Hannah's first theater production!

I'm a week behind with my blogging so instead of catching you up on our super fun birthday weekend, I'm going to take you in the time machine and go all the way back to......last Sunday. Hannah and I headed back to Hagerstown for the second week in a row, but this time to hang out with Grammy who had a special treat for Hannah: tickets to Beauty and the Beast being put on by the local art school at the Maryland Theater. Hannah's first play/musical/theater experience!! And we even got a group photo to remember it by.

The group photo is courtesy of my cousin Kim. We met the extended fam for lunch at a restaurant across the street from the theater before the show. My camera was acting up, but I still managed to get some cute shots of everyone having QT with Hannah.

Swinging down the street with Uncle Donnie.

Eskimo kisses with Kim.

Cuddles with Jason.

I don't have anything clever to say about this one--it's a framer.

We bid them farewell then and went in to find our seats. Mom pulled a little mini Belle doll out of her purse to keep Hannah occupied while we waited for the show to start, and it's a good thing because the show started late, and we were early so we had lots of time to play.

The cast was a pretty talented group of high schoolers with really impressive costumes (especially the Be Our Guest ensemble). We didn't make it past the first act though. I thought that a 2:30 show would be over around 4:30/5:00, but we were hitting intermission at 4:30 and Hannah had gotten up early that day so we hit the road. As it turns out, the meltdown was probably inevitable, and the ride home was bound to be insane regardless of the time. Our portable DVD player is broken, and without that, we were thrown back into the early years of traveling with Hannah in which she spends the vast majority of it screaming as if someone is torturing her. It was really, really, really loud. Painfully loud. It started because we didn't remember to bring the crayons that Grammy had gotten her to go with the coloring book that entertained her during lunch. It escalated from there. I spent the last 20 minutes of the ride holding onto her foot because she insisted I hold her hand, and her foot was all I could reach. It quieted her, so I did it, but holy cow was my arm sore when we made it back to Hampden. Home sweet home. Whew. My brain was fried after that car ride.

Note to self: don't leave the 'hood again until you've purchased a new portable DVD player.

Playdate at Clay's

Our belated Easter was not very Easter-ish: there was no egg hunt or anything which I thought was a bit of a bummer, but I suppose it's my fault for refusing to head back to my dad's without Chip. My mom and I have rearranged countless number of holidays and birthdays to fit our schedules, but I guess others might have a hard time resurrecting the mood two weeks after the official day. On the bright side, there were cows. Cows have a way of making any activity complete. Right??

The funny thing is that as soon as soon as we lined up at the fence to stare at the cows, the cows lined up on the other side of the fence to stare at us. It was definitely a who's-watching-who scenario...

They grew bored of us before we grew bored of them. Not sure what that says about us...

 

At the end of the day, Hannah said her favorite part was the tire swing. If you don't get dizzy easy, I took a video of them playing on it. It makes me sick to watch it though so you've gotta really love giggling, tire-swinging cousins to watch it. 

 

The kiddos took a self-appointed quiet time in front of the TV to relax and unwind after their cow-watching, tire-swinging, wagon-riding adventures. After an hour, the only thing that pulled Hannah away was asking if she wanted to go play in pappy's truck. "Oh sure!" she said and jumped up and ran out the front door. She was still pretty cranky though, as is obvious in the photo below this next one.

We forgot to bring her Lila baby so one of the first things she did was ransack Clay's toy chest until she found his baby. Of course, then Clay wanted the baby, but Hannah clung to it for dear life and just kept saying "couple more minutes." Eventually I convinced her to let Clay have a turn in exchange for her getting to snuggle a stuffed mouse. The mouse didn't hold the same long-lasting appeal as Lila, but then Chip started climbing trees...Distraction accomplished.

With those two running around like the crazy kids that they are, I didn't make much time for hanging with my newest nephew, but I did manage to get a pic. So cute!! It's going to be so fun to watch how the dynamic grows and changes as Mason gets old enough to get in the game.

Hannah and Atticus

My neighbor, Dawn, took these pics of Hannah and Atticus coming home from picking flowers with Neslin last week. They're so cute I thought I'd share.

A load in the drawers and a semi-functional sticker chart

You know how Hannah has been potty trained since a few weeks before she turned 2? Well, she's not anymore. When the "accidents" first started a few weeks ago, it was because she was engrossed in playing or, more often, watching TV, and couldn't be bothered with taking a potty break. This seemed relatively normal to me so I didn't worry about it too much, just told her that it was okay, but that she really needed to listen to her body and get to the potty in time. After a few accidents in front of the TV, I gently let her know that we weren't going to be able to keep watching TV if she kept peeing on the couch. (I'm always looking for a reason to not let her watch TV anyway.)

Then it stopped being a matter of being engrossed in something and turned into and all-out, straight-up aversion to using the potty. Example: one morning about 20 minutes after a cup of juice, I asked if she had to pee. She took off running down the hallway screaming "noooooooooo." I didn't push it; I brushed my teeth and and went about getting myself ready. When she came out of her hiding place in my closet a few minutes later, her pants were soaked. She obviously had to pee. She was not in the middle of an activity. She was reminded to pee. She refused. What's the deal with that??

Later that day she peed on the booth seats we have at our table while eating lunch. Just hauled off and peed. We were talking and hanging out and eating, and I heard a water-like sound and looked over in time to see a puddle spreading out around her. 

