Another mishap

I pulled the rental car too far into the garage and hit the stroller which hit the storm door which shattered into pieces.



Nothing makes you feel better than cleaning shards of glass out of your daughter's stroller. It was a mess.

But wait! You might be wondering, another mishap? rental car? My blogging has fell quite far behind. A little over 3 weeks ago Jeff ran our minivan into a lightpole. It was the morning of the first Hawkeye football game, around 8:20. I was already up tailgating, Jeff waited around for the babysitter. He was on his way to pick up the Davises, he was looking down at his phone and he ran right into a lightpole. He was fine. The pole fell over, the minivan was wrecked. Since he was less than a block away from the Davis house, Aiden got to enjoy all the excitement and see the fire truck that had to come, so I guess some good came out of it. :) Jeff got the van towed and everything squared away, and he made it to the game, but it definitely put a damper on the whole day. I should get the minivan back tomorrow, but it has been over 3 weeks!!

But wait! A minivan, you might ask? Yep, we got a minivan in July. Might be kind of excessive for just one child, but we knew it would be very useful on our midwest trips to Mich, Ohio, Indiana, etc and it definitely was! We love it!

Here's a pic right after we got the van.

Our little girl is all growed up!

I don't have bad grammar, the title is a reference to the movie 'Swingers'....

It seems like Isabella has changed so much just by moving up to the 2 year old classroom, we can’t believe it and we are not ready for it. Drop off in the morning has been extremely easy, hardly any crying at all. It sounds like she has no problem drinking her milk out of a cup and she even has gone to the bathroom on the potty. The whole potty thing has me concerned, I wasn’t even going to consider thinking about potty training until after she turned 2. Now, I feel like on scrambling to do some research on how it should be done. I want to be consistent at home and at daycare and I feel like that might be difficult until I understand what I am even supposed to be doing. She went on her first field trip on Tues. They went to the library for story time. I think it might be all the novelty of it that she is doing so well. I wonder if in a while she might become bored or disinterested again.

This morning Isabella offered part of her waffle to her teddy bear. I haven't seen her try to feed any of her stuffed animals before. So cute!

Here is a video of her showing her animal sounds (she actually is a lot better at animal sounds than she demonstrates here) Also, it shows how she calls Grover "Elmo", which she is increasing doing more of every day (just to irk me, I think). Also, her sound for 'dog' is just panting like dog. She doesn't say woof.

Our trip to Ohio

There is so much to post about for our trip to Ohio, I don't know where to begin. I could write and write and write but I'll have to keep it short. After our overnight trip to Indiana we went to Columbus to see Grandpa Jack, Grandma Linda and Aunt Jillian. Isabella had tons of fun playing with the outside toys her Grandparents had for her on the deck: a slide, a basketball hoop, a boat teeter-totter and a cozy coupe. True to form Isabella was constantly saying "outside" and wanting to go out.




On Friday we went to the Columbus zoo. It was lots of fun and huge, we hardly made it through any of it before it was past Isabella's naptime and we figured we better make it home. Lots and lots of pictures can better describe our trip to the zoo.



After nap, we took Isabella to the park down the street. Aunt Jillian met us there and told us she got an internship with a judge for the next 3 months. Way to go, Jill!


On Saturday we went shopping. I spent lots of time at Babies 'R Us because we really needed a new diaper bag because our other one was ripping out due to us constantly overpacking it. Isabella kept herself quite entertained by pretending she was shopping herself. She completely filled up the cart!


We also went shopping over at Easton, which is a really neat shopping area that is mainly outside. We weren't able to spend much time there because we were pushing it to get Jeff home for his football draft. Isabella did find herself in the fountains, I didn't see this, but I guess that the fountains go on and off and Isabella ventured on to an area that was off. Pretty soon, of course, that part of the fountain came back on and completely scared Isabella.


Isabella had an absolute blast playing in the boat that had rainwater in it. She just jumped right in wearing a regular diaper, which just sucked up a lot of the water. We just laughed at her quite a bit before I decided it would probably be better to get her into a swim diaper. Shortly after that however, I could tell she was "filling" her diaper. Lesson learned in that case was that you should make sure to change a dirty swim diaper ASAP. Enough said.





