Trip to Palm Springs

A month ago (I'm a little behind on blog posts!) we went to Palm Springs to visit Grandma Lala, Papa Rod and some of the crowd from Reno who had driven down for some much needed sunshine. We all had a great time and Natalie loved hanging out with her cute cousins, Emma and baby Reese. It was so much fun watching them all interact together. They don't get to see each other that often but when they get together they typically pick up right where they left off...kind of like the big cousins!!

Ryan and Ashley
These two used to be the ones known as the "little cousins"!

Aunt Jackie and me

Grandma Lala's desperate attempt to get a picture with Miss Wiggleworm.

Coloring

Gaming

Uncle Mike is pure entertainment for the new generation, too!

Swimming with baby cousin, Reese, and big cousin/part fish, Emma!

And my all time favorite picture of the whole week....I went searching for two mysteriously missing and very quiet cousins and this is how I found them in the backyard. Emma with her video games and Natalie with her coloring...just totally content hanging out together! I love it. Somewhere in the archives of our family photos there is a picture of Aimee and me not too different than this one!

Thank you all for such a great trip! What a nice way to ring in the new year!

Little Trooper

Natalie had to have surgery on both of her eyes this past Friday. She has a condition called Strabismus where her eyes do not track with each other or as her brain would prefer them to. Consequently, when she's tired and loses a little bit of muscle control, her eyes will shift apart leaving her with a temporary case of double vision and lack of depth perception. It started very suddenly about a year ago and attempts at regular eye exercises to try to get her brain to correct the problem didn't work well due to her somewhat uncooperative age! We knew surgery was probably inevitable anyway and decided to tackle it sooner rather than later after it seemed to get a lot worse during the holidays. At one point in late December, she looked up from her lunch at the Christmas tree nearby and said, "look Mommy, now we have two trees!" I think I was on the phone with the pediatric eye surgeon later that afternoon to get all the particulars about the surgery!

Well, she was a little trooper during the entire experience on Friday. We arrived at Phoenix Children's Hospital at 6:30 am, she was in surgery by 8:00 and we were headed into the recovery room to see her by 9:00. The outer muscle on each eye had to be removed and reattached to her little eyeball. Sounds like so much more than an hour long surgery to me, but that's how quickly it happened. We are so thankful to have found a wonderful pediatric eye surgeon, pediatric anesthesiologist and have access to a children's hospital where everything from the elevator floor in the parking garage to the sticker filled recovery rooms are totally geared toward making kids less afraid of the hospital experience.

Before she was taken into surgery, Corey showed her an obnoxiously heavy bag of jelly beans and promised, if she was a big girl and went with the nurse, she could have the whole bag when she woke up. Well, when Corey and I made it to the recovery room after her surgery she was just calming down from being very upset. The poor recovery nurse was trying everything she could think of to comfort her, but Natalie didn't want juice, stickers, crackers or cuddles! She was quite delirious, but when she saw Corey, she immediately said, "may I have my jelly beans now?". A light went off in the recovery nurse's head and she said, "THAT'S what she was trying to ask me!! Oh, Natalie, I'm so sorry!" Natalie, of course, was in no state to eat one jelly bean, let alone a collection of them, so she clutched the bag in her fist the entire way out of the hospital, while she slept in the car and while she continued to sleep after we arrived home. She held on to them for at least 3 hours until she was finally coherent enough to enjoy them.

clutching her jelly beans as she slept of her anesthesia at home!

Due to her resilient little spirit, fairly high pain tolerance (which she did NOT get from me) and probably in part due to the sugar high from eating only jelly beans after a fast since dinner the previous night, she was acting like her old self by later that afternoon. What a trooper!! We'll find out in about 4 to 6 weeks if the surgery was a success or if we have to do it again. Pray this is it!

Attempting to Sweeten the Pot-ty

Over a year ago, when Natalie was only 22 months old, a close friend of ours began potty training her daughter (only 5 months older than Natalie) and within a week they'd found dry diaper success! Because this little girl's Dora the Explorer potty chair accompanied her to a play date or two at our house, Natalie witnessed this potty-ing first hand and was very curious to try it herself. I did not encourage it like I should have back then (I'd done no potty training research, I had no training pants, no potty chair, no interest in trying to take Natalie into airplane bathrooms...a trip across the country was only days away...and frankly, no patience for it as our life then was in such chaos). Oh, how I wish I could go back and slap that "full-of-excuses" old me and tell her that one year later I'd have a child totally disinterested in the potty!

I thought we had it down months ago...but then disaster struck...or should I say, gulped! Natalie won a Dora sticker every time she went on the potty. One particular time, she immediately stuck the sticker on a little plastic Easter egg she was carrying around at the time. Well, when we proudly flushed, Natalie was so busy clapping and congratulating herself that she dropped the egg into the toilet while the water was making it's final lap and down it went never to be seen again. Natalie as so mad at that potty for swallowing her egg and her new sticker that she really wanted nothing to do with it for weeks. Then, life got crazy again and I stopped trying.

Now we're serious. Here's the chart we made. She gets a sticker and a stamp every time she goes on the potty. Yep, only 3 stamps the first full week. You're seeing it correctly.


If she goes 8 times, she gets a new My Little Pony. Yes, the Pony is still in the box a week later.

I thought we had her now. Stickers+ stamps,+My Little Ponies= most of Natalie's current favorite things . She woke up from a nap and I showed her the chart and excitedly explained how in one short day of 8 potty visits she could be playing with a new pony and she should start right now. Her response, accompanied by a shrug of indifference, as she reviewed the criteria and the reward, "maybe tomorrow".

Corey got desperate at this point and put Mango Tic Tacs in with the stickers and told her she could have 1 (no, 2, no 3, maybe 4!!) Tic Tacs, too, each time she went. No sale.

We've now resorted to an obnoxiously huge jar of jelly beans. That worked twice. She's over jelly beans now, apparently.

So, the Dora potty that we've now inherited sits lonely most days.


In another month we'll be deliriously desperate and offering to buy her a real pony! Then she'll be interested!

It's a girl!

It's a good thing...we don't even own a burp cloth that's not pink, let alone an actual blanket, bath towel or onesie that isn't totally girlie! We're so excited. Corey was convinced he was seeing a boy at one point during the ultrasound. When we (the technician and I) asked him to point to the proof, the technician shot him a look and said, "that's a femur!" Good grief.

Here's a picture of the little peanut...she's already practicing her yoga! Thought you'd like that, Grandma Lala!