Chocolate Ice Cream and Moo-Moo's

Ok, yeah….I’ve made the command decision that being a home owner is a lot of hard work. -especially when you have built the house from ground up. I’m pretty certain that it will be quite a few years before we have the walls painted, pictures hung, and furniture purchased for every room, even though we have done our best to do “house stuff” every weekend for the last 2 months or so. But, even with that said, every once in a while, you need a break! And, that is exactly what I got this last weekend.

It started on Friday night – my friend Christine, or as she is now known to Avery, “Auntie Christine,” came into town from NYC. She's lived in NYC now for a few months, but with all of this house stuff going on, we haven't figured out a good weekend for her to come up for a visit - it was great seeing her and catching up! Since I had officially gone outside of my Little Compton bubble on Friday night by driving up to PVD to pick her up at the train station, I decided to take advantage and have dinner in Providence. And, yes – I even had a glass of wine – it was wonderful – I savored every single sip. Although, we were at one of those trendy restaurants that only fills the glass half way, yet charges you $10 for it. When I saw the glass of wine, I felt like looking at the waitress and pointing to my belly, explaining to her that CLEARLY I was making an exception here and the least she could do was help a girl out by filling it the rest of the way. However, considering she probably already thought I was the worst mother on the planet by having even one sip of wine while pregnant, I let it go.

Saturday was a big day in the Holland household! A) We mowed (or should I say, my father in law mowed) the lawn for the first time ever – until the lawn mower died for some unknown reason (even the handy man, Earl, couldn’t fix it, so you know it was bad). So, really half of our lawn got mowed…details B) We had our carpet for the living room delivered, cut and bound onsite (all within 30 mins, mind you – that was the fastest $250 I have ever spent) AND C) we got our furniture delivered! So, minus paint, artwork and various pieces of furniture, our living room is done!

Oh -and, D) Josh put up the blackout curtains that I got for Avery's room (in hopes that this will help with 6 am wakeup calls), which required him to actually drill holes and install the curtain rod - who said my husband wasn't handy??

And, mind you, we got all of this done while taking Avery to the potty every hour so as to start our first full blown weekend of potty training…well, kind of.

I’ve decided that this potty training thing is really a big pain in the butt (no pun intended) for the parents. I mean, seriously? How are you supposed to be expected to be near a toilet at all times so that your child can go pee? This is really cutting into my walking time, my shopping time, etc! Anyway – considering we were at home all day on Saturday, Avery did go poop and pee in the potty all day and never had a wet diaper. AND – she now insists on dumping the pee from her training potty to the big potty all by herself and then flushing it. Half of the time, she does this without me even knowing it – I’m sure one of these days, I’ll walk in and there will be a puddle where she didn’t quite make it to the big potty, but whatever… Below is a picture of Auntie Christine with Avery - note the lack of diaper on Avery - apparently, Christine was pretty confident in our potty training abilities at this point...

Sunday? Not so much. Christine, Avery and I did a 10K charity walk for MS in Bristol that day and, my main goal was to get Avery to go to sleep in the stroller so that we wouldn’t hear, “Mama – get out? Mama – get out!” for 6 miles – it was definitely not to keep her awake so that I could stop every mile to have her go potty in the porta potties on the route. So, in the diaper she went. The walk went really well. The weather man said that it was supposed to be 45 degrees and rainy all day, so I had pretty much decided that we weren’t going to do it, but as it turns out, it was 60 degrees and sunny, so it turned out really well! The route takes you all through Colt State Park, which is right on the water – it was beautiful. Granted, it was a bit more challenging with this ever growing belly that I have going on, but still nice.

The weekend ended with Avery and I taking Auntie Christine to the train station so that she could go back home to NYC. Avery was sad to see her go and is still asking “Auntie Christine go?”

On the way home, Avery decided that she was craving chocolate ice cream, so like a good mom, I gave in and stopped at the local ice cream stand – I know, I know – the things we do for our kids. I’m glad that I did stop because, as simple as it was, it turned into one of those moments that I will always remember with her. After getting the ice cream Avery immediately noticed the "moo-moo's" that were in a fenced in area right next door to the ice cream stand and there just so happened to be a bench about 10 feet away from these moo-moo's. So, needless to say, we had to go over and eat our icecream on the bench so that we could be up close and personal with these cows. No sooner than we sat down, one of them let out this loud, “moo!!!” The look on her face was priceless! She loved it – she just had this huge, chocolate covered smile on her face the entire time we sat there. I wish that I had a picture of it. I mean the joy of watching your 2 year old get so excited over something as simple as moo moo’s AND getting to eat chocolate ice cream while doing it? What could be better? It really was the perfect way to end a great weekend.