Toilet Soup and Potty Mouth

Toilet Soup and Potty Mouth - there appears to be a theme

After our stomach bug last week Ava became very familiar with the workings of a toilet. So much so, tonight when mommy was cooking dinner in the kitchen, Ava decided to go around the corner and make some soup - in the bathroom....

Ava's recipe:
1 bowl of cat food
1 role of toilet paper
A couple of feminine products
2 wooden blocks
1 hand towel
1 red hair ribbon
and to top it off our add your "Swiper" beanie baby
Directions: Pull your stool up to the toilet, open the toilet lid, add ingredients, stir with your hand, then your princess wand, and end with a flush. After you flush, jump up and down in the water on the floor until your clothes are wet enough for mommy to notice. After mommy walks in the bathroom and reacts say "oh shit" and then let her figure out which action to respond to...

So - my friend Catherine wrote about Bella's version of Toilet Bowl Soup about a year ago. The girls are the same age. I could consider myself lucky that this did not happen until now. I laughed quite hard at her expense when I read her account of the incident and thought she would get a chuckle out of my experience as well - what comes around goes around.

The potty mouth... During the move, Ava picked up the word "shit" in context. I tried really hard to believe she was saying "sit" the first few times I heard it, but in one morning I heard it three times and it was in the moments that one might say "oh shit" - things rolling off a table "sit?", when she could not get her foot in her shoe, and when she dropped something - no real reason for "sit" at those moments. So I went into day care and asked what to do - they said to ignore it and not bring attention to it. So that is what I have done. She still pulls "oh shit" out occasionally and I do my absolute best not to respond (as advised) - but in this moment all I could do was laugh hysterically and cry... Note to self - Ava is not allowed to hang out in the bathroom when Mom is not in there also. Just so you know - I rarely swear So, I am not sure I can take credit for teaching her about the context of "oh shit"... but at least she is using it in context.

She has also found another new hobby in this house. Slamming doors... I am not sure why she has picked this up, but she thinks it is the funniest thing in the world. In general, I can live with it - the time when it gets tricky is when I do not realize she just shut one of our animals in a space they are not interested in staying in for a few hours. Of late, I feel much better about the door slamming thing, because I saw the kids on "John and Kate plus Eight" the other night getting in trouble for slamming doors - if they are doing it, it must be normal. Right?

Questions for the moms...
How do your reward for potty training? And do you do something different for sitting on the potty vs. going on the potty?

Happy Lunar New Year - Tet

Ava in her Tet outfit from Vietnam (The Tet photo shoot in her new room)

To celebrate Tet we went to a Vietnamese Restaurant with friends. Ava wore her Tet outfit to day care and to dinner. At day care we did a coloring exercise with the kids in her room, then went to the doctors office for a follow up check and she is a healthy girl. YEAH!

January 26th represented the first day of the most important holiday celebrated in Vietnam - Tet. A celebration of the Lunar New Year - To the Vietnamese Têt Nguyên Đán is the Ultimate Holiday. There is nothing like it in the West. Besides the beginning of a new year, Tet also marks the beginning of Spring and everybody's birthday. The actual Tet holiday is three days, though most people tend to take seven or more days off. It is a time for family reunions, exchanging gifts, best wishes, correcting one's faults, forgiving others, paying debts; in short, to start the new year with a clean slate. Literally, Tet Nguyen Dan means the first morning of the first day of the new period. Officially, it marks the beginning of a new year on the lunar calendar. In reality, it is a friendly, festive, family holiday. Painstaking care is given to starting the year out right, since it is believed the first day and the first week of the new year will determine the fortunes or misfortunes for the rest of the year. Links with more information about Tet:

http://www.geocities.com/nha1975/12congiap.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E1%BA%BFt

http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/1198 - the Vietnamese Zodiac meanings

People often assume that Tet and The Chinese New Year celebrations/calendars are the exactly same and they are not - sometime the new year starts a day off (although rarely) and sometimes different animals are used (although similar). For example this year in Vietnam this is the year of the Water Buffalo in China it is the year of the Ox.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Just a few more pictures...

January 2009 - How to characterize???

I am a PRINCESS!!!!!

Let's see - At the beginning of the month I thought I was looking forward to what ever the routine of my new life with Ava as a single mom in a new town would be like. I would have Ava with me most of the month and Ava would visit her Dad every other weekend. Daycare and work 5 days a week and we would get through our first "normal" month. Boy, I hope I was wrong and this month does not represent normal.

