ice breaker sours

i took the kids to the Y yesterday for swimming classes. as i was trying to get jackson checked into the nursery so i could get ela to her mommy and me class and gracie to her class, i heard this high pitched, fingernails down the chalkboard, blood curling scream. i quickly realized that it was ela! she was standing two inches from this poor, innocent 2 year old tiny little boy who's mother was trying to get him into the nursery as well. so my thought is, maybe he bit her or pulled her hair or threw her against the wall (not really) or something to get such a terrifying scream to rip from her mouth like she did! no, no, no......it's not that logical! ela had a tiny ice breaker sour in each one of her hands that i had given her before we got in the car to come to the Y. she held out her hand to show the tiny little "friend" and he took it from her and put it in his mouth! when she started screaming, he opened his mouth, the sour went tumbling to the floor, and he was climbing his mothers leg before you could blink an eye! ela was so upset! the little boy cried for quit sometime, even after he was in the nursery and i am sure that ela has scared him for at least a month or two! sad thing is, we see this little boy and his mom almost every day we go to the Y! talking about trauma!

i would like to thank....

first of all, let me begin by telling you that we do have 5 other children besides ela and i do love them all equally and unconditionally. i know that in the future there will be many things to say and share about them all at any given time, but i need to pay homage to our ela! she's earned it!

so.....it seems like forever ago (it's been about 8 months now), we started talking potty training with ela. we talked and we demonstrated and we begged and pleaded and bribed and scolded and gave high fives and flushed just to watch the water go down and chanted her name while she sat on the potty and cleaned up accidents all over the house and reminded her that she gets to go to pre-school when she pees in the potty and begged and pleaded some more! now i can say, by gosh i think she has it! i didn't want to say anything before now but the child has gone 5 whole days with no accidents AND has worn her big girl panties everywhere, even out of the house, AND has even been frustrated with herself when she has woken up in the morning and peed in her pull up!!!! IT IS TRULY A MIRACLE!!!

i don't think that you can possibly understand where all of this is coming from unless you know our history. ela is the first child that joseph and i have actually potty trained! my mother-in-law, aka ma-maw to the kids, watched gracie and jackson most of the time while i worked in north carolina and therefor took care of the nitty gritty details of potty training for us.......did we ever say thank you for that wonderful gift? living across the country now, she couldn't do that for us......SOOOOOOO,


i would like to thank the academy for this nomination for the "first time potty training and actually succeeding" award. it was many days and nights of crawling around on the floor with a bottle of resolve in one hand and a scrub brush in the other trying to find the latest accident that miss ela did "last year". i would like to thank first and foremost, joseph, for his constant reminding that one day she will get it......that is what you call faith! i would also like to thank, ma-maw and gamma (my mom) for the many weeks that they spent one on four and then one on six while i was on bedrest and recovering from our latest additions! if it weren't for the two of you ela would have no one else as equally excited as she is to share her fun news with! last but not least, i would like to thank ela for actually doing it!

ela was paid in full the other day with the bribe of all bribes for a 3 year old in training. she picked out her very own surprise dora baby doll and a pack of 7 pairs of brand new dora panties! hey, we do what we have to do! desperate times call for desperate measures!

3 down, 3 to go!

In her own form, Ela celebrates the victory!

our third child....

so......as many of you know, of our 6 little darlings, ela is our "independent" one! every family has one, right? she is the one who can push my buttons in a second flat! she constantly has something new and interesting to say, she has one volume which is LOUD, and she is not afraid of anything! if we were to open the front door, she would run out and never look back, which by the way, she has done and i have ran out after her many a day. this is the child who decided to climb up in the playroom window last summer and bounce on the screen like it was a trampoline, the whole time laughing like she was at an amusement park having the time of her life. mind you, the playroom is on the second floor of our house and thus the window is too! when i came around the corner and saw my then two year old lunging herself into the screen again and again and again my heart stopped and my blood went cold! this is the same child who can sing every letter of the alphabet with a animal name attached: alligator, bat, cat, dog, elephant.......the other day we stopped to let a bus full of high school students cross the road and of coarse they are going to get out one by one, right behind each other, and ela says, "why are they playing follow the leader? can i be the leader one day?" when she gets up in the morning she proclaims to the world,"i slept last year! i had good breams!" she is the one that you go looking for when things are to quite! i have found her pouring water out of the toilet with her shoe all over the floor so she could go swimming. she loves to climb up on the sink and put soap on her fingers and draw all over the mirror. i have found her at the bottom of the stairs with 12 peeled bananas lined up neatly with the peels flung all over the living room! she is the one who will change her clothes 15 times a day just because she can! and all of that has happened in just one day! this child likes to run out in the middle of a parking lot not turning to see if a car is coming or heaven forbid listening to the frantic screaming from her mother to "Stop"! If you chase her she just runs faster! ela thinks that everyday should be her birthday.....she likes to tell me what her cake should look like; normally it is purple with blue pokadots! ela refers to her brothers and sisters as her "friends"! she thinks that her gamma and her ma maw are "the breast cookers ever"! she is her daddy's biggest fan and i think that she secretly knows that she has him wrapped so tightly around her little finger that no matter what she does all she has to do is bat those big baby blues at him and he is going to melt right in the palm of her hand! our ela is one of a kind!

the whole point of me telling you this is right before she went to bed tonight, she came up to me and said,"mommy, i lub you so much! you are the breastest mommy ever! will you always be my breast friend?" she is something else!

heavenly father certainly broke the mold when He sent her to us......at least we hope so! not only for our sakes, but for everyone else as well!

who has time????

i like to think of myself as one who doesn't follow the crowd or isn't influenced by the latest happening thing that is going on.....that said, since about mid september, i have jumped on the bandwagon for alot of crazes. the first was reading the twilight series. i swore up and down that i was not going to get involved with a bunch of vampires and then i was put in the hospital on bedrest and given the book by a friend to help pass time. it sat there and stared at me for 2 days....then i picked it up and read the first chapter and that was it! i couldn't put the book down nor could i stop myself from reading the other 3 in the series. then i was invited by several friends to join facebook! i barely have time to eat during the day and people are inviting me to join facebook......what is facebook? my curiosity got the best of me and i joined and instead of getting much needed sleep at night, i have to see if anything has changed on facebook before i can close my eyes! so sad! that brings me to this point.......BLOGGING! i love to read other peoples blogs, i think it's a fun idea, i swore that i would never have a blog myself because when would i have time to sit down and blog? blah, blah, blah! and here i am.....it's 12:07 am and i am trying to figure this whole blog thing out! we'll see how it goes!

if anyone decides to read this and is curious about our world.......WELCOME! i hope i can keep up with it all! here goes nothing.......