Photos!

My Girl Likes To Potty All The Time

It's been forever and I have way too many cute Josie stores.

First, per the title, the most exciting news - Josie is figuring out the whole potty thing. It started out rough - we bought her a little potty seat thing which she quickly became totally enamored with - but she REFUSED to get off of it. She wanted to have a naked rear all day and just get on and off the potty as she felt the whim. Not the "urge" mind you - she never actually used the potty, but she was insistent on a) being naked and b) having free reign to get on and off. When Cory (quite reasonably) insisted on a diaper, the girl just totally freaked out and pitched a huge fit. What a weirdo!!! Anyway, this morning brought a huge victory as she said "potty poo poo" and I put her on the potty and she smiled and kicked her feet and I coached her on with phrases I will not repeat lest I really hit mama-rock-bottom-embarrassment-that-I'm-even-talking-about-this. I picked her up and there was no poo but some pee! Yay!!!!

It's just astonishing that I find this exciting. But this is really like the most exciting thing going on in my life. Tell me that is not a depressing commentary on the state of my life.

Anyway, Josie story number two (no pun intended) is really funny and you will like it more than the first, which was quite frankly, fairly boring/gross. Okay, so Josie likes to say "hola!" to people really loud. We've been trying to teach her Spanish here and there and hola just seems to have stuck. So she's at the drugstore with Cory waiting in line for a prescription. And saying hi to everyone. And she'll say hi to people (strangers) in stores and such at a louder pitch and more frequent intervals until the person relents and says hello back. So she's saying hi to everyone, and everyone is saying hi back to her. This teenage boy is listening to his iPod, trying to pretend he's invisible - which of course Josie is having none of. She says hi. No response. Hi again, louder. No response. Again. Same. She scrunches her face and then says really loud, "HOLA!" The boy looks up and finally figures out that she's been yelling HI at him, then replies to her "Hola." Josie is happy. Everyone gets prescriptions, takes care of things. Cory is on his way out and Josie is, of course, saying Bye! to everyone. Except the boy. To him, she says "ADIOS!!" And he laughed and said Adios right back. So the key to communicating with your sullen teen, people of the world, is apparently as simple as just speaking Spanish.

I am going to post super cute photos as soon as I can get my computer working right.

One more!

She's not smiling in a bunch of the photos I put up. No good! She smiles like crazy, I promise!!

Long Time Gone

Dude, so it's been forever. We had Thanksgiving in Orange County, then Christmas (1) in Minnesota for a week with Cory's family, then Christmas (2)/New Years/Mom's Birthday in OC again this weekend plus. We're pretty tired. Traveling over the holidays with an 18 month old is a nightmare. Plus everyone at Cory's family's house got the stomach flu, including Josie, Cory and I. Disaster! Holidays were lovely anyway though.

It snowed like crazy in Minnesota, affording yet another photo opportunity (now that we have a new camera!). Josie didn't really like being in the snow, but she was ok being pulled around on a sled by her Nana. She's in love with a guy named Arthur, who is currently Cory's sister's boyfriend, but maybe in 20 years or so Josie will get her wish. We left days ago and she keeps saying Arthur, Arthur. Remember in that long western epic movie with the three brothers and Anthony Hopkins is the dad (what is the name of that movie??) where the young native girl was in love with Brad Pitt and it was like "uh, yeah, no" and then she grew up and they got married and it seemed totally fine? I think Josie has that story in mind.

Okay so photos.

A few photos to hold you over...

We did go trick or treating last night, but unfortuantely our camera is not functioning so we don't have photos at the moment. We went with our fabulous neighbors, Dave and Alexis, who of course had a camera. Mia is their daughter and she is adorable - about 9 months younger than Josie. Mia was a monkey (Josie loves to say "Mia!! Mia!!" and gets very sad when Mia goes home) and was adorable. Josie was a chicken and was too shy after she left the house to do the "bock bock" that she totally knows how to do. We went over to a friend of Dave/Alexis's to go trick or treating with their son, who was a boxer and had dribbled red skittle juice all over his shirt and it looked like blood. Awesome. So we went to about 10 houses, and Josie picked up candy, but didn't say trick or treat. A few times she tried to put the candy from her little bag back into the candy bucket that was at a few houses. Hilarous. She was really sweet and adorable. Had to cut it off at about 6:30 - she went into "Im tired and need to sleep mode" which is most often signaled by the thumb going into the mouth with the other hand going to the back of the head to stroke her own hair. So cute.




