Penelope has been doing fabulous with her toilet training mission. My least favorite part was when after about a week she absolutely refused to put on a night time diaper. Woo. Thus started the waking up in the middle of the night every night to change the sheets, until I got an over the top mini bed protector, and then I just had to pull that off and hope she was good with a towel until morning. Which she pretty much always was. The waking up screaming, and then screaming that she didn't want to go to the potty in the middle of the night, that was fun too. Now we are at the point where she gets up in the middle of the night by herself, goes to the potty, and then gets into my bed. Sometimes she comes into my room and drags me into the bathroom with her, but she's gradually phasing that out. And she knows that she's not getting into my bed until she uses the potty! So we've finally reached almost alway dry bed, and almost always peeing between midnight and 3. She even occasionally doesn't get into my bed. I could use an uninterrupted night, I'd had a couple nice months before the toilet training. Oh well. She is also getting all of her second year molars, which I know have been really bothering her for the last couple months. She's had a lower pain tolerance for everything else. second molars take forever! And that's just the obvious first eruption to done part. I'm sure there was another month of uncomfortable gums at the beginning I didn't notice. I think we're past the half way point, maybe as far as three quarters, probably another month to go! Then maybe more sleep.

Penelope has been going through her two year old tape phase. So I got a set of 8 different colors of masking tape for our open-access art drawers. The other day she made a stripy tape collage on some black construction paper, with one piece of tape hanging off each side of the page, then picked it up and started walking around the room: "Buzzzzzzzzz buzzzzzzz buzzzzzz, it's a bee!" Then she took a pink piece of paper and put on lots of tape for 'these are the ant legs', and then crawled around the room pushing it saying "Crawl crawl crawl". I was wondering what sort of noise an ant was going to make.

Rebecca is going through another phase where she starts not liking her staple foods. Like milk, and pb&j for lunch. And everything. She still drinks milk, but sometimes claims that the milk which tastes perfectly good to me tastes awful. So maybe she's going through a hypersensitive taste phase, I have no idea.

She also came home the other day and told me she hates reading. We talked about it, and determined that she hated the 100 book challenge at school, which when it was presented to me sounded like a great idea, but it is clearly clashing with Rebecca. She had 4 reasons, the books are stupid, she hates being told she has to do something, and I've forgotten the other two. Although she just added two more, she hates switching the books in her book bag because it's boring, and she hates having to carry extra things to school. So I went to the library and found some books that I thought she would like, to convince her that she didn't hate reading, just hated reading stupid books. And the books she has to read are dumb, they are supposed to be books they can easily read to themselves to build confidence, but her level is such that they are brain numbing. And they are supposed to read them three times, which would kill me. She did really like the books I got, Dora, magic ponys, blah blah blah, and now freely admits that she doesn't hate reading anymore, only reading stupid books, which is totally okay. I don't know why they don't have any 2-yellow books about magic ponys and princesses and rainbows and crystals, but I think I'm going to have to fix that problem.