When the accidents first started happening, we were calm and gentle and careful not to be negative.  When the accidents got more intentional, calm turned to flabbergasted, and it showed in our reactions. We were both guilty of exclaiming, "Hannah! What are you doing? Why did you pee in your pants?" As soon as I heard it come out of Eric's mouth I realized how negative and accusatory it sounded and decided we needed to curb that and opt for some positive reinforcement. Enter the sticker chart.

Hannah's friend, Kylie, has a sticker chart and gets stickers for getting herself ready in the morning. Since Hannah LOVES stickers, and since toddlers across the country seem to be trained by these seemingly easy contraptions, I decided to give it a go. I got out some construction paper and created this less-than-artistic-but-totally-functional chart, then I called my mom to ask if she knew where I could find a sweet selection of stickers. She said she was heading to Target that night and would look there and report back. In the interim, I dug out the stickers left over from the egg dying kit Shannon brought over.

Our first day went pretty well. I decided that Hannah could have a little sticker every time she peed in the potty, and at the end of the day, if her pants were still dry, she could have a big sticker. She made it until dinner time with dry pants. No big sticker, but not a bad day.

The next day, sticker reinforcement arrived via USPS. Grammy had found a huge arsenal of stickers at Target and instead of just reporting back, she bought them. All of them I think.

Within the arsenal of stickers is a highly coveted pack of princess stickers. These became the new end-of-day prize. So far, she has received one princess sticker, and really, I cheated that day. She did pee in her pants, but it was first thing in the morning and during an INSANE temper tantrum. I decided to "forget" about that at the end of the day because it was the only day she didn't pee right around dinner time, and I figured she forgot about it too, and I wanted to give her a little incentive, so she she got a princess sticker that day.

The chart mostly worked for most of the week (except for the daily evening accident), then this morning she peed in her bear cave (a fort her and Eric made out of couch cushions and blankets), and then during quiet time she dropped a giant load in her pants. That's the first time she's pooped in her pants in a really, really, really long time, and it was really, really, really uncool. We put her in a diaper after that, and she's still in it now.

When we ask her what's going on and why she's peeing in her pants, she just says she doesn't feel like going to the potty.  I called the doctor about it at the beginning of last week and they suggested I bring her in and have them run a quick UTI test, just to rule that out, but that based on what I'm saying, it doesn't sound like that's an issue. Since the sticker chart was working until today, I didn't prioritize the doctor visit, but I suppose I should.

From what I'm reading online, a potty-training regression is pretty normal, but this one just seems crazy. Has anybody experienced one this HUGE?? Any advice? How long will this last? I don't want to go back to diapers!! I'm trying to stay positive with her, but it's really getting frustrating. Of all the times that we have regressed into a behavior that I thought we had moved beyond (sleeping, tantrums, whatever), this has got to be the worst.

Climbing trees at Sherwood Gardens and other nature tales

For not having any kind of a yard, we managed to spend a great deal of last weekend communing with nature. On Saturday we met Brody and Addison (and parents) at Sherwood Gardens to climb trees, run around on the soft, green grass, and not traipse through the pretty tulip patches. There were a few casualties (two of which are in a vase on the table), but most of the tulips were still standing when we left. The kids were far more interested in tree-climbing than tulip-picking anyway.

Addison is a big fan of Hannah's binoculars (a free gift with her subscription to Wild Animal Baby, courtesy of Grammy). She practiced looking cute while strolling in circles around the tree while Brody and Hannah engaged in some pretty aggressive tackle football that had the grown-ups cracking up. Unfortunately, I didn't get a pic of Hannah taking Brody down, which she did repeatedly, much to Brody's delight.

 

 

 

 

 

At some point, one of them spotted a "trail." Really, one of them just got smart and decided to dub the mulch a "trail" in a successful effort to gain permission to traipse through it. They're smart little buggers. Within the trail was a young girl (maybe 10?) perched on a tree with her journal. Hannah and Addison were obsessed. They stood there and stared at the girl for eons while Erin and I tried to coax them away. They asked a few questions too, like "what are you doing?" and "why aren't you wearing pants?" (She was wearing short white shorts which I guess confused the questioner.)

Quiet time was a wash that day--we were at the gardens until after 2:00. Time flies! As a result, when we packed up and picked her up to go, over-exhaustion kicked in and she screamed bloody murder from one end of the park to the other as we made our way back to the car. She finally calmed down a few feet from the street where we'd parked, and Brody summed it up for all of us when he said something along the lines of, "I had enough of Hannah crying," in his very cute voice.

We spent most of the rest of that day crashed out on the couch, but then the next day, after a morning at the farmer's market and planting flowers, we drove out to to the Ellicott City area to visit Jess and Todd. I'm really bummed that I didn't take my camera with me there because if I had been going mamarazzi, I'd have a picture of Eric holding up a crayfish, a salamander, and a frog for Hannah to investigate. Awesome, right?? Their house backs up to Patapsco State Park, so we hopped on the access trail from their backyard and followed it down to the train tracks and the river on the other side. On the way down, Eric found a stream off the trail that was teaming with life--a crayfish and salamander were in hand within a span of a few minutes. The frog they found at the river, and Hannah got to hold that one, at least until he hopped out of her hands and swam away. They also found a snake curled up on the bottom of the river, but they left him where he was.  It was a seriously awesome visit: not only did we get to hang out with two of our favorite friends, but we got to do so outside in a beautiful park on a super gorgeous day. And then they fed us dinner with some delicious vegan carrot cake muffins for dessert. How lucky are we!!!

We all smiled ourselves to sleep on Sunday night, taking turns exclaiming what a great weekend it was.