Potty training and other achievements

The biggest news in our neck of the woods right now is that Raegan is well on her way towards being potty trained. YAY! Best Christmas present I could ever get, let me tell you. She started two weekends ago, when she just happened to go potty when she was sitting on the little toilet before her bath. (That's been something that's been part of the bath routine for months now.) Luke and I made a huge to-do about it and gave her some candy for it. The next day she told me after we got home from work/Angie's that she wanted to "go potty, get candy." I said sure, and lo and behold, she went potty again. Now we are to the point where candy is an occasional thing (basically between the hours of "after lunch and before supper") and she's staying dry for longer periods of time. Today she stayed dry from when I changed her after nap (2:30) until right before supper (6:00), with two trips to the potty in there. And one of them was in a public bathroom. Hollah for getting over that hump! :) My hope is to pick up some underwear after Christmas and give them a try since I'm not work from December 23rd until January 3rd. Raegan's not having quite as much luck with going potty at daycare, but so be it. She'll at least be weekend potty trained before too much longer. :S

Raegan's really starting to get into pretend play. She makes her little squirt toys talk to each other in the bathtub, and I've even caught her having her little pieces of candy walk around on the placemat, talking to each other. It's pretty cute. She also likes to do things and say, "Look at me, guys!" which I'm guessing she hears at daycare a lot. Now at night when we say prayers before bed, I'll tell her it's time to say prayers and she'll clasp her hands together and say, "God is great, God is good, now we thank Him for our food. Amen." Then she'll list the people she's thankful for and say, "Please help Raegan sleep well, Aaaaa-Men!" Her favorite songs to sing are "Where is Thumbkin?" and "I'm Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee." Well, those and "Pumped Up Kicks". Luke must have sang it to her with his own lyrics in it before (he does that with a lot of songs) because one day she just started singing, "Kids with the pumped up kicks, run run faster, boo boo brush your teeth." lol She still loves all things Elmo and Sesame Street, but she really wants me to let her watch Barney when she sees it on Netflix. (Mean Mommy - I don't like Barney, so we're not watching it.) Raegan just learned how to gallop this last week, and she is so darn proud of herself for being able to master it. Those are all the things I can think of at the moment, so I'll leave you with a picture:

Raegan loves listening to Zane's MP3 player. He'll let her stick the earbuds in her ears for a minute, and she just loves it.

Update on milestones

I keep forgetting to write a post updating all of the new things that Raegan is doing now. It seems like as soon as August hit, she just took off and made leaps and bounds in a lot of new skills. You especially can hear it in her speech. She's using three and even some four word sentences quite often now. When Luke and Raegan dropped by my school on Friday to bring me a pop (awesome husband!), he handed over the pop to me and Raegan said, "I want my wa-wa." Smartest girlie ever! :) She's also getting a lot clearer in some of the longer words that she says. Yesterday she said "hamburger" and it came out perfectly. She's not dropping syllables (which is still perfectly normal for her age) nearly as often as she used to, so it's getting easier to understand her. For a couple months there, we had the problem that Raegan's vocabulary is huge, but her actual speech abilities hadn't matured enough to catch up with the vocab, and sometimes she could be a little hard to understand. Now, we're golden about 95% of the time! :)

Raegan's also becoming more independent, and she really WANTS that independence. She is able to put on her flip flops by herself now (almost always on the right feet!) and she's working so hard at pulling up her pants by herself. Anytime she's trying to get dressed or undressed and you offer help, she very emphatically tells you, "No!" :) Potty training hasn't really gone anywhere, but seeing as she hasn't even turned two yet, I'm not too concerned. I wanted to give her some time to get readjusted to being in daycare (and to check with our daycare provider about what all she's willing to do to help) before we went guns blazing into potty training. Raegan still tells you when she's wet, pretty much as soon as it happens. She calls it all "poopy" whether she's wet or poopy, but she will tell you the difference if you specifically ask her "wet or poopy?"

Another fun skill that Raegan has picked up is "reading". We still read probably 10-20 books a day, and she's started "reading" her favorite ones also. When she reads Baby Bear Baby Bear (which is similar to Brown Bear, Brown Bear) she says, "Bay-boo bay-boo, uh uh see" (Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What do you see?) and then turns to the page with the fox and says, "Red fox, Red fox, uh uh see." I've been trying to catch it on video, because it's just too adorable.

Raegan's big love this summer has been Elmo. The theme for her birthday party next weekend is going to be Elmo, and I think she'll be really excited about the Elmo cake! As a treat, sometimes I let her watch Sesame Street on the television in our room. It's fun to lay on our bed with her and watch. Sesame Street is really quite funny, and I like watching it with her. Now that I'm back to work, we'll have to get videos from the library. Raegan has also started to really like Abby and Zoe, and gets pretty excited when she sees them on Sesame Street too.

I'm sure there is plenty more that she's been doing lately, but that's all I can think of at the moment. I can't believe she's going to be two in a couple weeks! My baby is most definitely not a baby anymore!

300th post, and milestones update

This post marks my 300th post! I have quite a lot to say, huh? :)

I realized that I haven't updated lately with Raegan's milestones, so I figured I should do that while I'm thinking of it.

