Life's been good to me so far

I love the synergy in our backyard.

I needed basil tonight for dinner. So I was cutting some in the backyard. Jake and Elise followed me out, and started eating cherry and grape tomatoes off the vines. I noticed the cilantro and mint needed pruning, so I gave the cuttings to Aaron to take to the rabbits, that flip (sometimes literally) over fresh herbs. We compost the rabbit poop because it makes great fertilizer. I can garden easily with the chickens distracting the little kids. I can use leftovers as chicken feed when I realize we're out of chicken feed. Like today. They got black beans, bulghur wheat and old stale veggie straws, which is actually surprisingly nutritionally sound for a chicken. The chickens will be laying eggs for us, in a couple more months.

In addition to being covered in almost-ripe mangoes, our mango tree has a bird's nest in it, now. We watch the mother bird come and go. She wisely chose a spot that is almost completely shielded by a privacy curtain of leaves. But today, we found part of one of the tiny eggs on the ground under the tree and the three oldest passed it around for almost half an hour in total amazement.

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Elise is wearing underwear!

She is not exactly toilet trained. But she controls her urges and doesn't really have accidents, either - basically she hasn't peed or pooped while we are out or in a bed (she sleeps naked most of the time...) in a long time. And she's naked a lot of the day if we're home. Whenever she has to pee, she runs to the laundry room, finds a dirty towel, and stands on it and pees. I have tried and tried and TRIED to get her to pee on the toilet, and she has a little mini-seat on one of them with a step stool and sometimes asks to try, but it's only worked twice. When she has to poop, she knows way beforehand and talks about it a LOT prior to, but can't seem to START on the toilet...if she's started and I rush her to the toilet she'll finish there and be so happy about it. Otherwise she ends up pooping on the floor and immediately telling me so I can clean it up, and then she flushes it and we talk about how she needs to just do it in there to begin with. Sometimes she rushes out to the yard and poops outside and then comes in to report it. *sigh*

This is eerily similar to what I went through with all three boys. The problem seems with all of them to be/have been that they only want to go when standing and are used to only going while standing, when diapered. Which is great in that it means nobody gets their lap dirtied and beds are safe for laying in, even with a one year old... But it's a really big adjustment to try to make it happen while sitting down.

It is awesomely cute seeing her in tiny little panties though. She is EXTREMELY proud of them. And I've taken her out for whole afternoons running around twice now, that way, with no accidents. As soon as we come inside the house again, she strips down, and goes to find a towel to pee on. Or, waits through me trying to sit her on the toilet first, acts like she's straining, gets bored, and then runs to find a towel to pee on. I'm having to wash towels a lot more often, with pre-rinses and Oxyclean. No diapers, though, and the towels are already dirty anyway. *shrug*


She is using more and more 2 and 3 word phrases and pseudo-phrases. "no more" "no way" "My mommy" "Jakey Isaac ur" (Jake and Isaac hurt me, usually following some kind of rough play accident), "Chicks eat" (when we feed them), "Cat bite", etc.

Considering that she just turned 2 May 1, she is impressing me :)