poop fish

     Prepare yourself for a gross story.  Seriously, if you are eating do not read this story right now. Also if you think that someday you might want to possibly have children don't read this story until they are toddlers.  If you're pregnant, too late! Brace yourself because this is headed your way in the near future!  If you have successfully potty trained your children, pat yourself on the back for a job well done and have a laugh at my expense.
  
     Emma is at this point fully potty trained. This means that she wears underwear all the time and uses the adult potty by herself (with no toddler seat) at home.  In public I help her up and then spend the whole time saying "please don't touch that! and dying a little inside.  But she's still not very good at wiping herself (gross I know) and in typical three year old fashion she refuses to let me help her a lot of the time.  (sidenote: she takes twice as many baths not as she used to)  But when she poops I make her let me help her.  She is supposed to let me know that she pooped immediately so I can make sure she has a clean bottom, and so I don't stumble upon it later.

   Cue Friday morning, about 8 am.  I'm nursing Asher on the couch watching the Today show when she announces that she has to poop and runs off to the bathroom.  All good so far. I put Asher down for a nap, and just as I am finished she comes in and announces that she had a "poop accident".  So I immediately order her back to the bathroom, preparing myself to pick up poop off the floor or maybe her underwear. No biggie, all in a days work. Meanwhile she's telling me that she thought she was done pooping so she got off the potty, but then she got scared because the poop was still coming out.  I told you, gross!

   I was unprepared for the amount of poop that was all over the bathroom!! It was was smeared all over the  toilet seat, all down the front of the toilet and all over the floor.  Emma is still nonchalantly babbling away about how well she had wiped herself and asking for a special treat for pooping in the potty (um not a chance kid!) And it was then that I took a good look at her.

    All oveeeer her hands, legs, and lower half.  Totally covered in poop.  So I said some choice words in my head, took a deep breath in (instantly regretted the deep breath because of the overwhelming smell of toddler excrement) and began to clean up.   Twenty minutes or so later, I had a well scrubbed bathroom and a totally unphased toddler sitting in the bathtub. I scrubbed my hands clean, mentally calculated when I would be able to take a shower, and went to check on Asher.  When I came back a few moments later, there was a cup of water sitting on the side of the bathtub.  Emma yelled "come look at my fishy mommy", so I did.

   Then I told myself that I wasn't possibly seeing what I thought I was seeing because it looked like there was a turd floating in that cup... but maybe just maybe it was something else.  So I shrieked "Emma, what is that????" And calm as she could be, she replied "poop mommy, it came from my bum".  

   I'll let that sink in a moment. There is my adorable three year old daughter calmly playing with a cup full of her own waste. Just another special memory for mommy to cherish forever....

This is a blobfish. It really exists. Go ahead google it... It is also the most appropriate picture I could find for a blog entry entitled "poop fish". You're welcome! 

Dear 4:45 am

Dear 4:45 am,

   I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but we are not friends.  I feel like maybe you think that we are, and I'm not sure where you got this idea, but it very very false.  I'm fairly sure that we were never friends to begin with, and I certainly have never made any effort on my part to cultivate a friendship.  What we had going there for a little while was great, (mainly I slept blissfully right through you), and I'm not sure why you would want to ruin such a beautiful thing.  Can we pretty pretty please go back to those days? 


 This morning was not pretty... and I'm sure nobody wants to repeat that.  I was having a perfectly good dream about being chosen to attend a special wizarding school taught by that guy who plays Gimley (this may be the result of watching an episode of Sliders and Adam playing Lego Harry Potter into the wee hours of the night -cause that's how we roll people!)  when all of a sudden the box of chocolates I was about to devour like a rabid wolverine, started to sound a lot like a certain screaming two year old- (which was obviously confusing to me) and when I woke up I was halfway to Peanut's room to make it stop ( does anyone else have that sleepwalking problem?)  I'm not sure why she felt the need to scream at the top of her lungs but I managed to make it stop.... for 15 whole minutes! That scene was then repeated twice more, before my well-intentioned husband decided to give it a try.  Unfortunately, he is not at his best at 5:15 either. Who knew? 
    He of course, being much more susceptible to the pleas of said screaming two year old attempts to get her up. Whereas mommy is like "Get back to bed you little gremlin, you get up when I say you get up because you're two years old and mommy only got three hours of sleep last night! And if you know what's good for you, you'll stay in that bed and think about how lucky you are to have such a fantastic, beautiful and talented mother" Suffice it to say that did not go well either, and ended with me putting her back into bed screaming at the top of her lungs and pummeling me with all her might.  (consistent parenting- epic fail)  But twenty minutes later, she was calling and cooing in a much pleasanter voice, and since I was wide awake at that point, we got up at the ripe old time of 6:15. 


