August 2006

I'm finally posting some new pictures and news. Life with two mobile children is very busy and leaves very little time for emailing and blogging. I'm lucky to post something once a month.

Jeff completed his chaplaincy internship this past week. It was an intense experience, but very helpful to Jeff's future in all his roles: pastor, father, husband, son and man. We very grateful for the amount of growth in Jeff's life, my own life and our marraige through this program. It was a worthwhile investment of time and money.

We recently had a great visit to Virginia for Jeff's friend Jon Chiu's wedding. We enjoyed seeing old friends and celebrating with Jon & Mary. The girls and I had a slightly longer visit with my parents and some of my close girlfriends. It was such a fun time (though incredibly hot)! Some of the highlights of the grandparents house are
*playing with Lupita the cat (Cambria's personal favorite)
* separate bedrooms for each girl and Jeff & I
* plenty of adults to play CandyLand with Cambria
* a great community pool & fun playgrounds
* Granddad buying Cambria a Happy Meal a couple of times :-)

Cambria is really into board games and computer games. In fact, the computer games have often replaced watching TV (not a bad thing). I think she has grown somewhat bored with the Dora shows...she's seen them all a million times. She spends a great deal of the day dressing up and pretending all kinds of funny scenarios.

The other exciting news about Cambria is that she is finally potty training again. Things were going well in the spring and then she just lost interest in June, having accidents all the time. At her 3 year appointment, the pediatrician told me to lay off the discussion and pressure of potty training for 6 weeks and see what happens. Well 5 weeks later, she decided on her own to wear underwear again and use the potty. That was this past Wednesday and she hasn't had an accident since that time. In fact, I hardly ever ask her to go potty...she does it all herself. We do still have two more hurdles with potty training: 1) she hates automatic flushing potties and refuses to use them in stores (who's brilliant idea was it to invent those...he/she obviously never had a 3 year old), and 2) she still won't poop in the potty (there is a fear associated with this, too). The good news is that I'm not worried about it any longer. She has shown me that she'll come around when she's ready...I don't need to pressure her.

Lastly, Avery is as cute as ever. She says "Da", "Ya-Ya" (for Cambria), but has stopped saying "Mmmm" for Mommy. Oh well, she doesn't need to say my name because I'm always around. :-) I weaned her from breastfeeding this week. In the last few weeks she became incredibly distracted when nursing. She's much happier with bottles and I'm glad to be on the road to full pregnancy/nursing recovery (though that means cutting back in more calories -- bummer).