The Olympics and Exercise

We've been watching the Olympics along with everyone else and Anna loves the ice skating, whether it's racing or figure skating. When figure skating is on she twirls about the room. When it's speed skating, she runs around our living room in circles and screams "go! go!" Then when NBC cuts to another sport or goes to commercial, Anna cries "Mo! Mo!"

The photo above has nothing to do with exercise or the olympics, except that it is an example of the excellent diet we enjoy at our house. I made a chocolate carrot cake for a friend in the ward and let Anna lick the frosting spoon. What a happy face!
Somewhere Anna picked up the word "essersize" (exercise). When I took her swimming at our rec center a few weeks ago, she pointed at the people walking around on the indoor track and said "essersize." She also constantly asks me to put in my Biggest Loser Last Chance work out DVD for her. She pulls it off the shelf, hands it to me and says, "essersize Momma." She's probably trying to tell me something since I haven't exercised since Evie came home, but the last thing I want to do right now is exercise with Jillian Michaels. I tried the DVD back at the beginning of the year and couldn't move for two days afterwards. Anyway, Anna loses interest pretty quickly, but it's fun to watch her try to mimic the DVD.

We've also been working on a different sort of training: potty training. Actually, I'm in no big rush. She seemed to be showing signs that she might be ready, so I bought a potty and Sesame Street panties. When I got home from Target, she was going through my bags and suddenly I heard, "Yay! Yay!" She had found the panties. In an effort to encourage her, I thought I'd let her wear the panties. We've experimented with a few different arrangments: wearing the panties over a diaper, wearing just the panties with plastic swim pants (worked pretty well), and wearing the panties inside the diaper. That last one might have worked out okay if she hadn't pooped right then. Yeah, that was a rookie mistake, but my thought was that she'd feel the wet easier with the panties inside her diaper and might become more interested in potty training, but after the poop, I'll let her feel the wet a different way.

So we got out the potty and let her sit on it a few times. Then last Saturday she came and got me, said, "potty" and after I helped her take off her diaper she sat on the potty. I thought I'd keep an eye on her, but after a few minutes, she kicked me out of the bathroom and shut the door half way. I didn't trust her enough to let her shut it all the way. Then I got distracted and suddenly she was yelling at me and there was poop in the potty and some had fallen out on the floor. But, now she won't even go near the potty. So I think the poop scared her. I figure we'll try again in a month.

Here's a photo of my brother Ryan using Anna to get girls. He's a freshman at BYU and we went to his dorm to see him open his mission call. He is going to the Birmingham, England mission and reports to the MTC in England at the end of May. We're excited for him.