Nurturing...and trying to keep up with the creative mommies.

My 21mo-old daughter is now taking care of others.

Lara takes Teddy to the potty. Speaking of which, I finally got Lara to sit on the toilet for longer than 3 seconds today. In fact, she sat on the toilet for several minutes while we talked about the cars and trucks that are currently for sale in the newspaper.

Lara is undressing Teddy after telling me to put a shirt on him. Earlier, she pointed to his bottom, saying, "stinky." So I put a diaper on him, but she took it off and said, "Stinky. MeaklamamaseeWET WIPE." So I gave her a wet wipe and she wiped his face, then his bottom ( I promise, I don't do that). She wouldn't put the diaper back on him because it was "yucky."

Seriously, how cute is my baby girl???

I love.love.love to read other moms' blogs to get inspiration. I hope I can sometimes lend a little here, though I am not getting my hopes up. A lot of moms will post ideas they think of for activities, crafts, games, etc. So in keeping with how these things work in the blogosphere, I might occasionally add on something fun I've come up with.

This I did MONTHS ago, and many of you may have already seen it. Lara has always enjoyed a good flap book, so I made this...behind each flap is an aunt, or an uncle, or a nana, or a daddy (actual pictures chopped up out of a photo album). You just never know who may be sitting behind the window!

Unfortunately, the instructions to making this will take up way too much space, so I'll just say that it involved a lot of contact paper and an exacto knife. It's gone through quite a bit of wear and tear and there seems to be a dust storm near the corner of the house. Contrary to what it shows, we don't get those here in Atlanta.

Okay, so there's crafty idea #1.

Have you heard of these? Apparently, muffin tins are the in thing now for feeding your little ones. I haven't yet figured out why, except that obviously, why would you eat off a plate if you could use a muffin tin? The blogger moms who passed on this idea include really interesting foods that I have never heard of. But since I am a simple IL girl, what we here are strawberries, turkey roll ups, cottage cheese w/flaxseed, carrots, whole grain bread, and string cheese. Lara didn't really eat much because she ate a full child-size box of teddy grahams at the store that morning. But it did keep everything cleaned and organized. And since there's no way a toddler can eat that much food, I enjoy the bite size pieces myself later.