By about 6:30 I was ready for coffee, but of course wasn't actually able to get out of the apartment till about 8:30.   That did not go so well either.  I will spare you details, but it ended with me in thoroughly coffee soaked, mud caked jeans eating part of the world's soggiest donut and muttering unpleasant things about a car that almost ran us over. 


I can't help but feel that this day would have gone two million times better if I was allowed to sleep in until a decent hour (like how about noon?)

Side note:  Emma keeps saying "Oh no, Daddy tooted at work!" and giggling hysterically and then running away..she may be a pain in the tookus but she does keep me laughing!


So for my birthday this year (which is in two days!) I am asking  Santa Clause for the gift of sleep. Eight hours a night is all I ask.  I go to bed at 10:00 for Pete's sake! It doesn't seem a lot to ask! 


Ok, I'm done. Rant over.  Thanks for  listening, or at least skimming to the end to see if  I've posted any cute pictures.  I haven't.  Sorry.   We've only got one pair of rechargeable batteries and they have been in our Wii remotes  for the last week because mommy may or may not have developed an addiction to Just Dance 2 and may or may not be so sore from "shaking it" that it hurts to lift this cup of coffee to my mouth.  Yay for straws! 

Stinky Daddy

    Sometimes on cold and blustery days, Emma chooses to start our morning off with a good laugh!  This morning was one of those days....

Scene:
    Daddy, Emma-Jean, and two Mr. P-doo heads (those are potato heads for those not in the know) sit at Emma's little table eating breakfast.  One of these P-doo heads was dressed as a stormtrooper but that's not really relevant to this story.

Me:  Ok, I need to get a picture of this, where is the camera?  Oh shoot, you took the batteries out to play Wii yesterday didn't you?  And then you played until they died, right?  You stink Adam!

Emma-Jean:  Emma stinks too daddy! (in an "it's ok" tone of voice)

:: cue hysterical laughter on mommy's part ::



* the above picture has nothing to do with this story, except that it is a recent picture of Emma and her daddy being a little goofy.  If my camera had batteries there would be a cute picture, but because it did not have batteries I have a cute sotry instead!

My little two year is….


...Goofy
           as evidenced by the pictures in this post


... Loving

    she has a checklist of places we have to kiss her before she can go to sleep :

         (cheek, “otha one cheek”, hair, nose and chin)

...Stubborn

      she gets this from both mommy and daddy, she is incredibly    persistent

...Frustrated

     when we won’t let her do things like watch TV all day long, or    eat cookies for breakfast

 
 

...Conversational

       she speaks in full sentences now, and is learning so many new  words a day I can't keep track of them

...Possesive

        She is not very good at sharing anything, and labels everything "Emma's" or "Mine" as in "my daddy and my       mommy" or "Emma's toys"

...Helpful

        She wants to help mommy do everything, and is often heard to say " I helping momma! I helping?"

...Imaginative:

       She tells me stories all the time now.  They usually involve      Thomas the Tank Engine and the "bad train"

... Definitely our daughter!

All I wanted was one good picture!

So we were at this beautiful series of little waterfalls, gorgeous really.

See?

And everything was going well, until .... mommy decided that she would like to have a picture of the peanut and herself (just to prove that she really does go on these outings, and it's not just daddy and Emma)

Ok, ok so that didn't go very well, let's try again.  Look at daddy Emma!

How did that one look?  Not good? Are you sure?

Cause I felt like it went well...

Ok, so maybe this isn't happening right now....

But we're in this beautiful place, and I apparently like punishment, so we'll try just ONE MORE! I think it had potential...

Ok, so we'll try it like this.  I'll get down at her level, give her a rock (that's what she was screaming about) and she'll look at the camera in adoration and gratitude!

There we go!  Now what the heck is wrong with my face?  Seriously?  The one picture she's smiling in, I look like this....

            And I think it's time to call it a day... That one's great hunny, really!

At least she'll know I was there right??

