Say It Aint Snow

Actual Date: Friday, February 4, 2011

That's the first thought I had when I woke up this morning.  Snow?!  We were now going on 4 days of being stuck at home.  You can bet cabin fever had officially set in.  At this point I was ready to throw in the towel.  I was running out of activities to keep everyone busy, running out of food and running out of patience.  For the first couple days I tried to keep the t.v. off and keep everyone entertained.  But by the 4th day I was ready for a few quiet minutes.  At that point I broke all my rules and let them watch cartoons and play Wii for most of the day.  

Brooke asked me to take a picture of her wearing my beanie.  

Then she said "Hang on a second Mom.  Take another picture.  I need to strike a pose first."

Insert eye roll here. 

My goodness it starts early.  Seriously.  She's been talking about Justin Bieber non stop lately...  I've never even heard a Justin Bieber song before and I'm pretty proud of that, so I'm not sure where this obsession comes from.  If this is what it's like at 4, I'm sure not in a hurry to see what it's like at 14!

My three oldest babies, Brooke, Ava and Chester playing in the snow.

Trying to catch snow flakes.

Mmmm. Freshly fallen snow.

We had many great times over these past couple snow days but the best part of the whole thing was Ava becoming potty trained!  Seriously I though potty training would be the death of me.  Brooke was a night mare to train and Ava was starting become one too.  But now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it's been great having just 1 in diapers.

Lord knows we've been trying to get Ava potty trained for months but the girl is just hard headed.  It really helped that we were stuck at home and were able to be more consistent.  Plus she is Miss Independent and never wants me to help.  But she was excited to have Brookie home to help her.  Every time she had to go she would yell "I want Mama Brookie help me!"

Another thing that helped was the Potty Dance from Pull Ups.  I told her that it only works if you go potty so she was all over there.  There they are above dancing to the music.  

You know how when you pull up a video on you tube there is suggested videos off to the side?  There were two that would always come up with the Potty dance that they loved too.  The first one was a Elmo goes potty one and the second one was a silly baby one.

Now every time I play any video on my computer Parker says "We watch Elmo day?" (Can we watch Elmo today)  The girls love the end of the silly baby one that says "Hey!  There's no paper on this roll!"  Ava likes to scream it while she's sitting there going potty.  While I was changing Parker's diaper a few weeks ago he got up and ran off.  I yelled after him "Hey!  There's no diaper on that baby!" and all three kids cracked up.  

Another great thing that happened during the snowy days is that I was able to check some things off of the Spring cleaning list.  One of which being disinfecting toys and cleaning out the play room.  The girls helped me.  We dumped all the toys out of the toy boxes and bins and soaked everything that could be soaked in bleach water.  I washed the rest of the stuff by hand and we threw away everything that was broken.  I should have taken a picture of the play room after we were done because it was the cleanest it's ever been.

I'll leave you with this video of Parker Man singing his favorite song.  He loves the Old McDonald song.  Sometimes you can hear him on his baby monitor singing it when he's supposed to be sleeping.  It's so cute.