Sea Life

Sea Life opened not long ago at Legoland. It is a separate facility next to the entrance for Legoland that is a huge aquarium. It is set up almost in a maze pattern where you enter in groups. It kind of reminds me of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, where everyone goes into that crazy elevator thing before going on to the ride. When you first enter, you all go into an entry room where you hear the welcome and the instructions on not terrorizing the fish before you enter. It's really great! Now of course, it is no comparison to Sea World, but then again, what is??? There are lots of aquariums of all sizes as well as interactive areas for children.

Keira and I decided to head there early in the morning before her afternoon nap. Here she is with King Neptune. Sorry for the horrible quality of the pictures. They were all from my cell phone.

Here is Keira checking out some of the displays

Here is one of the wall murals. It's all indoors. It's kind of weird because it doesn't look like that big of a building, but they really do have alot going on in there!

One thing I like about Sea Life is that they do alot of the displays with kids in mind. Here was an aquarium that kids could crawl under and pop up in the middle of the tank to make it seem like they are looking from the inside.
Now what would an aquarium by Legoland be if it didn't have Legos in there? Some of the tanks had huge Lego submarines and people. They did a great job and we'll have alot of fun checking Sea Life out on the breaks when we can't get to Sea World!

4 Days and Counting...

Just a real quick entry to say that it is 4 days and counting that Keira has been exclusively been going pee and poop in the potty. 4 DAYS!!! Granted, she still needs a diaper when she takes a nap or sleeps through the night, but when she is awake during the day, she not only pees and poops in the potty, but goes and does it herself! She runs into the bathroom when she feels the urge, throws her underpants into the hallway, climbs up on the step stool and gets on the potty by herself. She doesn't even like either of us in the bathroom. LOL

I think that it was the magical combination of bribery, chocolate and Princess Underwear! The first morning of the 4 day streak, I went out and bought her a 7 pack of Disney Princess Underwear as well as a bag of Cherry Chocolate Kisses. I decided that enough was enough with the stupid Training Pants. They obviously were doing nothing for her getting to understand when she needed to go. We would have to just bite the bullet and deal with the mishaps and mess if we were going to finally be successful with it. I promised that she could have 1 chocolate whenever she told mommy and daddy that she needed to go potty and didn't pee in her underwear AND if she was good and only peed and pooped in the potty, she can wear her special Princess underwear...well that was all it took. She was off and running. She completely stopped at that point with telling us when she had to go and wanted to go on her own so that she could try on all her new underwear! I started to just leave the pack in the bathroom and everytime she would go, I would help her wipe and after that, she would put different one on. This totally tells me that she had it all along and just needed that extra thing to push her into wanting to do it.

It was a big test to see if she would keep it up during her time at daycare and she has! Amanda told me today that she would just go by herself whenever she needed to. My little girl is growing up...which kind of makes me a little sad, but when I think of the savings in diapers...well, let's just say that it makes it a little easier to get over it! :)

The Little Princess

In daycare, Keira is currently the only girl. She holds her own playing with the boys, but one of the things that I started to notice was that whenever she was in a play situation with boys and girls, she would always go to play with the boys Whenever a little girl would approach her to play, it was almost as if she didn't know what to make of it and would run off to play with the boys.

A funny thing that she would do is whenever you would ask if she was a big girl, she would stand up, put her hands on her hips and defiantly say "I not a big girl....I a BIG BOY!" It would make me laugh, but I promised Dan (who still wanted his little princess) that I wouldn't encourage it. I just figured that we had a little Tom-Boy on our hands...wanting to wear jeans, play with boys, watch Thomas the Tank Engine...you get the picture.

Last year, Gigi bought Keira a Disney Princesses towel when we were at Disneyland, but Keira didn't really think anything of the picture on the towel. When I first started trying to potty train Keira, I bought her pull ups that had the Disney Princesses on the front (I've since been buying other brands since they get so expensive!). While sitting on the potty, she asked me, "Mommy...what DAT?" I told her "Princesses!" She said princesses over and over again. That was a couple of months ago and she never really mentioned it until one day a couple of weeks ago when we were going to the beach, I pulled out her Disney towel. "MOMMY! PRINCESSES!!!!!" She's been obsessed ever since. She wants to bring her Princesses towel everywhere with her, she doesn't want to wear anything that snaps over her pull ups or underwear so that she can see the Princesses at all times. Yesterday when I told her not to pee on the Princesses, I think it worked! LOL She's been back to telling me whenever she has to pee and I've had her wearing Princess underwear (not training pants) some of yesterday and this morning and so far she has been back to telling me when she has to pee consistently.

