On the matter of Milly’s potty training, I feel confident making this statement: When naked, Milly is completely potty trained. There were several times today that Milly used the potty all on her own with no prompting from me or Amanda. The last time this evening she didn’t even tell us she’d gone; Amanda just happened to see something yellow in the potty.
She had a cloth diaper on twice today, and she peed both of those times, but not very much. I think she’d holding it. So the next phase is to get her used to telling us when she has to go, or get her comfortable using her pullups.
She did ask for “pretty candy” today. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that at first, but I eventually figured out that she meant Nerds. I gave her some yesterday. I wasn’t going to give in, but she used the potty without telling me she had to go first thing today and I was proud of her. Plus it was nice outside, so I loaded her up in the wagon and we walked to the store.
Jennie, Milly’s friend at the grocery store, had a little something for Milly. She gave her a little bendy Santa Claus figure and a hair tie with jingle bells on it that she wore around her wrirst until we got back home.
We didn’t get any pretty candy, by the way, but we did split a doughnut. I really need to move her past that, for her sake and for mine.
Back at home Milly wanted to play outside. It was overcast and had rained at some point, but it felt great, so I acquiesced. She just milled about the yard for a while, but then she wanted me to fill up her play sink, so I did. It’s funny how a few cups and a tub of water can keep a kid occupied. It’s also funny that we can play with outside in t-shirts in late December.
She had her nap after that and I did some work. Amanda went out to lunch with her coworkers and came home with a bonus and a gift basket. She then went to work putting up a ribbon in the living room and tying all our Christmas cards up on it.
Milly made me very proud a couple of times today. At one point she was sitting on her potty (just casually sitting on it) and watching some phoenetic videos on YouTube. After one finished she said she wanted to see a bicycle, so I did a search for bicycles. One of the results was the Monty Python skit Bicycle Repairman, so we watched that. Milly liked it so much that she wanted to watch it twice. There was another one about salesmen that I actually had not seen before that she watched after that. This was all right before we went to the store.
The second thing she did was when she decided she wanted to eat lunch while sitting in my lap in the office. After sitting there and eating a few chicken nuggets she told me she wanted to watch Go Duke, so I pulled up Monday night’s game, fast forwarded it past the really irritating first fifteen minutes and we watched some Duke basketball together.
We didn’t “officially” have small group tonight as most of the couples were wither out of town or getting ready to go out of town, but we had the Hausers over for breakfast-dinner and a movie. Amanda made waffles, eggs and sausage. Milly was very excited about Rosa coming over, though she didn’t want to share much with her at first. That’s odd because Milly’s usually pretty good with sharing. Emil officially walked for the first time, incentivized by our Christmas tree and Harvey, whom he seems to absolutely love.
While we were dishing out the food for the kiddies, Simon asked me if our dog Bruce (Rosa thinks he’s terribly funny) was named after anyone. I told him, “Bruce Wayne. Batman.” Milly heard me say that and immediately said she wanted to watch Batman. I was confused, because I didn’t recall ever watching anything with Batman on it with her. Then she said something about Superman and bicycles and realized she wanted to watch Bicycle Repairman again.
The kids played after dinner until around 8:00, at which point they helped clean up the disaster area that had once been our living room. I was going to read Horton Hatches an Egg to the girls, but Milly said she wanted to read it. She mumbled through the first few pages, but she did describe some of the pages and on a few pages she said, “He sat and he sat.”
Once the kids were all in beds we introduced the Hausers, who are German, to a classic American Christmas tradition: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. They seemed to really enjoy it. Rosa seemed to enjoy it too. She was on the guest room bed with the door open because she doesn’t like the dark, and any time someone laughed loud she would laugh too.
Zach Dotsey