Hayley and Kate Minter

I know, I know, two posts in two days–what’s going on? But something happened this morning that I just had to write about.

When Wade left this morning, I asked him to take out a bag of trash. There was a cardboard box that the bag had been sitting in that fell off in transit. So I just left the box on the side porch.

Later I went out to put some recycling in the bin and Hayley went with me. We noticed a butterfly on the box on the porch, probably interested in some tomato juice that had soaked into the box. The butterfly moved when we approached, but it didn’t go far. I put the recycling in the bin and came back to find the butterfly still near Hayley. She, of course, wanted to hold it, but I didn’t want to hurt it. I said I would try to grab it and put it on her hand, but that it would probably immediately fly away.

I waited until it closed its wings and gently grabbed it. I put the butterfly on Hayley’s outstretched hand…and it stayed. And stayed. I was flabbergasted. The butterfly just sat on her hand, “licking” her with its long tongue.

I knew this was a “Kodak” moment, but I didn’t have my camera with me. I told Hayley to stay where she was, that I was going to run in and get my camera. I just knew the butterfly would be gone by the time I got back…again, I was wrong. The butterfly was still there and remained on Hayley’s hand while I took several pictures. Amazing.

In fact, the butterfly stayed on Hayley’s hand until a mosquito flew toward Hayley’s arm. I swatted at the mosquito and, in doing so, must have frightened the butterfly (though I was shocked this butterfly COULD be startled) because he flew away.

Hayley was sad to see him go, but I tried to impress upon her what an unusual experience she had just had. I’m glad I was able to get some pictures because I can hardly believe it myself.

We began potty training Hayley when she was around 27 months old. I am not one of those mothers with a desire to rush the process…she’ll spend the rest of her life using the potty–a few years in diapers didn’t kill either of us. And we were pretty successful with her training pretty quickly. Over the last year+, she has had very few accidents, and now of course, she does the whole business of peeing with no assistance from me.

Once Hayley had mastered the potty by day, I knew it would take longer for her to go through the night without peeing. So I kept her in a diaper at night. Later we switched to pull-ups at night when she started waking up to pee because she could pull them down and back up.

For about the last month, Hayley has been dry nearly every morning, so I decided that when this last pack of pull-ups ran out, we would switch to underwear at night. I did, of course, buy a waterproof pad to protect her brand-new mattress, just in case.

Last night, we gave it a try, and she made it the whole night (and she slept nearly twelve hours) without peeing! Yay, Big Girl!

I’m sure there will be the occasional accident, but hopefully, the older she gets, her body will learn to wake her up before she pees the bed. But it is nice to have reached this newest milestone with our girl, who continues to astound us with the rapidity at which she grows and changes.

We stopped by the new house on Wednesday to check it out, but they’d progressed to the point of having doorknobs on the doors, and the doors were locked! Denied! We tried all the doors, no luck.

However, we noticed that one of the back windows was unlocked, so we slid it open. It was somewhat high up, so Holly and I didn’t want to try to get into it. But we were able to lift Hayley through the window, then said “See the doorknob over there? Go open it.” She said “Ok Daddy!” and went and opened the garage door, letting us in to look at the house.

Kids - they can be handy around the house.

After tiring of referring to “Fetus”, Holly told me that we needed to go on and pick out a name. It came down to two finalists, and I may have polled several of you about which one you liked, but as you can tell from the masthead, our new little girl will be named **Katherine Lee Minter**. We’ll most likely call her Kate.

Several nights over the past week or two, Hayley will “read” to us instead of us reading to her. She’ll pick a couple of books and proceed to “read” them. She’s pretty good at saying the exact words of the story; she only misses a few. It’s pretty impressive that she can memorize so many of her books…some of them, like a Peanuts book, have fairly involved stories, not mostly pictures.

Hayley did REALLY well at her skating class last week. I was concerned that she might be a little rusty because she had missed the previous week’s class because we were traveling to New York. But she went out there and skated like she hadn’t missed a day. She went back and forth across the ice with no help and got up by herself every time she fell (which wasn’t nearly as much). She even skated backwards a little. We’re so proud of her for the improvement she’s made in such a short time. She only has three more classes left in this “semester” but she may want to continue taking classes. I think the next session would pick up right after this one ends, so she may be skating year-round from now on! I think Wade has visions of her one day skating with the Mighty Mites hockey team during the intermission of a Hurricanes game…