A poopy mystery

  So I have been dreading the moment when Emma figures out that she can reach into her diaper and pull out her poop. (Every mother's worst nightmare, right?)  Well, folks, today is that day! (Oh, goodie!) At least I think it was today.... I opened the bathroom door this morning to find a very stinky little peanut eagerly waiting for me to emerge. The first thing that hit me was the stink. The second thing was the fact that there was poop smeared all over her stomach and hands! Ahhhh! So I immediately place her in the bathtub and grab some wipes. After getting her belly and hands all cleaned up, I opened her diaper (expecting a huge mess) and found...NOTHING! Excuse me?

So my question to all of you is where did this poop come from???? 

Here are the facts:

• I'm 98% sure it was poop (I don't know what else it would be)
• It was her poop. I was in the bathroom, where the litter box is, so it wasn't Bellas
• There was not even a smidgen of poop on her butt
• The poop was found only on her stomach and hands

Here are my theories:

• She pooped so explosively, that it somehow rocketed up on to her stomach!
• This one is a little iffy because I think she would have to have been sitting down to make it work, also I'm pretty sure there would be poop smears
• She was waiting for the poop to come out! She had her hand stuck down her diaper, and literally pooped into her own hands.  Then proceeded to smear it all over her stomach.
• I think this is the most likely although she has never done anything like this in the past!.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Any poop theories of your own?

Also, although I made a thorough search of the house for more poop, I'm more than a little worried that I will be finding additional poop smears in the coming weeks.  This makes me really sad.

This may be my last post for a little while.  We are going on our first ever family vacation!! We will be in the White Mountains for the majority of next week, and taking a few little "daycations".   I'm really really excited about it!  So if I don't respond for a little while, don't take it personally.

And seriously....where the heck did the poop come from???? It's going to drive me crazy, I think I may need a nannycam.

Good Morning Gorgeous!

Well it's been about a week since I last posted!! Shame shame... Self discipline was never my strength.  (Ask my mother, she'll tell ya) 

 Anyways... we had a crazy busy Father's day that I will probably tell you all about in a future post.  But for now I will leave you with pictures from that morning.

Here is what my beautiful little angel looks like first thing in the morning.  She is full of grace, charm and sophistication (as always).  She greets the world with a smile on her face and a song in her heart, grateful for just one more day with her loving, doting parents.

Or at the very least she makes us start our morning with a good laugh :)

Our Very Own Blooper Reel

Wonder where she gets it from? ;)

Why I love PBS

     I don't know about you, but I love it when my apartment is clean.  This pretty much rarely ever happens around here. As anyone with an 18 month old will tell you, it is nearly impossible to clean when they are awake!  There are only a few ways that I ever manage this feat.

 Method 1:  PBS.  Seriously, thank the Lord for a channel that shows educational cartoons at pretty much anytime during the day.  This is how I cleaned my kitchen this morning.  Hooray for Sid the Science Kid!  Hooray for Peep!  And most of all hooray for mommy knowing what these shows even are....

Of course, I can't just plop peanut in front of the TV all day long and still feel like a good mother. But I honestly do not feel bad about a show or two while mommy does the dishes, or runs downstairs to do laundry.  I know there are people who are totally against this, but I am not one of those mommies.  Although I have recently decided that Adam and I should not watch any of our shows in the evening before Peanut goes to bed because she is starting to understand a whole lot more and repeat things!!!  CSI or Family Guy may not be the best choice for her anymore....

Method Two:  Get her involved in the cleaning.  If mommy is sweeping, then Emma is swiffering.  If mommy is wiping the kitchen table, then Emma has a baby wipe in hand and is taking care of the cofee table.  Of course if mommy is vacuuming then all bets are off, and  Emma is standing on the couch screaming like I'm hurting her.  (We're working on this one...sigh)   Of course, this has it's drawbacks.  My neat little piles of dirt are often swiffered away all over the floor, and I have to summon a lot of patience in order to not scream and throw a fit.  After all, they're never too young to encourage cleaning right??? I'm really hoping to have a neat teenager some day. (Go ahead and laugh at me, I deserve it)

Method Three:  Food, food and more food.  And this one only works if she is buckled into her booster seat.  And if this happens to be mealtime then it does mean that I have chosen to clean over making myself any sort of good lunch, and will probably have to settle for either waiting for her afternoon nap or snacking on whatever I can grab while she's not looking.  Am I the only one who can't eat in front of her children without having to either share or endure full out tantrums in front of the refrigerator?

(this picture is from July of last year, so cute!)

