Up to Some Good

It's been two weeks since my last post, but I have a good reason to be remiss in blogging. Bella has been wearing underwear since Friday the 11th, and between trips to the potty and trying do do anything else I haven't been able to really sit at the computer for more than a few seconds at a time.

While the Harvey's were in town we got her a toilet to see if she liked it. She enjoyed dismantling the thing, but wouldn't really sit on it long enough to do any business. After a talk with my mom on the phone I decided to try potty training her my Mom's way. She apparently potty trained all seven of us at 18 months, in ONE day.

During the week she'd been kind of sitting on the potty- but mostly playing with it- Bella developed a fear of making a deposit. She was happy to sit on it and color, read books, or sing songs- until she needed to do her business. This fear complicated things a little bit, so it has taken longer than 1 day to accomplish what we have.

It took her 3 days to not scream and cry when she needed to go (sometimes begging for a diaper to go in). Since overcoming that fear she has been able to pee on command- on any toilet. She had one quazi-accident yesterday (her undies got a little wet, but she held in the rest till we got to the pot), and she still uses a diaper for nap time and bed time, but other than that she lets us know when she needs to go and keeps it in until we get to the toilet.

Yay! Can I just say- I didn't think it was possible to potty train a 19 month old. Happy Day!

We've been up to lots of good around here.

Happy December

It's been December for a while now, but I haven't been able to sit down at the computer much in the last couple weeks. I was having way too much fun with Mark and Marlene (Ryan's parents), who came to Houston to do Thanksgiving with us. I won't go into details now, but we'll just say Bella was basking in more attention and play time than she is accustomed to. She now knows what the monkey says, and never fails to scratch her arm pit every time she does the sound. Thanks for coming to visit us! We had a blast.

Fix it Friday 37

Today is Fix it Friday at I ♥ faces! Today I used a layer with overlay blend mode and grayscale to paint brighter her face and the background darker. I then used coffeshop's bold pop action, adjusted brightness layer, flattened image then added skeletalmess's chaotic soul texture in multiply blending mode. at 50% opacity. Done!

i heart faces Autumn Beauty week

This week's theme at i ♥ faces is "Autumn Beauty." Although I haven't seen any changing colors around here yet, I do have a picture of a little beauty wearing fall colors in October. I used some textures from skeletalmess to make it feel more autumny. If I recall correctly we had news of snow back west in our home state on this same day. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about this autumn is that we can still wear shorts and T-shirts mid-November.

More Zoo

Last time we went to the zoo we didn't dare try any more than the petting zoo, and even that seemed to be a little lackluster for our little princess. Although it's only been about 3 months since then, she has learned enough new stuff to make the zoo a fun place.
This time Bella had been working on her animal sounds, her favorite being the cow. Every time she spotted an animal that day she shouted "MOOOOOOOOOO!" We tried teaching her the correct sounds but discovered that we don't know what most animals say (anyone know what the giraffe says?), and a disproportionate amount of zoo animals say "Raaaaaaaaar!"
Although the animals interested her this time, nothing captivated her like the merry-go-round. we decided it was worth an extra 1.25 to take her a second time. That girl was a load of fun!