She has a Disney Princesses DVD that she could have cared less about before that she loves to watch now. In the bath, she was singing one of the songs that Ariel sings on the DVD at the top of her lungs with her arms waving in the air (one of the characters is doing sign language during the song). At the beach yesterday, there were lots of little ones playing and she played with a little girl even though there were little boys running around throwing sand at each other. Last night because she was doing better with her potty training again, Dan brought her to Coldstone and let her pick her ice cream out. What did she pick? Pink ice cream with gummy bears...all of which is making Daddy very happy that he has his princess back...for now anyway LOL.

The Potty Go Round

Ok...just a little frustration venting for a moment!

Keira has been doing so great with her potty training! She has consistently for the past few days been telling me that she needs to pee or poop. She would have good days and bad days, but now it was several days in a row. We would run to the bathroom, I would help her get on the potty and results every single time...all in the potty and none in the training pants. YAY!!! Time for underwear! We tried underwear for a while (even let her pick her own Dora and Elmo underwear), but she was just peeing all over the place and not even blinking an eye about it...but now she was ready!

All of a sudden out of nowhere, I don't know what happened, but she decided that she didn't want to tell me anymore and has started to pee in her training pants again. AAAAARRRRRGGGH!

The potty go round. Here we go! I got her some Princess training pants and told her "Don't pee pee on the princesses! The princesses don't want to be peed on!" She repeats it for me "No pee pee princesses!" It makes me laugh...even though I want to pull my hair out about this.

A Fun Summer

Here are some pictures as promised. Max took most of the pictures on his camera from their trip out and unfortunately I didn't get a chance to download them on my computer. So these are just the ones from my phone. Hopefully he will send them soon. For being so young, he really takes the time to plan out the pictures he is going to take. He'll tell Keira exactly where to pose and where to stand. It's pretty funny!
First we headed up to Vegas to pick Auntie Gigi and Max up. I was dying to see the new Palazzo Hotel and I have to be honest...I was pretty disappointed! I remember thinking about how beautiful the Venetian and Venezia are and wondering how they were going to be able to top it...looked like they didn't bother trying! There really was nothing very impressive about it and from the looks of the pictures, the rooms pretty much look exactly the same as the Venetian.
Here are Max and Keira in the lobby of the Palazzo. One thing I have to say is that the fountain there was beautiful. Something about it seemed to inspire the two of them to have a sudden desire to practice their Synchronized Swimming routine.
We headed to Disneyland and unfortunately I didn't get any pictures, but I did get a couple of pictures of Keira at the beach. We were probably there every other day and Uncle Mike taught Max and Gigi to surf! They both did pretty good- much better than I ever did! I can't even stand up on the thing! Lorraine and I were watching from our little tent as Gigi was standing up. Apparently Mike didn't have much wax on the board and next thing you know...we see Gigi do this strange looking cartwheel looking thing from the surfboard! Both of us at the same time went "YEOW..that had to hurt!" She hurt her shoulder a little, but it wasn't too bad and laughed it off saying "Yay! My first surfing injury!" LOL
In case you are wondering, I wasn't originally planning for Keira to go in the water, but you know how it works with kids and plans. Her clothes got SO wet that she ended up having to run around in her training pants! She loved running around with the board and would sometimes put her sippy cup, her shoes and her clothes around on the thing. It was pretty funny to see.

Just Keira being silly
We did eventually get to head down to Sea World to see the new Bay of Play. They did such a FANTASTIC job with it! They have cute rides and fun things to climb just for the young kiddies. Here is Keira hugging Bert in case you are wondering what on earth that picture is supposed to be.
Here Keira is posing with Ernie and Bert! Max took one by himself and Bert took Max's hat off and showed him how to wear it to look exceptionally cool like a muppet.
Here are Max and Keira with Grover and Abbie. We had such a great time this summer as usual when Auntie Gigi and Max get to come to visit! We're hoping that we can visit sometime around Halloween. It would be great for Keira to get to visit Max at his home as well as meet all of the extended family and friends! We can't wait!