Movie Evening With Aria.

Watching movies with Aria right before bed is one of the most fun things ever. We've done it twice now. The first time it was with Care Bears and now the second time is Bob the Builder. Usually she doesn't want to see anything but Dora, but if I tell her that we will be eating ice cream, and she can stay up late, then she was all about it. She even started stripping as soon as she could so that she could have her bath early!

It is fun watching new things with Aria because if it is something that she hasn't seen a million times she is glued to it. It was Bob the Builder and the Golden Hammer and it was cute watching Aria try to figure out the clues and making comments about the things on the screen. She sat with me on the couch underneath the blanket and a bunch of her stuffed animals were all around us.

Then it was potty break and she went to bed with no problem!

I've got a few more movies lined up for us to watch sometime next week.

Is it Tuesday? Wait, yeah, it is Tuesday.

I don't want to say that Aria is potty trained because she's still having accidents. Some days she'll have absolutely none at all and then the next day she'll make up for it by having me have to clean every one of the stuffed animals she has in her bed. Today was one of those days and that poor horse has been washed so much he now has a horsey afro.

But surprisingly she hasn't had an accident any time we've been in the store, which is what I am prepared for. If I forgot one thing, like wipes or a pair of pants, that would be the day she would pee on the floor of walmart. So far so good.

Aria and I made an epic zoo with her animals, little people, and blocks.


As you can see, the little people children all love the zoo. We have giraffes, a panda, many horses, geese, ducks, a porcupine, and a rabbit in our zoo. We also have a park, and a train.



Even Percy enjoys our zoo.

Aria and I have been playing several games in bed. All of these games are classics like, "Hey what is this bump in the bed? Hey, it's Aria!" or the ever famous "Where is Aria? I can't find her under this blanket or this one...oh there she is!" also there are many waking up games that involves Aria pretend snoring which is just hilarious.

Here is Aria pretending to sleep on the couch.


She's also been really good about going to bed lately, let's hope that continues.

Aria has made it known that she no longer wants to be tickled. She runs way from her daddy when he comes home because he'd always chase her and then tickle her first thing. I told Rod about it and he has agreed to stop tickling. Now when he comes home Aria yells, "No tickle! No tickle!" and when we say that no one will tickle her, then she is all right. I don't blame the little girl, I hate being tickled too. I don't laugh, though, I kick and scream.

Aria quote of the day: "Heh heh...Aria funny."

11 Things Thursday

1. Had another accident with potty training this time. this time it was in her car seat. We stopped at two places in Davenport for a potty break and she didn't pee anywhere. then she is in her car seat and she goes. The good news is she didn't pee in her bed for naps and waited until she got downstairs to pee in her potty.

2. Although she seems perfectly all right to pee in her pants, she doesn't like to poop anywhere but the potty. This is the exact opposite from everyone else I've talked to. In fact, she's quite proud to poop in the potty, but she totally doesn't care if she has pee running down her legs.

3. The new game now is that Aria wants to save everything. She'll put on her firehat, get on her Winnie the Pooh fire truck, and then go save some random stuffed animal. "Giraffe, I save you!" "Oh no! Horsey stuck! I save you!" Firefighter Aria to the rescue!

4. All of her animals are her friends and in the bath she says hello to each and every bath toy.

5. Her stuffed doggie was leaking beads so I am being mommy of the year putting each bead back inside and then sewing him up. I promised my little girl that doggie would be fixed in the morning.

6. Tomorrow is Aria's first gymnastics class. I hope she enjoys it. I've been psyching her up for it and I keep reminding her she has to listen and behave.

7. I love my kitchen now. I used to hate my kitchen. Now I am loving it. It still needs work but it is 100% better than what it was.

8. I need to have parties at my house all the time because it motivates me to clean up.

9. I need to go to bed early tonight, but I know I won't.

10. I am totally addicted to starbucks coffee.

11. I was at the bank and Aria saw the fish and was just talking. The teller goes, "She talks a lot, doesn't she?" I said, "She never stops unless she's sleeping."

Kitchen fun!

You know what you do when you hate your kitchen? You wait for a sale at Menards and then you fix it! Finally we got tired of the stupid green seventies sink, the broken cabinets, the stains on the counter top, and the ugly white wall that shows every grease splatter from the stove.

Rod ripped out the old counter and sink on Monday. It was rotted at the bottom. The plumbing had been leaking again, which prompted the fixing. We decided that just once and for all we were going to replace all of it. I'd even get a new sink in the bargain. Wicked awesome.

It was all too easy to get. The area to put it in was exactly 6ft. The counter top was exactly 6 ft. Perfect. It always ticked me off the way that our cabinets were put in before. They were way too low and there was this space in the middle of all of them. There wasn't enough room because they got cabinets too small for the space that they were going.

When Rod ripped it out, I got to painting. I picked an orange/red color for my kitchen a long time ago and Vick and I had done one wall. Now I got to do another one!

