SOOO not a toy

okay, as most people can tell you, when you move, especially more than once in a short period of time (ie. a year), things tend to get displaced. boxes are spilled in other boxes, items end up in the wrong box marked for a different room than where the item should be, etc. so i'm not so shocked that this particular item was somehow accessible to little fingers. now, on with the story.

in effort to keep my independence testing toddler from feeling too restricted, i try to give her choices about things (picking her own socks, choosing from a "menu" for breakfast and lunch, etc.). one of the things i allow her to do is to choose her toys for nap time and to put in the diaper bag when we go out. so, the other day, she puts some things in the diaper bag and off we go. i get to church and start digging for her quiet toys and find a tampon. and it's open (so i know for a fact that it's not a left over from my stash last month). and this is the toy she keeps trying to pull out of the bag. no, no. that just won't do. i can't really have my kids playing with that on the pew during sacrament. people will talk...and rightly so! i hide the item at the bottom of the bag and figure she will forget about it. well, yesterday i'm cleaning up the breakfast dishes and hear mali and noe fighting over something. i come in to find them pulling back and forth on, you guessed it, that same tampon (i checked the diaper bag to make sure it's the same one and that they don't have a stash somewhere). they have taken the applicator apart, taken out the actual tampon, and have made a game out of putting the applicator back together over and over again. okay, we're in the privacy of our home and i'm trying to clean the kitchen, so i decide to let them keep playing with it, instructing them to share and take turns before returning to my kitchen mess. a few minutes later, mali comes strolling into the kitchen carrying the tampon by the string, waving it around and squealing like this is the greatest fun she's had in a long time (i guess i need to rethink our daily activities....). again, i figure there's no harm in it.

did i mention that my daughter eats EVERYTHING?

yes, i look back at her when i have the dishwasher loaded and she has cotton or whatever it's made of, hanging out of her mouth. she's just taking bites like it's corn on the cob. ew. perhaps there is a problem with them playing with a tampon. i guess the bottom line here is that there's a reason you don't see kids plaing with these in pews at church. this story is quite funny when i tell it to family now, but i can see this being an awkward issue that they will likely have to discuss in therapy when my girls become little women. "well, honey, you remember that toy you had when you were younger....?"

on a different note, mali has begun feeding herself. i've been easing her into it for a while, filling her spoon for her and then letting her put it in her mouth, then helping her load her own spoon. the next stage was supposed to be giving her a spoon to use with me holding the bowl and another spoon to feed her while she tries to feed herself with her spoon, too. this stage took several months with noe before she took over completely. mali, however, is advanced in everything food, so this morning, she insisted on doing it all herself. i wasn't even allowed to hold the bowl. if i tried to help in any way, she screamed and threw her spoon down, hitting the bowl and my spoon with her hands, refusing to let me put anything in her mouth. so i let her go at it with some rice pudding. while i expected her to become frustrated and want me to help before too long, she actually did quite well for her first time and managed to get through half without much interference. then, rather than let me help her with the rest, she decided she'd rather get down and leave the food (a big deal for her, i'll tell you). i've decided that when people say that the chunky babies will slim up when they start walking around and such are only half right. they slim up at this point, but more because they don't get as much to eat, due to their own stubborn independence. pride is a great diet aide.

noe is peeing on the potty almost every time she has to pee now. the motivation of choice? marshmellows. still no improvement on the pooping, though, but i guess that's only once a day whereas the peeing is many many times.