Princess parties and petting farms

Wow, I have quite a bit of catching up to do before I can get up to the present! I'm not even ready to post Easter pics. Anyway, this post is going to focus on two fun events Kerensa did in April. The first was a princess party. Kerensa hardly knows who the Disney princesses are, but she certainly caught right on to the dress up part. Someone lent me a dress for the event and was sweet enough to let Kerensa keep it. She talked about that dresss for days afterwards!! So here's my princess (and a glimpse of a little prince too!):





We had a few nice days in April, and on one of those I was fortunate to be able to take Kerensa to a petting farm. They also offered pony rides, and I was just sure Kerensa would not want to get on the horse. Turns out, I was wrong. She didn't even hesitate! It was really fun to watch her riding and trying to feed the animals. She was so excited!






Since this post is about Kerensa, I have to share 2 big accomplishments of hers. First, we are done with pacifiers. Yeah, she's almost 3, but since somewhere around age 2, she's only been allowed to have a pacifier at nap/bedtime or in the car. They actually proved to be quite useful tools in getting her to stay in bed at night. We went through a period where nothing seemed to be working to get her to stay in bed. We tried all the suggestions you read about to no avail. Finally we decided to take away her beloved pacifiers for 10 minutes if she got out of bed after bedtime. I know I'm a cruel cruel person, but it worked! Now I'm not saying she never gets out of bed anymore ("I have to go potty" became a whole other issue!), but it's not near the problem it used to be.

Now where was I, oh yeah, getting rid of this addiction. We've been planting the seed for months that she'd be saying bye bye to her "fiers" when she turned 3 or broke them all, whichever came first. She has 4, and they were dropping like flies over the last few weeks. It was actually pretty cute to be tucking her in and her showing me which pacifiers had holes. Finally, the last one gave out on Saturday on her ride home from the grandparents house. Ryan and I geared up for a rough night, but she was fine! She acknowledged that all of them had broken, and it was a total non issue. She even told me that she was a big girl now and didn't need her pacifiers anymore. Woot!

Accomplishment number two is on the potty training front. We have moved from pull ups at night to underwear! I nonchalantly asked her the other night if we should get her pull up on, and she told me "no, I want to wear undies." Now you need to know here that her pullups have been consistently dry for months. I can only think of 2 times it hasn't been. It's obviously much more fun for Kerensa to get out of bed and go potty than it is to go in her pullup, but I still hadn't planned on moving her out of them until she started preschool or something. But she asked, so I took a deep breath and let her independence take flight. So far so good . . .

One last thing I want to mention is her complete adoration of the phrase "no thanks." She thinks it has magical powers or something. Granted when she first started saying it, I encouraged her because she was being polite, right? Then she began bringing it out when I'm not asking a question, but am asking her to do something. I suppose I can't blame her for thinking she can make things optional just by adding "thanks." So funny!