Body Art

It seems we are seeing a little bit of the terrible two's starting to emerge in Ellie. She is mostly a joyful baby, well, little girl now. :( I am bumming that I no longer have a little baby - we'll have to get to working on that! Well, our walls are starting to show that we have an almost two-year-old in the house. I have caught her on more that one occassion with crayon and pencil in hand scribbling on the wall. This particular night the older girls got ahold of a pink marker and pen and decided to "tatoo" flip flops onto their feet! After Ellison had her shower, she also got ahold of the marker. When I first looked at her, all I noticed was the massive amount of pink marker all over her thighs. However, as I looked closer, I noticed that she had marked over both of her nipples as well. I laughed, of course, and asked her why had she put marker on her nipples. Her response was, "No, not my nipples. My milks." I guess maybe it's time to stop the breast feeding!

The Stray Dog

So it's been almost two weeks now, but we had a stray dog show up at the house. We already have a 3 year old chocolate lab, who frequently disobeys us. Brian and Brynn are suckers for animals, though, Brian especially has a soft spot for dogs. This one appeared to be a fairly young, maybe 6 months old, Beagle-type dog. He showed up on a Friday afternoon when Brian got home from work, but was not there later that night. Once again, he was at the house on Saturday morning. When the girls got up on Saturday, Brian took them to the window to show them the dog. Brynn immediately told him, "I think I'm gonna call that dog 'Baby Cakes'." Well, the dog is a boy. After calling him 'Baby Cakes' for a good portion of the day, we finally told them that maybe he wouldn't like being called a "girl name." Tristin thought 'Biscuit' like the stories about the dog would be a good name, but that just wasn't sticking. Then Brynn pipes up and says, "I think we'll call him 'Doctor Dan'." And that seems to be the name that stuck.

We have pee in the potty!

I will spare the pictures on this, but much to my surprise I found pee in Ellison's potty chair tonight. Actually, she found it! To backtrack a bit, we bought her a potty chair awhile back. She had expressed some interest, but nothing major, so I figured "what the heck". So, we have the chair, we've sat on it quite a bit, but no tinkles - until NOW! She'd been running around without a diaper on for awhile after supper so I sent her into the bathroom to sit on her potty. I didn't even go in with her. A couple minutes later, she comes out of the bathroom pulling up a pair of Tristin's panties she'd found and doing a little "shake your booty" dance. That in itself was pretty darn cute - she does the dance while singing, "Shake your booty, shake your booty." Ok, so I didn't think anything more about the potty until bedtime. Honestly, I didn't figure there'd been any pee action. But as I was walking her to her room, she went into the bathroom, pulled up the lid of the potty, pointed and said, "Pee in there!!" She actually seemed surprised herself, but then got really excited and had to show the rest of the family. Well, that is the excitement for our house tonight. And, yes, this really is exciting - it could mean no more diapers in our house soon!

This is one of very few pictures of just myself with all three girls. Not too bad! We were at a bluegrass festival for Brian's birthday back in July and some lady asked if she could take our picture. She just e-mailed it to me last week - a little late, but I think worth the wait.

Thoughts About A Disney Vacation

Well, last week was a whirlwind taking our vacation to Disney. The threat of hurricanes and a 10-day forecast with rain expected every day had us (ok, Amy) a little anxious before leaving, but we had a wonderful time. We only got rained a little bit one day, and it cleared the park out so we were able to just hop on most rides without any wait. Brian says we're not going back until Ellison is at least Tristin's age, which will be 4 more years. That might not be a bad idea.

Heart

Well, it was a regular day. Actually, it was going to be a fun day. Not that we don't have fun on regular days, but this day we had planned to meet some friends and family at the blueberry farm. The girls were excited! They loved picking blueberries last year, and I loved that they loved it. So we were getting ready to go when Ellison spotted her little red Bible on the bathroom counter. As soon as she saw it, she said, "Jesus." Of course, I had seen it as well and knew what she was referring to, but decided to question a little more. So I ask, "Where? Where's Jesus?" And without a moment of hesitation, the response I got from my 19 month old baby was this - "Heart." And that melted mine.