Backyard Tent Camping

It had been TOO long since we had my favorite egg-in-the-hole breakfast, and it was super delicious this morning!

Emerson likes it when I make her scrambled eggs and put hers in a piece of circle-toast too.

We ate breakfast at the coffee table, while finally finishing up Cinderella. (It takes a loooong time to watch a movie, when your 2.5-year-old only wants to watch about 10-15 minutes at a time.) But she ate every single bite of her egg & toast, and was so proud of herself for joining the clean plate club!

And then she brought me every book from the basket in the corner, and said that we needed to read alllll of them. We didn’t make it through all of them, before getting up to start working on some projects around the house.

For starters, Jeff replaced our old vinyl mini blinds in our bedroom with the nicer-looking faux wood blinds, that also block out more light, which is good for afternoon naps, because the sun comes in bright in those windows.

I tidied up the living room and vacuumed…

And put a few nails in the door frame to hang these lights more permanently, since before they were just taped up there temporarily.

We also had all of the windows and screen doors open, because it was only 66 degrees this morning, and it felt amazing!

We also did some outside projects, but I didn’t have my phone with me for most of that time. We cleaned out our shed a little bit, and rearranged some stuff in there, and got rid of some old stuff, and Jeff started working on these two old mowers, which need to be fixed up a tiny bit. Emmie and I also laid in the hammock together for about 10-15 minutes, and the weather was so perfect and it was so nice!

We had leftovers (mac & cheese and hot dogs) for lunch on the back porch, before getting Emerson ready for her nap time. Jeff did more outside work (spraying this bug spray stuff that attaches to the water hose, and replaced an outdoor outlet that wasn’t working), while I put Emmie down.

By the way, she STILL won’t pee on the potty for me at home. She did actually pee on her tiny potty for Libby last night (so that’s twice she’s done it home, the first time was for Andersen last week), but neither time has been for me. We’ve been working hard on this potty-at-home stuff for about a month now, and she still refuses to go for me. We’ve tried donut bribes, a potty watch, games, videos, being gentle, being stern, going by herself, Daddy taking her, Mommy taking her, potty chart, new undies, candy bribes, and I don’t even know what else… And nothing has worked so far.

SO, who has any new ideas for this weird situation?! Reminder – she always pees in the toilet at school, and has been doing that for like two months now, she never even wears a diaper at school anymore, ever. But she still refuses to go at home. So I know she’s technically ready, she knows what she’s doing, she understands what’s going on, but she just won’t do it at home…

Jeff and I both continued working on projects and chores while Emmie napped, including writing half of this blog post, and then I took a break to read for a little while in the hammock. It was just so perfect outside!

After Emerson woke up, we cuddled and watched a little bit of Toy Story (she was being incredibly sweet and snuggly), and then it was time to get ready for Jeff’s special at-home-birthday-activity: backyard tent camping! We set up our cute little green tent in the backyard, complete with the twinkle lights we always take camping, plus our air mattress, pillows and blankets. We even set up a little spot with the laptop for movie-night!

And since it was for Jeff’s birthday celebration, we ordered a special take-out birthday dinner from Longhorn (using a gift card, score!), then picked it up and brought it back home to eat on the back patio, before snuggling up in the tent for some family books and movie time!

All three of us took turns with bath and shower time, and then we got her ready for bedtime, indoors in her bed like usual. (We did not tell her we planned to sleep in the tent, because we knew she’d want to do that too.) But now that we’ve got her down, we’re going back outside to watch Captain Marvel on the laptop, and then haul our pillows back inside for bedtime. We promised Emmie we’d leave the tent up and play more in it tomorrow.

Night friends!