Night night Papa for the third time

Look what Ray brought to contribute to game night dinner. :D

Ari has been into decorating herself lately. She found where we had our Sharpie markers- thank god, she was mostly interested in drawing on herself. Yesterday, she had to have two baths due to close encounters with food dyes and some washable markers.

Mind, I've been writing this entry over several days, so "yesterday" in the prior paragraph is like, Sunday.

Today, on the other hand, has been a pretty exciting day. Ari cooked with me for the first time today. It was a pretty mixed success. :) She had been having kind of a rough, tantrumy day, and when I started cooking soup, she was really interested. I went ahead and got out a chair for her so she could see what I was doing, and I gave her a spoon to stir the broth, and so on.


Then I started seasoning the broth, and she was super interested in that, so I started aliquoting herbs and spices into a little cup, and letting her dump them into the broth. She was having a great time.

Then I had to go upstairs. Then, when I came downstairs, I discovered that, in cooking the five pounds of brisket that I cooked yesterday, I left the celery salt out on the table. I discovered this by finding the empty celery salt jar next to my beautifully seasoned beef broth! There wasn't much in the jar, but she'd still dumped about a tablespoon and a half of it into the now-incredibly-oversalted broth. I was able to rescue it with two more cups of unsalted broth and some tomato juice, but still. It just wasn't quite the same.

It was really cool cooking with her, though. I hope I get to do it LOTS more. :D

Second exciting thing is that Ari has- at long last- started to show interest in the potty. We went out and got one of those potty seats that goes on your big toilet, and she was very taken with it. She spent about an hour sitting on it this evening.

She has definitely not progressed to knowing what to use the potty for, mind. But this is still a big jump up from the little girl who didn't seem to notice that the potty existed at all or what we did with it.

Couple of other things: we taught Ari how to blow on dandelions for wishes. She really digs it. She's been really tantrumy of late. I choose to hope that this heralds the cusp of a new developmental stage.

Oh, and she's been really freaking me out on the playground. I try hard to stand back and let her find her own boundaries- which she's really quite good at- but she's constantly attempting things I don't think she should be able to do. She's always either succeeded at them safely, or turned back if she didn't think she could do it. And I really do want her to learn to not do things because she knows they're not safe, not because I told her so.

But still. She's climbed to the top of the jungle gym, and I don't think she can get down without falling. I'm there biting my nails and making myself wait until she asks for help. She doesn't, though. She always climbs down on her own.