Hayley and Kate Minter

I never thought I’d be a grandma at 30, especially when my oldest daughter is only five.

But after more than two years of promising, we finally got Hayley the chihuahua she wanted yesterday and she wants to be its “Mama.”

The new member of our family is an 8-week-old male chihuahua, mostly white with brown markings.  He’s tiny and cute, and Hayley has named him Darwin (just like Aunt Jenny’s chihuahua).  Today was our first full day with him, and we spent a lot of it trying to make sure he peed and pooped on his potty pad and not on our carpet.  Darwin spent the majority of his day napping.  Rod-kitty seems as indifferent to Darwin as he is with everything else, which is better than Rod trying to eat him.  The girls have fought over Darwin a few times–”Kate, I’m holding him!” “No, me hold him!”–but mostly they’ve been good about sharing.

Check out pictures of our little guy on our Flickr page!

Hayley’s first week of school has passed and she seemed to adjust really well.  Daddy took her into school each morning (except the first day when we all went with her) and she rode the bus home each afternoon.  Before school, she seemed excited about riding the bus, but once she actually rode it, she realized it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  It’s hot and noisy, and Hayley said she kept getting thrown into the seat in front of her (good thing they’re padded!).  “They don’t have any seatbelts!  Well, they have ONE seatbelt for the driver, but that’s it!”  She took her lunch each day and every day brought home at least one picture she had colored in class.  She’s already talking about some of the kids in her class, especially the ones who misbehave.  She is proud of the fact that she hasn’t gotten into trouble yet but some of the other kids (usually boys) get in trouble, even having to sit outside the classroom on occasion.  Hayley has been good, but she DOES talk about acting silly sometimes to make the other kids laugh.  Hmmm…that one sounds a lot like her father.

School is closed this Monday for Labor Day but it’s back to normal on Tuesday.  Kate and I are going to try to eat lunch with Hayley about once a month and Tuesday will be our first time.  Daddy is also going to start letting Hayley enter the school by herself after Tuesday.  Fortunately, they have a lot of fifth graders and some adults who serve as crossing guards every morning so Hayley should be safe if she has to cross the parking lot.  Still, it’s hard to think of her as big enough to walk into school all by herself…

First of all, Kate pooped in her potty for the first time today!  I didn’t even know anything about it until she came running to me and said, “I poo-poo in potty!”  I thought she meant she had peed because sometimes she says poo for pee.  (I let her run around without a diaper at some point most days because she likes being naked and because it allows her to practice with the potty.)  When I followed her into the bathroom, sure enough, there was Number 2 in her potty.  I quickly checked the place she had been playing and didn’t see any signs of early release, so I assume she felt the urge to go and just went.  What a big girl!

And then, there’s Hayley.  Hayley always has to pee first thing when she comes home from school, which is understandable and perfectly fine.  Unfortunately, I accidentally locked us out of the house yesterday when I went to meet her at the bus stop.  The poor child had to go and didn’t have a toilet to go in.  I told her that we’d go into our (fenced-in) backyard and she could just pee on the ground (hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go).  She headed toward the front yard–and, I thought, toward the gate to the backyard–while I unbuckled Kate from her stroller in the garage.  However, as I carried Kate toward the front yard, I got a shock.  There, standing bare-butt naked with her pants around her ankles, was Hayley, squatting in front of the big tree in our FRONT yard.  “Hayley!  What are you doing?!  I said the BACKyard!”  Fortunately, she hadn’t actually started peeing yet, so I urgently told her to pull her pants up and run to the backyard.  I just really hope none of the senior citizens who live around us was looking out their windows at the moment Hayley’s butt was exposed…

After struggling with Kate to take a nap this afternoon–and failing–I was a bit worn out myself.  I lay down on the sofa for a minute to take a break and Hayley didn’t even bother to beg me to get her something to eat.  She went into the kitchen and I heard her rattling around in the pantry, Kate close at her heels.

I wasn’t in there to see what was going on, but I could tell by the noises and conversation pretty much what was going on:

Hayley got a bowl out of her cabinet and began to pour herself some cereal.  Hayley asked Kate if she wanted cereal but Kate was merely thirsty.  Kate grabbed a cup out of the cabinet and held it out to Hayley.  Hayley said, “No, Kate.”  Kate put that cup back and got another one, again handing it to Hayley.  In a resigned voice Hayley said, “It’s not the cup Kate, it’s the liquid.  I can’t pour it by myself!”

I nearly fell off the sofa when I heard her say that.  I’m still laughing about it…”it’s the liquid.”

Hayley lost her second tooth this morning.  No gushing blood or anything.  Daddy just pushed on it and it popped out.  Tonight she gets another visit from the Tooth Fairy.

We went into Sam’s Club today and they had put out some Halloween decorations.  The girls wanted to look at all the spooky stuff (which is a lot less spooky in the brightly-lit store than it would be on a dark Halloween night).  There was one almost-adult-sized zombie creature that had a motion sensor on it, so when we walked past it, it began to talk.  It’s eyes flashed and then it “took off” its mask.  The mask looked more like a normal face than what was underneath, of course.  Its eyes flashed and it laughed maniacally.