There had been a huge hole in the back of our counters that we didn't know existed before. Great. I was sure that was where our roach problem was coming from-they were living in the wall! Rod wasn't going to patch it because he said it was just behind the counter and I had to explain to him why he needed to patch it. He did and then I painted over it. No holes in the wall!

Aria was whiny while we were working all week. It was "I'm hungry!" when she had food around her. "I'm thirsty!" when she had juice. She just wanted attention and we were busy. Rod had been bugging me about why couldn't I get stuff done around Aria and when she started crying hysterically because she wanted something and we were busy I said, "This is why. This is why it is difficult to work around Aria."

But when she wasn't being a whiny little brat, she was being very helpful. She used the tape measure to draw straight lines on a paper and told us she was making a fridge. She helped daddy by giving him tools. Then she wanted to saw, to hammer, and to hold things. She liked being helpful. She even threw stuff away for us, just before requesting Dora's Pirate Adventure for the 70 billionth time.

Now granted, the color of the counter top was not my first choice. It was just the best looking of what they had at the time. It also went with my color scheme. Also, the cabinets are actually really high, but that is because we have high ceilings. For now we are using a step stool to get to the cabinets, but if we get annoyed we will lower them some. I will have a stainless steel sink put in and then it will all be good!



We managed to salvage two of the old uppet cabinets and I am going to put them in other places in my kitchen. Then I plan on getting two more counters now that I know what size I want and the approximate cost. Eventually, I may have an actual kitchen instead of the weird thing that passed for a kitchen before.

Some Things I Accomplished Today

1. Combing Aria's hair. This may not seem like a biggie, but it is getting more difficult to make that girl get her hair combed. I know she doesn't like it when I get out tangles, but it has to be done and I try to make it as painless as possible. Today I had to drag her out from under the table and then trap her with my legs as I combed her hair.

2. Made breakfast for everyone. This may also not seem like a biggie, but this time instead of just Ari and me, Rod was up too and so I made breakfast for us all. I made scrambled eggs with bacon, onion, cheese, mayonaise and a bit of white wine. It was delicious. Aria also liked it and so she actually ate some.

3. I put all of the things I don't want out this winter into the basement. That includes my patio furniture and my mower. I don't have to worry about that now.

4. I worked more on the brick sidewalk. It's getting longer now! Aria played outside hitting her big ball with her golf club. Then I put some nails in a board and let her hit them with a hammer. That was great fun to her!

5. We put the fence back up. It isn't perfect, you know, since the area was run over with a skidloader quite a few times, but our fence is back up. That means Aria and I can play outside a little bit. Only one of my asparagus plants survived the onslaught.

6. Helped Rod write a resume. He's trying to get a PTL job again and so we did his resume this morning.

So that's what I accomplished, and all before 3pm! I can take the rest of the day off!

Oh no! Save her!

Aria's new game in the bath is hilarious. She throws her dolphin squirty toy across the bathtub to the other side, then she swims over to it to save it. She stands up at one end and then poses like she is going to dive in. She yells, "Oh no! Dolphin! Save it!" then she goes, "I'm coming!" She jumps down into the water (she bruised her knees doing this) and pretends to swim until she reaches her dolphin. She then goes, "I save it!"

This little girl is a riot, I tell you.

Pumpkin Patch Fun

I have discovered a love of pumpkin patches. I never went to one before I had Aria and now I am going to make it a tradition. Already I've found my favorites. Today we went to the one in Buffalo on Hwy 22. I drove past it once because the sign was really small, but I turned around and found it!

The first thing Aria wanted to run to was the gate of ponies. These you couldn't feed or pet, but she sure liked looking at them. There were also tires filled with corn, a barn that was turned into a little kids' straw castle, a moon bounce, and lots of stuff. Aria didn't want to play in the castle or go on the moon bounce. For her it was all about the animals.

Especially the baby cows. There were three of them. Two of them you could feed and another one was in a fence with its mama-who was a longhorn. Aria thought the baby cows were so cute and although she was too afraid to pet them herself, she lived vicariously through me while I petted them and fed them.

This was the goat that was roaming all over the pumpkin patch. Aria was brave enough to pet this one a lot and he followed people around and ate anything that was on the ground.

Aria, naturally, wanted to go on the pony rides. I went to the concession stand to get a ticket and when I told her we were ready for the pony rides she didn't want to wait for me! She just ran as fast as she could there. Lil Stinker.

Pony Rides was the highlight of the whole day. She also enjoyed seeing the bunny that the owner let out a few times. she petted it too and thought it was really cute. So between goats, cows, pony rides, bunnies, and little pigs, Aria had a full day.

There was also a point when a train went by and Aria pointed at it and started waving while yelling at the top of her lungs, "Thomas! Hi, thomas! Hi, Thomas! Hi!" The people who knew the thomas the train reference thought it was cute.