Projects & Potty Training

Emerson specifically requested “cunch cunch & chockit milk” for breakfast, which is toddler-speak for Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And she ate three small bowls!

She also loves to drink the rest of the milk out of the bowl with a straw.

And Jeff and I ate the rest of yesterday’s leftover jam-filled muffins. I toasted them in the toaster oven, the sliced them open and toasted them again, and also decided to slap a little more strawberry jelly on them. And they were gooooood.

Emerson did another preschool music Zoom with her church friends and teachers, and all of the kids brought a stuffed animal with them today, so it was really precious.

She sat on the floor next to me in the ding room, with her coloring book and some more chocolate milk, while Jeff and I did our Zoom Sunday school video call.

We tried with the whole potty training business all day again today… And even though she’s cute, she’s THE MOST stubborn child. Good lord….

Oh, and after she sat next to me on the floor in the dining room, she was quietly playing in the living room. I didn’t know what she was doing, but she was quiet, so it was fine. But this is what she had been doing! So we watched “big church” with a mess all over the living room.

Oh and I got a quick start on dinner, by throwing this into the crock-pot, for chicken burrito bowls. Plus garlic & diced onion, which was already in the crock-pot when I took the photo. It’s really good you guys, you should try it.

This girl may be tiny, and she my not always eat very big meals, but she never. stops. snackin’. After her cheese crackers for snack though, she was very good at helping clean up the giant mess she had made.

OK you guys – these are some cheaper, generic version of the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser that Jeff got from somewhere (although he doesn’t remember where or when, I didn’t even know we had them..), but we went to town scrubbing allll the things in the house today. Stove, oven, walls, coffee table (when we found marker on the wood after church), the water & ice dispenser on the fridge, the stove vent hood, the counter tops (I got off a spot that had been there since we moved in that I think was paint or something?), and I don’t even know what else we found to scrub, but DANG these work good!

While Emerson ate cheese noodles for lunch, Jeff got another wild hair for cleaning, and vacuumed all the weird random dusty corners and lamp shades and baseboards. We did some other weird, random deep-cleaning stuff, but I won’t bore you with anymore of that…

Emerson napped for about two hours, and Jeff and I both fell asleep on the couch watching the first Harry Potter movie, after eating sandwiches and chips for lunch.

I made Emmie a little fort after she woke up, and she was so cute. She wanted her giant chick in there with her, but he didn’t fit, so I rearranged the blanket so it just fit over the top of his head so he was only kinda in the fort with her.

I had gotten out some of my Harry Potter paraphernalia to take a photo, and she loved playing with the wand. I tried to teach her to say a few of the spell words, but it was a mess. She finally got “lumos” & “nox” though, so that’s a win! She made up a few of her own words, and our favorite was “moanja!”

I tried putting a spell on her to go pee in the potty (wingardium peepee-osa), but that still didn’t work…

So even though I’ve already read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” about three times, and own both the original hardback and the illustrated versions, I decided I also *needed* to listen to the audio book version as well. And it was so, so good! April has been named #HarryPotterAtHome month, and libraries across the country have TONS of free copies of the e-book & audio book, available to check-out anytime, with no wait! I’d highly recommend checking it out! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

In the theme of the day with random projects, we started cleaning out our front bedroom, that we’ve more or less used as a storage room / dumping grounds for the last three years… I’m honestly too embarrassed to even share a picture on the blog, so I didn’t even take one. I’ll just wait and share a photo once we finish, a few months from now, haha 😉

But we found these old giant coloring pages that I’ve had for like, 13 years, and Emerson was very excited about them! I was honestly so excited to find them too, because I knew they would be so fun for us to color together. Also, that one below is one Megan colored for me my sophomore year in college, and I hung it up in my dorm for the year, and have saved it ever since then!

I left Emmie coloring in the living room, and I went over to shred our delicious chicken. After it cooks (high for 4-5, or low for 6-8), you just shred it and add it back to the liquid in the crock-pot to absorb some of the goodness & flavors.

Then you can use it for lots of things, like tacos, burritos, or like we usually do, burrito bowls over rice (tonight we used brown rice, but white is still yummy too), topped with corn, black beans, cheese, salsa & sour cream.

After dinner, Emerson took her very over-due bath, and then put her same nightgown on that she had been wearing all day, because who cares. We did another Zoom call with our Music Minister/choir director, and a bunch of our choir members. It was so good to see their faces, since I haven’t seen most of them in over a month now! We had Emerson all over the place during the call, and she was going downhill fast, so we had to hop off before everyone else, but it was still fun.

In case it wasn’t obvious (I would have shouted it from the rooftops), she never peed in the potty today. We once again tried allll the things… bribes, drinks, special candy, games, movies, videos, songs, spells, dripping water, relaxing, being stern, being chill…. NOTHING worked. She held it from 8am-1pm, and then again from like 3:30-7:30pm. She never had an accident, she just didn’t pee until I finally put a diaper on her for nap & bedtime.

I think I’m the most frustrated because I know she can do it, because she does it at school every single day. She’s been peeing in the toilet for weeks at school with zero accidents. So she knows what she’s doing, she seems to be ready, but she still refuses to do it at home. So she’ll go back to school tomorrow with zero stickers on the potty chart her teacher made… I know I sound really frustrated, and I am for sure, but we still had a really sweet weekend and lots of good time together at home.