One Year Already?

I had the random thought this morning, "I think I've been doing this whole blog thing for about a year now."
A quick search confirmed that I have in fact been blogging for exactly one year, today.

It all began with this short post about a 27 month old Annie's antics:

So, I finally bit the bullet and created a blog. Which has left me wondering for many days, how does one begin a blog? Introduce myself, my kids, my family? Everyone who's gonna read it already knows us. Then, I had this exchange with Annie yesterday:
"Mom, I'm poopy! Change my diaper!"
"Oh, you have a poopy diaper?"
Annie, reaching her hand around, shoving her hand down the back of her diaper, then looking at me, says, "Yep, it's poopy. I checked."
That about sums it up . . . I'm raising a monkey.

Annie - August 26th, 2008 & 2009
One year of bedhead going strong . . . Ellie
One year of near baldness . . .

One full year later, and my blog post topic, before I'd even remembered the year anniversary thing, was also about potty habits. I lead an exciting and wildly varied life:

Potty training is going well. My one complaint would be my daughter's enormous bladder size and amazing bladder control. She uses the potty right before bed, then at 10AM, a good 15 hours later, I'm begging her to please go use the potty since I'm sure her bladder is going to explode any second. She just seems to have no need to use the potty in the morning. And it wigs me out more than it should. (My mother brain starts worrying about infections, and of course, her bladder bursting . . . 'cause ya hear about that happening all the time, right?)

So, sometimes my excessive worries get the best of me, resulting in less than stellar parenting, like first thing this morning . . .

"Hey Annie, if you go use the potty right now, I'll give you five mini M&Ms." Yep, bribery . . . to do what comes completely natural, and she's completely capable of doing unprompted. Good Mom.
"Hmmmm," she thinks, "Six M&Ms. No, wait, seven."
"Six."
"Nope, I decided on seven."
"OK, seven mini M&Ms . . ."
She thinks about this for a second, then says, "OK," and starts to walk away. When she suddenly stops dead in her tracks and turns and looks at me. "But not until after my spinning." Then she proceeds to spin in circles until she falls down. Then she walks into the bathroom and shuts the door.

~~

Annie's standing next to me asking, "What's today? Is it Tuesday? Sunday? Saturday? Friunday?" She's recently become quite obsessed with the day of the week.
"You mean Friday?"
"Yeah, that one?"
"Nope, it's Wednesday Annie."
"Oh, I didn't even realize it was that one! Can Lily play on Wednesdays? Does she have places to go on Wednesdays? Some people go to WalMart on Wednesdays you know . . . " I assured her we would go over and see if Lily can play on Wednesdays, and I didn't imagine they'd be at WalMart all day even if they did go.