Random notes from the house-bound

We're stuck at home while we're potty training.  Since having children, it's pretty hard to embarrass me in public anymore (I will sing whatever I need to sing at whatever volume I need to sing it to soothe a crying kid, I have nursed babies in all sorts of situations including a wedding reception, and I have danced with my children in front of countless disapproving people).  However, I'm not quite ready to waltz into a store with Charlotte's froggy potty under my arm.  Once we have mastered the froggy potty, we're moving on to the potty seat on the adult toilet.  After that we will tackle public potties.  In the meantime, the farthest we are going to wander is across the street to Alicia and Dan's house (with froggy potty in tow, of course).

ANYHOW, we have been entertaining ourselves in a variety of ways.  Charlotte has taken to building "princess castles".  She has a rather unique style:

And here is the architect herself, modeling her big girl underpants.

If we take a picture of Charlotte, Peter races up and starts loudly insisting "CHEESE" until I take his picture as well.  This is a perfect example of what happens when Daddy dresses Peter for bed.  I take no credit for this mismatched ensemble.  (Yes, I know it's summer, but Petey Pie isn't good at staying covered up at night.)

And check out this amazing scene:

Rocky was snoozing on the back of the couch and Pacey jumped up and actually plopped down almost touching him!  There was no hissing, screeching, or smacking.  I couldn't believe I was able to get up to grab the camera without spooking Mr. Pacey Crankypants.  Not long afterward, they were tumbling around in one of those cartoon fighting clouds with punctuation marks shooting out.  You know what I'm talking about, right?  Something like this, only with fur flying:

Back to the potty training -- Charlie Jo is doing great.  All of a sudden*, this morning she started announcing BEFORE she needed to go and then doing the deed in the right place (a HUGE step up from the last few days when we could only get her to go in the potty by sitting her on it long enough that she just happened to go)!  We have been loading her up with juice and popsicles, so she racked up 10 hits and only three misses.  I don't think I peed 13 times a day even when I was nine months pregnant.  This is going to be an interesting drive to Dallas at the end of this week.

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*Did you know that according to some sources, it's correct to write "all of a sudden" rather than "all of the sudden"?  I have always used the latter and never been corrected, but since I read about 9 million books a day to my kids I have been paying a lot more attention to little things like that idiom.  I noticed that in print it appears as "all of a sudden" and at first I thought it was a mistake.  When I looked it up, I found arguments for both.  More official-looking sources seem to support using "a" instead of "the".  I hate it when I'm wrong about stuff like that, as Corey will attest.