More and more every day it seems like Raegan is more of a little girl and less of a baby. Weekly, and sometimes even daily, she is doing new things. I'm always in awe of how very smart she is. I know every parent thinks that their child is so smart, but I don't think it's just me being her mom. She can count to ten, you guys! TEN. For the longest time, she would start at 2 and count to 10, but this week she's started counting with the number one. Sometimes she will point at objects and count, but she doesn't always use one number for one object, and when she's doing that she usually trails off around five or six. I love the way she says five, with a "sh" sound on the end instead of a "v". Raegan is also starting to use color words, although she's not correctly naming any colors yet. She mostly says that things are blue or yellow. She has an Elmo alphabet book that she has pretty much memorized, and in certain parts of the book she can tell you what letter is coming next. As soon as you start reading the page that says "Iguana starts with I" she will immediately say J. She points to words and letters and calls them all E. :) These are all awesome skills that I look for in the 3 year olds I teach, so I'm pretty pumped that she's starting to show some literacy skills before the age of 2. She still loves to read, and we start off every day with book after book after book. :)

Raegan's nervousness about going to the pool has pretty much disappeared. She's still not a fan of deep water where she can't touch, but she loves going to the baby pool! One of her recent new words is "swimsuit." She's also so fearless when it comes to climbing and playing at the park. She loves the slides and the climbing structures. She had no fear of going through any of the play places at Silver Dollar City. I'm glad that she doesn't have the paralyzing fear of heights that I did as a child.

Her vocabulary is expanding daily. She's starting to use three word sentences/phrases more frequently. She knows the names for about every animal under the sun, and can do the noises for just as many. :) One of Raegan's favorite things to say right now is "What's that?" If we go somewhere new, she immediately asks about our new surroundings and wants to figure everything out. When we say prayers before bed, she has suggestions for what we should pray about now, usually involving saying thank you for all of her friends from daycare. She has three in particular that she names off multiple times.

Hopefully this weekend we're going to break out the toddler bed and start transitioning her to that. She tends to have a hard time sleeping in new beds (see: blogs about our vacation!) so we're starting now with the hopes that she'll be settled in by the time I go back to work and not too tired in the mornings. She still wants to sit on the potty before bath, and randomly throughout the day, but she's not really going in it yet. She will tell you the instant she is wet or poopy (she calls it all "poopy") but she's not quite there yet in letting us know beforehand. I kind of want to get the bed transition taken care of before we start focusing on potty training more intensely.

I can't believe that Raegan is almost two! It seems like just yesterday she was my brand new baby.

Goodbye and good riddance!

What a week. I am glad to say goodbye to last week, and even more glad that I'll never see it again. :) Reed's funeral was Monday, and that was pretty draining. Then Thursday we had to drive to Sabetha for Luke's grandpa's funeral. I had only met Luke's grandpa a handful of times, so obviously that funeral wasn't as emotional for me, but it was still a funeral and I still needed to be there for emotional support for Luke and his family. My grandpa has been put back in the hospital because he was super dehydrated from a couple infections that he is (so please keep him in your prayers in the coming days). Then Saturday, Raegan woke up and was super fussy all morning. She hardly ate any lunch and was in her super!clingy! mode. We decided to go to Orchelin's to check out their baby chicks, and right after we got there, she projectile vomited all over Luke and herself. So we spent last night and the majority of today snuggled up on the couch. I hate it when my baby is sick, but I do have to say that I love how she just wants to sit next to me on the couch and play with her toys snuggled up against me.

So all in all, not one of my favorite weeks, that's for sure. So that this doesn't turn into a super depressing post, I'm going to change gears and tell you about the wonderful new things Raegan has been doing lately.

Some of her newest words include book (she says it like "boop"), rock (for rocking before bed), blankie (but it comes out sounding just like "baby") and water (wa-wa). Raegan is starting to put two words together a LOT now. Some examples are "bye bubba" or "bye Zane" in the morning when we drop him off for school, "Daisy wa-wa" when she hands me Daisy's water and food bowl, and "Wu dat" (what's that?). She points to many body parts (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue, hair, legs, feet, hands, belly) and makes the correct noise for lion, chicks/bird, dog, cat, and bear. Her favorite song is "Twinkle twinkle" and she asks for it every night before bed. She opens and closes her hand in the twinkle twinkle position and says "Up above" like she's singing that part of the song. The absolute cuteness of it slays me every time! Also, the other day she pulled this snail toy that sings the ABC song off her shelf and sang "A Dee Dee Dee" with the same tune as ABCs right before she pushed the button. I always say, "Could she be any cuter?! :)

Raegan's also starting to let us know sometimes when she is wet, and she's almost able to pull down her pants all by herself. At her 18 month well check a couple weeks back, her pediatrician said that since "she is obviously advanced" (actual quote from the ped, btw!!), we can start introducing potty training anytime, but Luke and I both feel like she's a little young still. And really, she needs to be able to pull her pants up and down before it's really even a doable feat, so for now we're just encouraging her to let us know when she's wet and working on her self-help skills. Really, when parents potty train so young it's more about the parents being potty trained than the kid because they are the ones having to run the child to the bathroom every 20 minutes. No thanks.

And last but not least, a little video of Raegan rocking in this old carseat that we have upstairs while we figure out what to do with it.