with baby #3 and I don't set myself up for disappointment!   

It's Like Riding a Bike

I fell off the blog band-wagon, but there are a few things I want to document so that I don't forget them.  And I realize that in a short five weeks, I will have even less time than I have now.  So I'm going to write some posts that need to be documented so that some day, a long time from now, I can remember how these things happened!

First off - way back in May, Daniel learned how to ride his bike with no training wheels!  He had asked us multiple times to take the training wheels off (after he saw the neighbor girl riding without hers), but we figured we needed to wait until we had a decent amount of time to work on it with him.  So we decided to do it over Memorial Day since we'd have three days instead of two like a usual weekend. 

David took the training wheels off, and within an hour, Daniel had it down!  David and I were kind of shocked (and of course proud!) that he learned so quickly.  He seemed so much older already!