And that's pretty much all I've got. Those are all the tricks.  And now you can see why my apartment isn't always as clean as it should be.  So how and when do you manage to get your cleaning done?  Let me know if I'm missing out on some good tricks!

Creepy Parade Souvenir

Is it just me, or is this thing Bates Motel creepy? I fell asleep on the couch the other night and found this floating close to my face when I woke up.  I almost peed my pants, I kid you not.

Also, just so you know we are not the kind of parents who would pay $12 to own this grossly oversized thing.  We are the kind of parents who cheer when the vendor goes by and this gets stuck in a tree.  And then I am the kind of mother who sits by and watches while her super kind neighbors repeatedly try to get it out of the tree, and thank them profusely when they present it to their little peanut.  (who of course doesn't get excited at all, even though she screams ELMO every other time she sees him on anything)

And now we're both a little scared of it... so it lurks in our living room and not her bedroom because I think it would be child abuse to send her to bed with this thing.

ps. I had six followers as of yesterday afternoon and now I have 15!  Does that make me seem more legit? I do feel a little bit of pressure to write better now that I am subjecting more people to my rumblings (a mix of ranting and mumbling?)  But then of course the first post I come up with is this dribble about a creepy balloon.... do you guys still even want to be my friend?  I hope so :)

There's poop on my floor...

    So after sitting with the peanut literally all afternoon in a sweltering apartment, reading book after book after book, what do I have to show for it?  A huge pile of poop on my floor. (Again!) So here's the potty situation update.  I've been a total slacker at it.  We did one naked week, and then one week of being naked after naps and first thing in the morning.  And then we did nothing for the next week.  Drats.  Not my proudest mommy moment.
  But I thought that we had at least made progress.  She has been telling me when she has pooped in her diaper by saying "uh-oh" and holding her nose (which is actually really cute).  So after a whole afternoon of no pooping I knew that we were due for a big one.  (she's very regular, twice a day usually, although not at scheduled times which is annoying- we never know when they will show up)  She was a little farty so I sat her on the potty for ten minutes, and nothing.  I go into the kitchen for two seconds to refill her cup and I come back to her calmly standing over her poop.  She's like a ninja pooper!!! There were no sounds, no grunting, no tell tale "uh oh" or "stinky".  There was no frantic running to the potty.  She was literally coloring away while poop slid down her leg.  Classy, I know.  I have a feeling this whole potty training thing is going to take a while... and maybe a bit more consistency on my part.

::sigh:: Not my best mommy day, thank goodness she won't remember any of this.

In other news, my cat also decided today was a good day to poop on the floor.  What is going on around here?  I swear if Adam comes home and poops on the floor I'm running away, and that's a promise. 

The shirt that almost ruined my Mother's Day Weekend....

    I have been feeling a bit frumpy lately.  (Well actually since I had Emma, so 18 months ago) Well actually maybe since about six months into the pregnancy (so 21 months ago)!  My body does not look like it used to look.  It is decidedly more lumpy, stretch mark laden, and just larger in general.  I still have about 8 pounds to lose to get back to pre-baby weight.  But even if I lost all the weight, I still wouldn't look the same.  My rib cage is larger, my boobs will never be the same, and I have a lot more skin around the tummy area than I used to. Not to mention that my already wide hips are wider still.  Not to complain or anything...  I do also have the most beautiful, little girl in the whole stinking world to show for it. So I guess it was a fair trade. :)

   But anyway, on a typical stay at home mom day, I throw on jeans and a t-shirt.  Then I throw my hair up in a ponytail or messy bun type thing and am on my way to the playground or on a walk in an effort to tame my lower half and stomach back into that shape I never appreciated as much as I should when I had it. (seriously, I wish I could go back in time and tell that 22 year old girl just how hot she was!)  

Ok back to the present and the Frumpy, frumpy frumpy. It also doesn't help that most of my clothes were purchased (pre baby) in an effort to showcase my previously very flat tummy.  Now they just make me sad. I used to long for summer to come so I could shed the bulky sweaters and sweatshirts, lately I miss them.  So I decided that for Mother's Day I was going to buy a few shirts that were figure flattering and made me feel good about myself.  Yes people, I am that shallow.  Go ahead and comment about how it's what is inside that matters, but I know the power that a flattering shirt has over my self esteem and I'm going to choose to work with it instead of fighting it!  So the family is packed up and it's off to the mall.  Adam is going to take Emma to the mall playground she loves and I will shop in peace for a whole hour!

