Life with Ava

Ava was eating dinner tonight when she signed that she had to potty. I hauled her out of the high chair and she went to the go-with-us-everywhere Baby Bjorn little potty that I'd brought into the kitchen where she quickly took care of business. After she finished I cleaned her up and lifted her back into the highchair to finish dinner.

In the 2.3 seconds it took me to put her back in the chair one or more of the dogs snagged the poop out and ate it. I immediately noticed it missing when I turned back to clean out the potty and saw three little guilty dog faces staring up at me as if to say, "Please madam, may I have another." I lectured them loudly, which greatly amused Ava (hey - it's like dinner theater), and strongly expressed my disdain for their snack choices. I also brushed all of their little dog teeth since I didn't know who the offender was and those mouths kiss both me and Ava frequently.

Ugh. There are many things about parenting that I never anticipated. One of which was kid eating dog poop and now this, dog(s) eating kid poop.

P.S. Ava woke up dry on Wednesday morning and signed to go potty when I got her out of the crib. I was very excited and told everyone that I came into contact with. Yep - I'm now *that* mom who talks about her child's toileting habits with everyone.

P.P.S. I made a big tactical error with potties. Lesson learned was that when you buy potties you need to make sure that the child can sit on them by themselves (Ava is too short for all but 2 that we have) and they must have a small opening for my child with no butt because she will fall into the larger ones (thank goodness it was dry and clean).

Although we didn't have kid photos to post this year, we do still have some amazingly cute holiday pictures. They have Ava's presents in the background, though - so that should count for something, right?

And I know I'm biased, but I really do think our dog pics are way cuter than some of the kid ones we've seen.

Happy New Year to everyone! To say we're looking forward to 2008 would be, oh - maybe just a teeny bit of an understatement.

Why, you put them in jail of course!

We're still in test drive mode and are trying out baby equipment to see where things are going to go in the house. I wanted a good, old-fashioned wooden playpen so I bought this Kettler foldable playpen ages ago because it was an insanely good deal. If you recall, wooden playpens used to be dirt cheap and you could find them everywhere. Yeah, not so much now. This one is currently pricing at around $279 which makes me gloat at J endlessly since I paid less than half of that (and who cares that it sat around unused for well over a year)!

We spent buckets of money and gift cards this weekend. We bought a crib mattress, sheets, a sit and stroll, and (finally) a camcorder. That Panasonic we were looking at a couple of weeks ago dropped a hundred bucks so we snatched one up today. For the first time ever in my life I think I can say I'm well and truly tired of shopping.

Back to the dogs…

I think we'll have to leave them in the playpen forever 'cause I'm pretty sure they're going to kill us in our sleep for all the embarrassing things we've subjected them to lately. What's next? Little pink socks???

We're pulling things that we've purchased over the last few years out of the closet and decided we needed to give the baby carrier(s) a test drive. Since there was no kid in sight we decided to make do with what was at hand.

The weight was a little off as the two combined weigh only a little over 10 pounds - but overall it indicates that the carrier will work as advertised. And if not, we can always look really dorky and tote the dogs around in it.

*The Ergo carrier can be found here.

I write many posts in my head. They just don't always make it onto the blog for any number of reason - maybe I get distracted or it just doesn't seem to come out right when I try to put it into words or because it's just not apropos for this particular venue. So even though it seems like I'm being lazy and ignoring the blog, I'm really not.

So for lack of any news relating to the adoption I'll just give you a weekly round up of my not-so-exciting life. I can sum it up very succinctly - I work a lot.

I'm actually somewhat concerned about that statement becuase work has become so much a part of my identity that I don't know how to break away from it anymore. In some ways, I envy people who are able to leave work behind when they go home for the day because I'm not able to do that (mostly by choice, although I do have to maintain some level of connectedness at all times in case of emergency). It's very difficult for me to walk away when there's so much that needs to be done - so I tend to leave work around 7pm, run through the closest drive-thru for a happy meal to eat in the car, play with the dogs for an hour or so when I get home, then promptly boot up the laptop and work for a few more hours. You can see that doesn't leave a lot of time for anything else. Need I mention that I'm as Type-A as they come and I don't know what to do with myself unless I'm busy? I should also make it clear that J is currently working second shift so it's not like I'm taking time away from him. Anyway, the whole point that I'm getting to here is that I have to start breaking this habit now because I know it will have to change when Ava comes home. I just don't know quite how to do it yet.

See - I was going to give you a weekly round up and you get my musings on being a workaholic instead.

My mom's birthday was last week. She doesn't like for us to fuss and would rather we not buy her gifts, which of course we ignore and buy them for her anyway. I think she was happy this year because we all kept it simple and bought her useful things. I sent her a book by one of her favorite authors and some dandelion tea. Hopefully what I really gave her was a restful afternoon sipping tea and whiling away a few hours with a good book. She deserves that and much, much more.

I shopped a bit, too. I finally crossed something off my list by buying a pair of Clarks shoes. They're certainly not the prettiest shoes I've ever owned but they were comfortable when I tried them on after shopping all day and Clarks seems to get a pretty high rating for being a good walking shoe.

I've also bought a ton of baby clothes because I keep running into some amazingly good deals at the fall sales. I figure I'm close enough now to be able to return them in a few weeks if we find out that Ava is a bit older and/or larger. I'm definitely saving my receipts until we get her information. I bought a regular diaper bag, too…and then promptly returned it because it was big and ugly and just screamed diaper bag the minute you looked at it. I replaced it with a Ralph Lauren leopard print tote that is way classier, cuter, and can multi-task.

J and I did take a break last weekend to take two of the dogs to the beach. Katie, our old girl, didn't go because it was way too hot and we walked a loooonnnng way. If you've ever walked sand dunes you also know it can be a pretty arduous task at times. We couldn't keep Sophie out of the water - sort of funny when the waves were bigger than she is. It was a really nice day and we should totally do it more often. The dogs love the beach but are banned through the summer by city ordinance - which is a shame because I can assure you that my dogs and I are cleaner than some of the families that frequent the beach scattering juice boxes and candy wrappers everywhere. (Yes - I am a bit peeved that they limit dogs on even the nature preserve beaches. Especially since 95% of the people utilizing the beach last week had at least one dog with them. All well behaved although there was one curly coated retriever puppy who was a bit over excited when greeting new people.)