Flour = Snow

Making cookies together is so much fun!! But apparently making snow on the kitchen floor is more fun. My personal favorite is the eating cookies part...

An especially energetic hand print makes great snow! Waiting for the cooking wasn't easy. A-chan's first taste of cookie dough was today. I used real eggs instead of the egg replacement that I normally use in baking so she only got a tiny taste. She was scandalized by the fact that I ate a chocolate chip before it was cooked! The chocolate chip cookies were for santa, and she lovingly arranged three cookies on a Hello Kitty plate just for him. There were only a few crumbs left on the plate in the morning.

It was everything I ever wanted it to be. Happiness :D

Pine cone mania

It's craft time! For this midwinter holiday we're focused on making some crafts. These mostly involve pine cones, acorns and tons of glitter glue. I am in charge of gathering supplies and supervising the glue use. A-chan is in charge of using the glue on everything except for herself or the cats or the furniture. Ketu is in charge of using the hot glue gun to attach ribbons with which to hang the decorated stuff on trees.

It's been a lot of fun! I'm not a very creative person when it comes to crafts like this so it's a huge new project to find things that a toddler can create and enjoy making. There have been a few incidents of innappropriate glitter application but not many. And A-chan adores being able to make things for her friends and loved ones. She'll pick out a special one for each person. Every day she wants to go gather more pine cones, lol. Unfortunately we ran out of acorns fairly quickly since the deer and squirrels eat them very fast! We had had a pile of them on our front porch that A-chan has been collecting since summer and they've all been glitterized now.

Making crafts for christmas decorations is like my penultimate wonderful thing to do as a mom, that I've always wanted to do! Now it's time for creative toddler cookie making next week...

A Miracle

For two days A-chan has consistently used the potty! It's something that we had begun to despair about, but now we have hope that diapers will soon be a distant memory. (Except for overnight and on long car rides...)

All of our attempts to get her to use the potty had been completely rejected or ignored for a long time. We really had just about given up. What caused the change of heart? Well...I have a theory that she heard us talking the other night. She was in the living room playing with the cats while we were in the office and candidly talking about how utterly depressed we were that she wouldn't even try to go to the potty. We didn't think that she could hear us, or that she would pay attention if so. But then when we stopped talking for a little bit she asked us to keep talking. We asked her if she knew what we were talking about and she said, "yes, me!" At the time we didn't really think much about it, but it was the very next morning that she immediately started using the potty. No dithering about it either, every time she's had to go, it's been in the potty! For two days!

I don't know whether to feel elated that it's finally happening or to feel guilty that she overheard us talking about it and decided to change. Hopefully the potty gods will continue to smile down upon us.

Finally back in the groove...

Okay, so we've been back from India for about three weeks now and still haven't quite caught up with real life yet. We are improving, though - A-chan is no longer waking up at 4 am every morning and thinking that's a perfect time to have breakfast and play.

India was awesome. Absolutely awesome. A-chan really loved India, she loved the trip and there were definately times that she didn't want to come home. Her favorite parts were riding in autorickshaws, playing with other kids and petting baby animals (goats, cows, camels, she loved them all). We had Halloween in Ahmedabad where A-chan dressed up like a kitty and was vrey cute, we handed out some candy to people and even took some Halloween decorations for our hotel room.

Bhuj and the tribal villages were so much fun. I learned a lot and A-chan got to hang out and play with lots and lots of other kids, the desert was so beautiful! Here are a few pictures of A-chan enjoying India...