I watched Kate’s face as she watched this display and though her brow was furrowed, she didn’t seem frightened.  In fact, both girls asked to see it again.  But we left to run other errands.  Kate kept talking about the creature saying, “Take mask off.”  We named it “Ugly,” so then she would say, “Ugly take mask off.”

After a while, she didn’t talk about it anymore and I thought she had forgotten about it.  But as I was putting her down for her nap this afternoon, she mentioned Ugly again.  “Ugly not bother me?”  Poor baby was scared that Ugly was going to come into her darkened room and get her.  I assured her that Ugly was just a big toy, not real, and was stuck in that store and couldn’t walk out to get her.  She kept saying things like, “Ugly not real?  Just big toy?  Ugly stuck in store?  Can’t walk?  Kate does.  Hayley does.  Ugly can’t.”  I finally got her settled down enough to get in her bed and go to sleep.  Whew!  We may have to avoid certain aisles at Wal-mart and the Party City store all together in the coming months or Kate may never sleep again!

Apparently, while the girls were in the child care at my gym today, a little boy hit Kate with a dinosaur.  Don’t know if it was plastic or stuffed, but it left the tiniest little red mark by her eye that disappeared after about thirty minutes.  No big deal, really (other than the fact that some person who goes to my gym has a brat for a kid).  Since then though, Kate has been saying, “Bad guy hit me with dinosaur.”  Poor kid.  She’s been resistant lately when I’ve tried to leave her to attend my classes and when her big sister isn’t there anymore after next week, I wonder if she’ll want to stay in the child care room at all.  Especially if little punks keep hitting her.

After wiggling around in her mouth for nearly a month, Hayley lost her first tooth this morning!

I asked her at breakfast to see her tooth, and she let me wiggle it around. I saw that the back of the tooth had completely detached, so I pushed her tooth backward with a mild amount of force, and out it popped!

Hayley looked a little shocked for a second, and seemed like she might cry, but after Holly and I started gushing over what a big girl she was and how neat this was, she started grinning. She spent quite a bit of time playing with the new hole in her smile.

I took her downtown for a celebratory lunch at Casa Rio, then with her to improv practice, and she wasn’t shy about telling everyone in either place about how she’d lost her first tooth. Then, at bedtime, we tucked her tooth into the pocket of the special Tooth Fairy Pillow that Holly made for her while in Virginia. So we’ll see what the Tooth Fairy brings our big girl tonight.

Now, we’ll see if it takes a month for her second loose tooth to pop out as well.

So, we’re back from our nearly 3-week vacation in Virginia.  We tried to see all of our immediate family at some point during the trip.  Things didn’t go exactly as planned, but few things in life ever do.  The girls had fun seeing grandparents and cousins, aunts and uncles, swimming, playing with animals, fishing, catching bugs, going to a county fair, and just hanging out and coloring or watching tv.  Both girls were good while traveling–I really feel fortunate that my kids travel so well, especially when I see other parents struggling with screaming kids.  Kate even slept for about 40 minutes on the last leg of our journey from Atlanta to San Antonio.

Speaking of Kate–that girl is a trip herself.  Not only can she say hundreds of words (she can pretty much repeat, or try her best to repeat, anything we say), but she can “sing” now too.  She knows “Hey, Diddle Diddle,” “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” and “Rock-A-Bye Baby,” and parts of some other songs.  It’s funny to hear the pitch of her voice change as she sings.  And today when we were in the car, a song came on the radio that had a lyric that ended in the word “good-bye” being drawn out to four syllables.  The song ended, and I heard Kate in the back singing “Good-bye-eye-eye.”  She was repeating what she had just heard!

Kate is also fearless and VERY independent.  Her most popular phrases are “Me do!” and “Do by mine self!”  If she wants to do something and you do it for her, she gets very upset.  She likes to brush her own teeth (and actually does a pretty good job), climb up into the van by herself, walk almost everywhere herself (she doesn’t like to be carried for long), wipe herself when her diaper is being changed, buckle her own belt in her booster seat, take off her shoes, socks, clothes, diaper, and pretty much anything else she is capable of doing on her own.  She wants to be just like Hayley and doesn’t always understand why she can’t do everything that Hayley does.

For example, when we went to the Powhatan, Virginia, county fair on Sunday, there was a “ride” that was like a small obstacle course.  Hayley went through it with no problem, but Kate was really too small to go through it.  That didn’t stop her, though.  She pushed her way through the hanging punching bags, dove into the ball pit (at one point, she was so deep in it, all you could see were her little red pigtails sticking up over the top of the balls), climbed up the rope ladder (she struggled a bit here, but she didn’t give up!), crossed the bridge, and slid down the tube slide.  She had so much fun, she wanted to do it again and again.  She went through it three times in all and would have gone more if we had let her.  Grandma Estes said she might be a future Olympian, the way she was pushing herself.

Hayley’s tooth hasn’t come out yet, but she has a second one loose now.  She’s having a little trouble eating now–tonight we had pizza and I had to cut it up for her, poor baby.  I don’t know how long it will take for the tooth to come out, but she will probably lose it before she starts school on Aug. 25.  Aaahhh!  I can’t believe my baby will be in Kindergarten!  We registered her today but the reality of her going hasn’t set in yet.  I’m sure I’ll be a blubbering mess on that first day.