Awesome

If you haven't seen this video yet, you HAVE to go watch it. Not later, go watch it right now. I only have one word...awesome!

The View Around Here...

We seem to have a little wedgie trouble with our big girl panties...

Snuggle Buddies

Just about every morning when I'm drying my hair, Bailey sits on our bed and watches an episode of Blue's Clues and this morning was no exception. And usually the dog gets in bed because, well, he's lazy. Jackson and Bailey have an interesting relationship. She loves him but he usually runs from her. This morning however, he must of been feeling exceptionally compassionate. Here's what I found when I looked over from the bathroom...

Sweet Corn Festival

This Saturday we headed out to Evan's Orchard to attend their Sweet Corn Festival. This is seriously one of my favorite places to go. I forget how much I love the wide open spaces until we go there. Of course we enjoyed a delicious lunch and I just had to have a fried apple pie...you can't go and not get one! After lunch we headed to the play area. They've really expanded it and Bailey had a blast. She usually hates swinging, but this time we could barely get her out of the swing!

Then it was time to slide down the Apple Cider Slider. The slide is huge. I was a little nervous about Bailey going down it all by herself but we tried it anyways. Poor thing, half way down the slide she would end up almost completely side ways. She would land in my arms with a terrified look on her face and then shout "Adin!" (translated again). I know she must of gone down 5 or 6 times, but alas, it was getting close to nap down and we had to go...that didn't go so well. The last time down daddy decided to join her.

She also enjoyed looking at the goats and the duck. They have a really large animal area now with a sloth, kangaroo and several other wacky animals...but most of them were gone this weekend. Bailey loved Gracie and Zoe (the farm dogs) and would get mad when they would leave our table to go try and score food from other families.

We also grabbed some corn on the cob while we were there and it was fantastic!!! Definitely the best corn I've had all year.

Potty Training Success!

This weekend was a real treat. For the past few months we've been working on potty training. It started out we just introduced the idea to Bailey and let her get familiar with the "baby" potty. We had her sitting on it every night before and after bath. Every now and then she would go in the potty and we would offer lots of praise and excitement. Then we started having her sit on it more often, then we moved to the potty seat on the big potty, and then we introduced the reward system. Every time she "went", she got 1 M&M, or "circle" as she calls them. Well, for my poor little sugar deprived child (being that we are kind of sugar-Nazis) this was a real treat. And for some reason she really likes the blue "circles". We had gotten to the point where if we sat her on the potty she would usually go, but she wasn't to the point where she was telling us when she had to go. Then one Saturday morning she looked at me and said "Blue circle momma", I asked her if she needed to go potty and she said "Yeah" and took off towards the bathroom, and sure enough, she had to go! From this point on she has gotten better and better about telling us when she has to go. This past weekend, from Friday at 5:00 up until Sunday night, she only went in her diaper 5 or 6 times (not including naps and bedtime of course). How excited am I?!?!? She is doing so well and I am so proud of her. And every time she has to go she simply says "Blue circle". Which, after thinking about it, is really nice. This should hopefully help us avoid the "I have to pee-pee!" scream out in public. It's like we have our own little code phrase. She even went to the bathroom while we were at Pizza Hut on Friday night and several times at Justin & Shana's house last night. What a big girl! So, this is for you Bailey... I'm so proud of my big girl!!

A Shopping Victory...and small defeat

I have really been trying to get better at shopping sales and using coupons. I've been clipping coupons for a while and saving a few dollars here and there, which helps, but I know I could do better. I've started following this site, which is a HUGE help!!! Jenny has a family of 5 and on average they spend about $50 a week at the grocery. And that includes anything and everything you can get at the grocery...even diapers, meat, cleaning supplies, personal items...everything! We budget $400 a month for groceries and almost always go over, and there's only 3 of us in our household. So I've really been cracking down and trying to figure this all out.

Last night I made my first attempt at "CVSing" (you really need to check out what she has to say about this!!), and I consider it a success! I did end up spending about $4 more than I had planned because I thought I had 2 of one coupon but only ending up having 1 of them...but anyways... Here's what I ended up with

10 page photo book - for Nick's mom birthday

Jumbo pack of diapers

4 bottles of Purex

2 bottles of Olay body wash

1 Olay face wash

4 Cheerios bowls

1 Air Wick air freshener

And my grand total (after tax)...$27.84. The actual cost of all the items had I just gone in and bought them without coupons or using any ECBs from CVS...$81.27!! Which means I saved about 66%!! And I'm stocked up on laundry detergent for at least 3 or 4 months and I probably won't have to buy body wash again the rest of the year! (They were BIG bottles and I have an almost full one right now). The Cheerios were $1 a piece and I had a $1 coupon for each of them, so they were free. The air freshener was on sale for $4.99 and I had a $4 off coupon...this is going to be a party gift for the bridal shower I have to give in a couple of months. This is more money out of pocket than a lot of the really good shoppers manage, but for my first trip, and for getting so many big ticket items, I'm pretty proud of myself!

So, you're wondering where the defeat comes in, right? Well, while unloading my goodies last night there was a casualty. I dropped one of the bottles of laundry detergent in my living room and it exploded, leaving a huge blue spot on the carpet!! We're still working on getting it up...any advice would be great!

Better Late than Never

I have been so neglectful to my blog!! I've finally decided to take the time and add the pictures from the 4th of July. Yes, I realize it's now the 16th, but hey, better late than never!

We started the day by going to the parade downtown. Bailey enjoyed herself...well, she enjoyed eating all the candy they threw out anyways, and she really liked the horses at the end.

Here she is dancing to the song "America the Beautiful" that someone sang before they started the parade. When she finished singing Bailey was asking for "Moe dance!"

That evening, after I got back from showing houses, we had our friends over for a cookout. I had hoped to enjoy a good time in our back yard, but as we all know, the weather did not cooperate! Bailey spent much of the evening coloring, her absolute favorite thing to do now.

And Uncle Mike was nice enough to play with the Dora house with her :)

Then it was time to head to watch the fireworks. I was really worried about how Bailey would hold up. She is such a routine baby and bedtime is at 8:00. She was such a trooper! I think it was almost 10:00 before they started the fireworks and she did great (could have something to do with the little bit of funnell cake she had!).

She wasn't scared of the sparkler at all!

The girls!

Aunt Shana and Bailey.

Uncle Justin and Bailey.

Watching the fireworks. She LOVED them! She loved naming the colors as they would go off.

Not Me! Monday

While vacuuming out the couch I most definitely did not find the following items: a puzzle piece, a book, a necklace, cereal bar wrapper, 2 receipts, 5 or 6 number magnets and part of a cracker. (Really, someone should clean that thing out more often!)

I most certainly did not do absolutely nothing yesterday except lay on the couch and stay in my pj's ALL day long. And for that matter, I did not lay around most of the week while Nick was gone. Of course not, I got everything accomplished that I had planned on.

I have not taught my daughter to say "Come on peeps" and do not think it is hilarious when she says it.

What did you not do this week?