T

Since late November we (or should I say I) have faced and gotten through both our birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, our first date anniversary, and the day we received Ava- people say it will get easier - but there sure seems to be a lot of special dates that creep into being when you have been with someone for over 12 years.

The next little bump was Ava's dad's decision to tell me he had a girlfriend with two boys - I certainly was not prepared for that - thanks to the friends that picked me up after that news.

A few days later I learned that Ava had a bad case of bronchitis (for the first time) and I/we were up every three hours giving her a nebulizer treatment. Even though I did not want to send her to day care - I had to, because I was the only person at work that could lay off some of my employees - I hope that no one ever has to experience that process...

Just as the bronchitis seemed to be heading off the scene (she is still taking antibiotics) and I/we started sleeping about 6 hours a night,we both came up with a VERY active stomach bug... Is it better to have it at the same time or not? I am not sure - All I know is I had a hard time taking care of myself and felt horrible that I could not give her the attention she needed.

OK - so here it comes the paragraph on her dad (skip it if you want)... I appreciated that when I was married to him, Ava's Dad helped cover the days that she was not able to go to daycare, he would wake up at night when he needed to, he would take/drop her off at daycare when I was sick, I appreciated that he would run out and get groceries and in general, I just appreciated having someone to talk to about what was going on. What I did not appreciate about him during those types of moments this time around - his decision to only visit Ava for 2.5 hours last weekend instead of staying with her longer and his decision this weekend to not see her until Saturday because he might catch the bug. (He is only taking her Saturday because I insisted that I needed a break...) Who is this man? Some people say that I should be thankful he drove all the way here (1.5hrs) last weekend since she should not be out in 2 degree weather - but if he drove all the way here - why couldn't he stay with her for more than two hours when he was supposed to have her at his house all weekend? I was at work and could have worked all day or done something crazy like go grocery shopping and run errands. OK - I am ranting - that is enough about me and dad.

Now on to Ava. She grew like a weed this month - maybe it was the steroids. She is officially in 24 month sleepers and if her waist was not so small she would be wearing 24 month pants. She has definitely adjusted to her new day care - which she calls "her friends" but at night when we say "bless you" to people she still says the names of her Cortland day care ladies and one friend - Claire. I keep slipping in the new people and she says yes, but she keeps holding onto the Cortland people and then asks where they are. A couple of nights she said Daddy's new friend's name - ouch. Since she and I have spent a lot of time in the bathroom the last few days - she surprised me today when three of the about twenty times that she asked to "go sit on the potty", she actually went pee. She got two stickers for those potty moments instead of the one I had given her for the other potty visits. She made out pretty good in the sticker department today since I was avoiding diaper"blow outs" at all costs. This month - she has loved playing with the balloons she received, has found the concept of a "tea party" or really any kind of make pretend party, she loves playing princess, and can't give Topi enough bones - they have become quite a team. She also found the cat scratcher and claims it as her own, until mommy notices.

Quite the climber and artist.

Welcome to the Adventures of Meg and Ava

For two years I wrote about the my journey to Ava Linh in Thai Nguyen, Vietnam and back to the US in a blog at http://www.avalinh.blogspot.com/ . Since our lives and the focus of our journey have shifted from adoption and travel to raising a little girl as a single mom - I have changed the focus of the blog and started a new one. I hope you enjoy watching us grow and learn together.

About me: Newly single mom in her forties, college vice president with a doctorate in higher education administration, grew up and work in central New York, we just moved to a new town 90 miles away from where we used to live.

About Ava: Two and half year old, beautiful, intelligent, rambunctious little girl. Ava was abandoned by her birth family at a hospital in Thai Nguyen, Vietnam when she was less than a week old and raised in an orphanage until she was five months old. She is the most amazing person and the light of my life. Her Dad and I went to Vietnam to pick her up and have been with her ever since. She attends day care full time at a center associated with our local State college. She is developmentally at or beyond where she is supposed to be according to standard tests, she eats and sleeps well, she is healthy, petite, and has a great attitude. She likes routine and experiences stranger anxiety - especially now that we have forced her into another major life transition.

I hope this will be an interactive blog with answers from the people with more experience than me and a chance for me to share what is happening in our lives. I also plan to have some standard topics that I mention each time I write, so that over time I can see how the answers change. I will be blogging about Ava, how to manage the joys of being a mom, how to balance work and family, how to understand/respond to the decisions of her father, and general life issues.