Saturday night we went out to a Mexican restaurant that was delicious. Unfortunately Isabella wanted some of the salsa that was a little spicy and also my salad was a bit spicy and pretty soon she was crying and trying to wipe off her tongue. We've seen her do that before when she eats something too spicy/hot and it is so sad to see. Isabella was about at the end of her rope, so Grandma took her outside and then even changed her into her pjs for the ride home and the rest of us were able to finish our dinner. That was very nice!!!

On Sunday we took a trip to visit Great-Grandma Jeanne. This turned out to be a very special visit as Great-Grandma passed away a few weeks later on Labor Day. We were very sad to see her go. We consider ourselves very lucky that we got to visit with her that day and our visit with her was very nice. Aunt Debi was there from Chicago, so we got to see her too.
After that visit we went to Uncle Tim's for a visit. We got to see Uncle Tim, Maggie and Trevor and all their horses. Isabella even got to ride on a horse with Grandma!



After lunch we stopped off at the bookstore that Aunt Kathleen works at so we could get to see her. The bookstore is a very cute place with lots of Melissa and Doug toys, so Isabella really had a lot of fun there.

Isabella is wearing Jeff's t-shirt here because we forgot a bib and I didn't want her to get her dress dirty, so she looked pretty funny.


Our trip was great! Isabella always had trouble sleeping on the road, so that always puts a damper on things. Jeff really spent a lot of time with Isabella overnight to get her to sleep and then on the last night Grandma took complete care of her, allowing Jeff and I to get our best night of sleep the whole trip.

Pic of Isabella watering plants with Grandpa. She liked to show him where to water.

Finally I had to post this picture because Isabella threw a fit when Grandma and Grandpa ran into the store to get milk without her. I mean, the poor girl has a new stuffed animal and a yellow balloon and she is just sooo upset.


If you'd like to see every single photo of trip, click here. I got all of Grandma and Grandpa's photos, so we have a combined total of 300+! Enjoy!

Grover or Elmo?

Imagine my shock the last couple of weeks when Isabella has been pointing at pictures of Grover and clearly saying "Elmo". We do have a couple of Elmo books, but maybe she has picked up this Elmo thing at daycare.

However - today Isabella said "Grover" for the very first time. She was pointing at a stuffed Grover and saying "Elmo" and Jeff was correcting her and then she said clear as day "Grover"! Very exciting!

Our little girl in the 2 year old room

Last Tues Jeff and I received this letter from daycare:

Jeff & Robin - As I am am sure you are aware, little Miss Bella has taken to biting her friends occasionally. While this behavior certainly is not abnormal at this age, the number of bites/attempts is slightly excessive.

After speaking with Brittany and Amanda, we think Bella might be out-growing the Young Toddler Room. We have several younger kiddos in there now and I think she just might be getting bored with the daily routine. Therefore, we would like to begin to transition Bella to the older classroom. Madison and Madeliene just moved over recently, and we think Bella will adjust fine. We would like to work on transitioning her immediately with the hopes of making her move permanent within the next few weeks. However, if she seems to take to her new room with no problems we will make the switch sooner.

Please let me know your thoughts and we can go from there.

I have to admit I hadn't even started to prepare myself for Isabella's move to the next room, I didn't think it would probably happen until January.

So, last week she spent some time in the 2 year old room and as of last Friday she is a permanent resident! It sounds like she's been doing pretty well and we haven't seen any bite notifications lately (like she would really bite these older kids!) Anyhow, I do think it will be a good move for her, even though I would have to assume the move is more about the classroom sizes/numbers than anything else.

When I dropped her off last Friday and they were feeding her breakfast they brought her milk over in a little dixie cup. I was like "hmmm, I don't know how she'll handle that..." and they were just like "We'll see". Whenever I've given her a cup without a lid, she's basically just poured it all over her face. Also, I guess they set her on the potty chair when they change her diaper and as far as I can tell she's showed zero signs of being ready for potty training, so let's hope this doesn't backfire.

Isabella's .25 second of fame

A co-worker told me he saw Isabella on the news after a football game. All I could think of was Kids Day at Kinnick and found this online. She's sitting in her stroller at about -1.27. How anyone caught that was Isabella really impresses me, I probably would have missed her if I wasn't looking for her!

http://www.kcrg.com/news/local/53317092.html