So until we get photos from Dave and Alexis, here are some from Palm Springs. In this first set, you will see how Josie was doing laps through the closet:



And then I open the other door....













And then come out the other side...

Waiting for the smoke to clear, sleeping in the bathroom

Okay so you probably think we're horrible, but the only one sleeping in the bathroom is Josie. We're in Palm Springs trying to gulp down as much fresh air as possible before heading back to San Diego. Even Orange County, where my parents have graciously set up a refugee shelter, is starting to be unbearably smoky. What the eff??

Anyway, we are here for a one-night engagement until Cory heads home to try to see how things are and I go to LA for work on Monday. Speaking of one night engagements, it turns out that both Jewel and Diana Ross are playing at random indian casinos on Cory's birthday this year. What to do what to do?? We'll probably just hit the Red Robin and call it a night at 5:45. Whoot!

Anyway, back to my point. Josie is asleep in the bathroom. Where else to put a one-year old who goes to bed at 6:30?? We're in a hotel room mind you. Now, the closet is actually pretty big and her pack and play would have fit in there but we didn't do that, now did we, so we must be pretty good parents, right? I mean, we would never hear the end of it if we did that and it got out. "You guys used to make me sleep in a CLOSET!!! You never loved me!! Of course you won't let me go to an all night party at a hotel with no adults after homecoming!!!"

I continue to digress. I'm tired and homesick and can't wait to get back to actual life. And I hate that Palm Springs is full of golf courses. Someone today was saying that the actual climate here in Palm Springs has changed because of all of the water they use to keep the grass alive on the golf courses. So now it's like humid and gross instead of dry and...well...less gross.

Sorry no photos. But we did enter Josie in the Gap.com baby photo contest, so maybe you'll see her photo on there! Probably not. But it was fun anyway! :)

Good night and sleep tight.

Fire!

Perhaps you've turned on the news over the last few days and have seen that pretty much all of North San Diego is on fire. Sunday afternoon we returned to our house from a weekend at Nana and PopPop's house and found a very smoky smell in the air. Over the course of the day the air filled with smoke and was just awful. We closed up the house but everything still smelled like we'd been to a campfire. Sunday night things kept getting worse and more windy. Monday morning the whole sky was brown with smoke and it was very hard to breathe. The wind was hot and smelled of fire - not just smoke, but actual fire, which was really weird. I had to get a brief filed so I was at work with a few other dedicated colleagues. The wind was blowing like crazy. By about 9 am, the streets were full of people trying to get out. Its very strange to see one's neighborhood full of cars that are normally one driver and suddenly all the cars have lots of people, kids, pets and stuff.

Cory got a reverse 911 call at about 9:30 "advising" us to evacuate. He packed up Josie, the wedding photo negatives, the video of Josie's birth (not graphic, I promise, we're not that kind of family - and it was a c-section, may I remind you), and some insurance papers and they hit the road, back to Nana and PopPop's. I followed behind about an hour later. The traffic was pretty bad; it took me about 30 minutes to go the first hour. For the first few miles, you couldn't see anything off either side of the highway. On the drive north, once you got about 20 miles from our house, you could finally see blue sky. In the rear view mirror, the whole sky was brown and clouded with smoke. It was such a relief - we'd had trouble breathing, headaches, and felt nauseous since Sunday.

So we've just been watching the news, hoping for the winds to blow the fire away from our house. For awhile yesterday, things were looking bad, but at the moment it's looking much better. A very expensive and exclusive neighborhood lies to our east and north, so hopefully lots of resources are going into stopping it from coming our way. We're hoping that everything settles down and we can go home tomorrow. We'll see.

In the meantime, we've been trying to enjoy this mini "vacation" from work and other responsibilities. (I wonder if I'll get some sort of billable relief for this? My office has been in the mandatory evacuation zone for a couple of days...hmmmm.....). We went to the Children's museum this morning and Josie had a blast. She's a trooper. Even with a cold and lungs full of ash, she's out running around and playing and having a ball.

Hope everyone out there is safe. More to come.