Hayley and Kate Minter

We had a pizza delivered to the house for dinner tonight.  When I answered the door, the girls were bouncing right behind me, excited about the food.  As I was signing the slip of paper to pay for our meal, I heard Kate’s little voice pipe up behind me.

“It’s a monkey, Mama, it’s a monkey!”

I can only hope the delivery man could not understand her.  He didn’t seem to have a reaction to what she said and I ignored her.  (The poor man was not good-looking, but I don’t think he looked that much like a monkey.)

You just never know what’s going to come out of your kids’ mouths and how embarrassed it will make you.

Kate often makes us laugh with the things she says.

The other day, Grandma Queen’s iPod was sitting on the end table by the couch.  Kate tried to get it, but I told her that she couldn’t play with that, it was Grandma’s.  Kate said, very seriously, “If it’s Grandma’s, it’s mine.”  That really cracked me up.

This morning, like nearly every morning, especially since Halloween, Kate wanted some candy.  She knows she can’t have candy before breakfast, but she always asks anyway.  She took my hands and said, again seriously, “Can I have some candy?  Don’t say no.  Let me have some candy.”  It’s hard to say no to those blue eyes, and it’s even harder not to chew the insides of my cheeks to pieces as I fight not to laugh at what she says.

Kate has been perpetually sick for the last month-plus.  It started out as a cold that both she and Hayley had, but Kate had a worse version of it.  We had to run the humidifier at night to help her breathe and during the day we were constantly wiping her nose.  Kate’s cold lasted about two weeks.  She was well for about one week, then got sick again.  The second time wasn’t quite as bad as the first but it was still unpleasant.  Hayley showed no cold symptoms this time around.

Last week, Hayley got the sniffles and this morning, Kate woke up with a runny nose again.  Argh.  Thank you public school system.

The only upside to Kate being sick so much now is that she probably won’t get sick as much when SHE goes to school.  For now, we’ll have to keep plenty of lotion tissues and chicken noodle soup on hand.

Hayley got a couple of free kids passes from school to the Alzafar Shrine Circus that is at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio this weekend.  So we decided to take the kids to their first circus.

It was a smaller-scale circus than, say, a Ringling Brothers circus but I think the girls enjoyed it just the same.  Before the actual circus commenced, they had pony and elephant rides, bounce houses, and other attractions, all available for a nominal fee of course.  We didn’t have time before the start of the circus to do any of the extra stuff, so we got the girls cotton candy and found our seats (Kate had been asking for cotton candy and popcorn for days, ever since we told her we were going to the circus).  We saw the standard circus acts–elephants, tigers, trapeeze artists, clowns, daredevils, etc.  I think we were all entertained.

Then during “half-time,” we went down to the floor to let the girls ride an elephant.  I had no idea I would have to ride it too!  Since Kate was so little, they made me sit behind her.  Um, I actually rode on an elephant probably twenty years ago but I didn’t remember how weird it feels.  There were about six or seven kids plus me on the back of this poor animal and I was on the very back, right above her hips, swaying from side to side as the elephant walked.  I’m not too keen on heights.  I’ve ridden a horse before too and I definitely prefer the horse.

We returned to our seats for the second half of the show.  Hayley covered her ears during the loud dirt-bikes-going-round-in-round-in-a-giant-metal-ball act, but she liked when “Cannonball” Smith was shot from his cannon.

When we were leaving after the show, Hayley said, “I’d never been to a circus before, but I think I’d like to go again.”

I bought new underwear for Hayley the other day, and Kate wanted some too.  I thought, why not?  She’ll wear them eventually, right?

Well, Kate wanted to wear them as soon as we got home.  I let her since it was pretty close to bedtime and we would have to put her back in a diaper shortly.

The following day, she wanted to wear her underwear again.  Being a sucker, and feeling sorry for her because she was sick, I let her wear a pair again.  About 30 minutes later, she went to her potty, pulled down her panties and peed, much like Hayley and I had showed her how to do the previous night.  What a big girl!  I thought.  Wow, this potty training stuff is easier than I remember…

How wrong I can be.