Did I mention the fragile self-esteem I was clinging to? Well, whatever self esteem I had was brutally murdered by this little number:

Gorgeous right? Super feminine and flattering!  I saw it on a rack on the way to the dressing room and fell in love with it.  I wanted this sucker, bad.  So I grabbed a few sizes and tried them on.  When I couldn't even get the small size over my shoulders I didn't panic, I just reached for the medium.  When however the medium one didn't even come close to buttoning and wouldn't fit over my boobs at all, I felt the tears coming.  But  I bravely swallowed them and calmly left that stupid store with it's stupidly small sizes and trendy clothing for people who clearly don't have any curves at all and will probably die alonewith their cats   way too perky sales people.  Then I went and found my husband and tried not to cry until he asked me what was wrong and was too nice to me and I lost it.  Tears streaming down my face... Perhaps not my proudest moment.

Fast forward to Mother's Day, (the next day) when I decided to try the whole mall thing again.  See?  I can be both forgiving and gracious.   I even decided to give the evil Forever XXI store a second chance.  And they redeemed themselves in a big way!   Turns out that shirt I was looking at, is actually a dress for little girls.  Who knew this store even had a little girls section???? There was no indication on the tag that it was supposed to be worn by pre-pubescent eight year olds.  There should have been a huge GIRL'S sign on the wall somewhere, right?  I looked, there wasn't.  Also who designs dresses for little girls with that many buttons on the front? Clearly they have never dressed a child in their life.

And that, dear friends, is the story of the shirt that almost ruined my otherwise lovely Mother's Day weekend.  Let this be a lesson to all of you to always know what section of the store you have stumbled into.  :)

Why I can't get a good picture

Here is evidence of me desperately trying to get a camera-worthy smile out of the peanut.

I always look at pictures of my friend's children smiling away and think "wouldn't it be nice to have a couple of pictures of Emma actually smiling?", but alas this is what I end up with when I ask nicely. I'm not sure where she learned that this weird facial grimace is what people call a "smile", but I sure hope it wasn't from me!

Also, I would post videos a lot more often if they didn't take so stinking long to post! This one has been uploading for over fifteen minutes now, and that's fifteen precious nap minutes that I could have been using to watch the Ellen show or to avoid doing the supper dishes. ::sigh::

Oh and on the potty training front, we made zero progress yesterday. And mommy gave in, put her in a diaper and took her to the park where she spent an hour and a half chasing bees, jumping in mud puddles and pouring buckets full of dirt on herself. But this morning, she started to pee on the floor and cried a lot until I sat her on the potty where she proceeded to have the rest of the Niagra Falls of pee. Progress? At least she knows when she is peeing herself and isn't content to stand there soiling my carpets anymore! There may be hope for this silly girl yet...

So swoosh Emma's bangs to the side, and we've got a Mrs. Brady cut going on here. Awesome...

I can't wait till it grows out of this awkwardness!

That's where your pee comes from...

Recently overheard in our apartment:

"Hot!" Emma says, pointing at her vagina...
and did I mention she also spends a lot of time standing in front of our window yelling at men in trucks? We're raising a classy lady here at the Roys!

So...she has been a tiny bit vagina obsessed lately. She's constantly pointing to it and asking me what it is. She's really into naming body parts. I had decided that I was going to be all PC and progressive and just tell her that it was a vagina, but then she said something that sounded a lot like vagina. And Adam and I decided we weren't ready for our one year old to go around pointing and proudly declaring vagina! Yes, I've read the monologues and I'm all for being proud of our vaginas but that doesn't mean I want my little lady to go around shouting vagina at Target. So for now I'm kind of dodging the issue. Here is a sample conversation:

Peanut: "Dis? pointing at her nose
Me: That's your nose
Peanut: Nose! clapping and happy shrieking ensues
Peanut: Eyes? poking herself in the eyes
Me: That's right, you are soo smart!
Peanut: Dis? grabbing her "down there"
Me: Ummmm that is where your pee comes from...

Hopefully that will satisfy her for a little while until I can come up with a less wussy solution to this vaginal dilemna. What do people usually tell their daughters?

Goofy Girls

Clearly she gets her good looks and classy sophistication from her mother ;)

Pictures that she will someday hate us for ::muah ha ha::

Ummm I think that last one is coming out on her first date, just to test that guy's commitment!