Mother's Day Weekend + Milestones

It was a beautiful weekend in Minnesota to enjoy outdoor activities this past weekend. The only indoor activity I enjoyed was a massage on Friday afternoon after a very long 2 weeks at work taking tests and learning new things about the products I work on. It was exhausting!

Since I had to miss "muffins with mom" and dad got to enjoy them instead (because of my final exam at work), I picked up the girls early with Grandma Jan. We went to see the flowers blooming at the Arboretum. We love our new membership to the Arboretum. So many seasons to enjoy. On Saturday, we went to the zoo with Craig and Meredith and Charlotte and Robby. We even ran into another friend, Heather, and her two boys, Evan and Kyle. So many fun things to see including a new kangaroo exhibit. Unbeknownst to us, the kangaroos can run freely in the exhibit. As I was video taping this, one ran right near Maeve and then stopped and waited for her to back up before running past her. It was crazy!

Afterwards, we went to see our cousin's new house. Jack and Shelby have a lovely place and now have 2 dogs to entertain. They have Grandma Joanne's dog, Flossy, and a new 8 week old puppy, Stella, who is a Westie. Maeve enjoyed seeing the puppies and asked about both Sadie and Grandma Joanne who we explained were in heaven!

Cecilia loved their house so much that she decided to show off her walking skills. She wants to walk everywhere now with your hands or a chair and then let go and take 5 or so steps. She's almost there!

After the fun afternoon, we enjoyed having Steve and Jan over for grilled nachos and fajitas. We gave Jan her apple watch for Mother's Day from all the kids and Grandpa Steve and Eric gave me the same thing on Sunday! Time to workout and track my steps!

Although Sunday was Mother's Day, the kids didn't really cooperate. We woke up at 4:50am with Cecilia, went to church at 7:30 and since I was so tired we decided not to venture out 30 minutes to the bike trail and instead tried a short bike ride around the neighborhood for Cecilia's first time in the Burley. She didn't enjoy the helmet that kept coming down over her face, but Maeve was enjoying it so much that she went off with Eric and Cecilia and I played outside. During Cecilia's nap, Eric took Maeve to the hardware store where she proceeded to throw a tantrum. She came home and took a 3 hour nap! She obviously really needs those still! After a short time at the park after nap, we came home to cook dinner and realized the pork chops were going to take too long to grill and the kids were hungry so I made some (burnt) grilled cheese that the kids refused to eat so deli ham was served and we all went out for ice cream! Kids will be kids....whether it's Mother's Day or not!

An update on some BIG milestones! We've been so busy these last two weeks:

• Maeve is POTTY TRAINED!! She is going in the potty multiple times a day. The trick that finally worked: starting a routine at 7am and 7pm that she must try no matter what and then telling her that she was the boss of her poop and she could tell it what to do. So after many conversations in the potty and lots of rewards and praises, she is going now like she never had a problem. Thank goodness! Let's hope we don't have any setbacks. Now only diapers overnight. We'll worry about that sometime before kindergarten :) Speaking of, we did her kindergarten readiness assessment. She did great! 33/48 and she only needed 13/48 to pass! She had some funny answers to questions but generally knew exactly what to do.


• Cecilia has made great progress in walking (see video above)


• She also points to everything and tells us what she wants .... she'll point to certain food in the fridge or her water on the table (not her milk in a sippy, of course, because she's just like Maeve and hates milk now that we're transitioning from a bottle)


• She's SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT. Well it's been 3 nights so I guess I can't get ahead of myself and will probably jinx us but I think she finally figured it out. She is an early riser - like 5am early - so we're still working on that but we'll take the uninterrupted sleep!


• She's also learned how to go down the stairs. She mostly does the 2 stairs by the kitchen that she goes down most often but she knows how to turn around and go down. I tried to get a video but then she just wants to play with the phone so that doesn't work!

All for now!