I was busy doing housework and I heard Kate go into her bathroom again.  I went in to discover poop everywhere–in her panties, on her potty, on her legs, on the floor.  She had begun to go in her panties and tried to make it to the bathroom but in pulling her panties off, she just smeared the poop all over.  Oh, boy.  I couldn’t be mad at her, though–she had made a valiant effort.

After cleaning up the mess, I once again relented to letting her wear another pair of panties (thank goodness for the 7-pack).  But after two more accidents (both pee, thankfully), Mommy had had enough for one day and it was back to diapers.

Of course, what I should have done was purchase some Pull-Ups for her to use before real panties, and that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend.  I don’t want to discourage her desire to use the potty but I also don’t want to spend my entire day cleaning up mess after mess and washing out countless pairs of underwear.  I now realize that Kate can’t yet distinguish the feeling of the diaper versus the underwear.  If she’s totally naked on her bottom half, she’s nearly accident-free; she just runs right into the bathroom when she has to go and goes.  But I think having something on her bottom confuses her right now.  Which is why I’m hoping the Pull-Ups won’t be too much like diapers for her.  We’ll just have to try them and see.

Either way, she’s not even two years old yet, so I’m not expecting her to be potty-trained too quickly.  She’s already way ahead of where Hayley was at her age, and Hayley was totally day-trained by 2 1/2.

(For those of you who haven’t read about or have forgotten about “Ugly,” please revisit this post).

It has been several weeks since we were at Sam’s Club but the time came when we had to go back.  I talked with Kate before we went, telling her that we would most likely see “Ugly” again in the store.  She seemed to be looking forward to it, even saying that she was going to kiss him.  I thought that maybe if she could touch him and see that he wasn’t real, she wouldn’t be as scared of him.

I strapped Kate into the basket at Sam’s and we strolled through the entrance.  We didn’t have to look hard for Ugly–he was right there at the entrance as part of a big Halloween display.  As soon as we stepped in front of him, we triggered the motion sensor and he began to speak.  Kate’s eyes widened as she watched him, and as he began to pull his face off to reveal the scary bones and flashing eyes beneath, Kate trembled from head to toe, screwed up her face, and began crying, “No! No!”  She struggled to get out of her restraint and into my arms.  I held her as I tried to calm her down, touching Ugly’s face to show her that he was just rubber and plastic and pointing out that his feet were stuck on a pedestal.  But she was having none of it.  She buried her face in my chest, held onto me with a death grip, and wouldn’t move (see also).

Unfortunately, what I had to do next had us standing at a distance from Ugly but in a place where we could still see him.  Kate made sure to keep her face turned away so she didn’t have to look at him.  I finished up at the photo area as quickly as I could and we began to move further away from Ugly.  When we got to the back of the store, I finally managed to get Kate to let go of me and sit in the basket, with the help of a lollipop bribe.

A few times after this, she ducked her head going around a corner thinking Ugly might pop out again.  We managed to make it out of the store without seeing him again, with Kate repeating phrases like, “I don’t like him,” “Ugly way over there?” and “He stuck on pedestal?”

Most unfortunately, we had to return to Sam’s about an hour later to pick up the pictures I had dropped off, which meant passing right by Ugly again.  By this point in time, Kate was much calmer, but when we entered the store, she buried her face again and even squeezed her eyes shut so there was no chance of seeing him.

Poor baby.  I hope she’s not scarred for life by Ugly.  Just when I thought she had almost forgotten about him, she got a frightening reminder of just how ugly he is.  I think I agree with Grandma Queen that Halloween may not be Kate’s favorite holiday…

Kate doesn’t usually go right to sleep when I put her down for her nap.  She usually spends at least ten minutes (and in the case of today a half-hour) talking or singing to herself.  Lately, it’s been singing, and as she jumps from a few notes of one song to the next, she sounds like a commercial for a kids’ compilation album:

“Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh…I love you, you love me…This old man, he played one…Mary had a little lamb, little lamb…”

And on and on until she wears herself out.

I wish I could videotape it but I wouldn’t be able to get in her room without disturbing her.  I think it’s cute, and she’s not crying or upset, so I just let her sing until she falls asleep.

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!

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…

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!