Busy House

We've been keeping ourselves busy lately. We started landscaping a few weeks ago. One Saturday a few weeks ago we spent the morning home improvment store hopping to buy a variety of bushes, shrubs and flowers to plant in front of our house. N tagged along with us for this shopping excursion and actually was pretty good. We had to tell him that if he was good while we were shopping we would stop and play at the park on our way home. Well, he was good and it was lunch time, so we stopped at the Golden Arches, got some lunch, ate it at a pavillion at a park near our house and let N burn off some steam on the playground afterwards. All that morning activity wore N out so he took a great
nap while D and I worked outside. This was one day in the last few weeks that I have had the most energy I've had in along time. Therefore, I was able to help with the project all day long. Our neighbor was outside doing some lawn work and offered to watch N after we woke up from his nap. They were hosting a bible study group. The group hires a babysitter to watch the kids while the adults do their bible study and my neighbor said N was welcome to join them. Thank goodness!!! (Thanks again, neighbors. That was so thoughtful of you!) It was sooo wonderful to have the rest of the afternoon to finish our work. D actually ended up returning to Lowe's after dinner that night to buy more plants. He worked until 9pm to get the job completely done. A few days later we had a truck full of landscaping rocks delivered and got to work spreading the rocks into the flower beds. The rocks really make the project look complete. I got a super great deal on some gorgeous dark brown vinyl covered wicker at Kohls. We set that up on our front porch to make the entry look very cozy. We are sooo happy with it. I will post pix of the finished product soon. For now I have posted pix of the work in progress.





































We've been working on potty training for what seems like forever. We have gradually worked our way into wearing underpants when we're at home. N is still learning the concept of telling us that he needs to go potty, so we are not ready to leave the house w/o a pull up or daiper on, but we'll get there...someday, somehow. :) We are borrowing a really cool potty seat from our neighbor. Her little boy ("I") is one month older than N but has been potty trained for several months so they are not using it anymore. Well, N thinks it is soooo cool that he gets to use I's potty seat. We are currently working on getting N to #2 (sorry for the gory details) on the potty. He has a Diego pop up tent that we had set up in the living room. I noticed that N was hiding in the tent to go #2 (in his undies) one day so the next time he needed to go #2 I put the tent over N's potty (pictures below). He thought that was THE coolest thing and now sits on his potty in his Diego tent any time he has to go #2. It's so cute because he collects several books and sits in their like it's his own little personal bathroom. At this point, I'm happy to let him do it because it's working! He's gone in his "Diego bathroom" three times in the last two days, so I'm going to stick with it.









Other than that we have been spending as much time outside as we can. We have had a very long, cool spring. It's also been much, much windier than I can ever remember. Mix all that in with several rainy days and our days of playing outside seem to be few and far between. When we are outside N loves to play with our bubble machine, we play at our neighbors house with their kids in the afternoons (thanks again!!), go to the parks near our house and try new parks in surrounding towns. Whenever it stops raining that is D's chance to mow, so D, N and I have been pitching in to get that done.

On one of the long rainy days we recently had, I decided to get our paints out. We set up paints, paper, paint brushes, etc on N's picnic tables in the garage and made some fun pictures. After painting a few masterpieces on paper N decided he was more interested in painting his hands that the paper... I let him do that for a little while, then he started touching things and getting paint on his toys so we had to get cleaned up. Before I changed his clothes I let him dance in the rain for a few minutes. It wasn't too cold, there wasn't any lightening and he was already a mess, so I told him to go for it. He loved it!! After that I threw him in a nice warm bath, we had lunch and both of us took a nap. :)