What I learned over a year of potty training

That's right. ONE YEAR. We started potty-training Jane about two months before Hank was born, thinking that if we got it done, we'd only have one kid in diapers. Jane was doing really great right up until he was born. She wasn't having any accidents, but I mainly took her to the bathroom. She very rarely told me when she had to go.

Welp, when Hank was born, she spent a few days with Grandma and Grandpa without Mommy, and her routine got interrupted, and she started having accidents. And... she ended up back in diapers, and about once a month I would try again only to decide that it was so much easier to just change her diaper rather than deal with gross-ness all over the house. We went back and forth like this for, I'm not even kidding, a year! Until one day my mom said she would take Jane to Disneyland if she would be potty-trained. That girl potty-trained herself overnight. Are you kidding me?

We leave tomorrow for Disneyland.

Here's what I learned.

• I never thought it was possible, but sometimes kids just don't care if their pants are wet or poopy. 
• The nice little "incentive" that Huggies puts on their Pull-Ups doesn't work if you've got a stubborn one. No amount of "Don't make the butterfly fly away" will convince her.
• Even brand new underwear with Elsa and Anna on it won't get a strong-willed child to keep her pants clean.
• My Jane will always do exactly as she wants
• We should have bribed her with Disneyland a lot sooner...

She's ready!!

Ummm... An update?

We lived in Missouri for 2 1/2 years. Jane was born there.

We moved to Oregon and lived with Cory's parents for about a year. Cory did an internship at Wildlife Safari. Hank was born. 

We bought a house in McMinnville. We love it and all its quirks and charm. 

We love McMinnville. It's such a unique little town and we already have such wonderful friends here. 

Cory works with monkeys (mostly macaques) and Kristen takes care of their monkeys (mostly humans).

Some pictures...

Missouri Wildlife

Kristen here. I got on our blog today for the first time in almost four years and found this gem of a post that Cory had started about the animals we saw in Missouri. I want to get back into posting here more regularly and thought I would start off with a little blast from the past. In future posts I'll catch you up on what we're doing these days, but for now, this is fun, too.

And now Cory, take it away~

I've spent most of my life living well within city limits, but since our move from Missouri that has changed. We are smack dab in the middle of nowhere, according to our new friends. Our home is a cabin in the woods halfway between Colombia (school) and Fulton (church and friends). So whenever we are out doing yard work, walking the dog, or driving we see the awesome beauty of nature, and more importantly wildlife.

Shortly after I got a smart phone, and took pictures of any wildlife I saw, I found an app and website for documenting wildlife encounters, or spottings, called Project Noah. Go here to check out my page. I am now addicted to getting a good shot of any mammal, bird, reptile or amphibian and uploading it right away with detail on location, habitat, and species. Aside from documenting my own wildlife spottings, I get to identify other peoples wildlife uploads on Project Noah. Due to this I am getting great at identifying members of the rodent family Sciuridae, tree squirrels, woodchucks, chipmunks, and ground squirrels.  What I most wanted to share was the amazing animals I have seen out here in the Eastern United States. Growing up in Oregon, and then doing a mission and school in Utah every thing was either the Western blank or Northern blank, now everything is the Eastern blank or Southern blank.

Eastern fox squirrel (Sciurus niger)

Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis)

So  we will start with mammals, because they are awesome, and a bit harder to find. Here in Missouri, as in Oregon, there are a lot of squirrels. The two common tree squirrels are the Eastern fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) and the Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis). The two are really quite easy to tell apart but they overlap a lot in where they are found, their distribution, I see fox squirrels on campus but gray squirrels at the LDS institute building where I park, and I only see grays near our house, which Petra our dog always want to chase, but I've seen foxes cross the highway close by. My favorites are the foxes they are a bit bigger than the grays and the gray grizzled coat is complemented by orange undersides, aposed to white. They are fun to watch forage for nuts and seeds on the ground, especially in the leaves and sometimes you can get pretty close.

Groundhog or Woodchuck (Marmota monax)

The other cool member of the squirrel family out here is the groundhog or woodchuck (Marmota monax) big grey ground squirrels. I have seen two now the closest I've been is in a car driving past. They seem a bit smaller than the yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) I'm used to in Utah, but still pretty cool.

Eastern cottontail (Sylivagus floridanus)

I have been able to get pretty close to the local lagamorphs here, the Eastern cottontail (Sylivagus floridanus) there are two residents on the LDS institue's grounds, and more on campus. I have been reading Watership Down by Richard Adams, about European rabbits, and didn't realize that some rabbits make large underground burrows, European and pygmy rabbits, and others just have nests or campout in other animal's burrows, cottontails. So these guys come out in the evening and nibble on the grass near cover.

(From here I was going to finish writing about other mammals I had seen and in later posts write about other groups of animals. As outlined in this list of species.)

Mammals:
Squirrels
Groundhog/woodchuck
cottontails
deer
raccoons
opossum

Birds:
hummingbird
sparrow
cardinal
woodpeckers
hawk
turkey vulture

Reptiles:
skink
box turtle
snapping turtle

Amphibians:
cricket frogs
leopard frog
toad

Yard work fun

I love having my own yard. It's hard work to keep the leaves raked and the grass mowed, but it's so nice to be able to plant the things that I want and make a plan for how I want it to look. Last Friday, I planted tulip bulbs for the spring. It was really hard work. Missouri ground is mostly clay, so digging through it to plant the bulbs took a long time. I started at 9:30am and had to take so many breaks, so as not to wear myself out, that I wasn't done with them until 2:15pm. It took me almost 5 hours to plant 24 bulbs. I'm excited to see what they look like in the spring.

While I was planting, Cory was raking the leaves. We live in a wooded area with tons of hickory trees, so our yard is covered with the falling leaves. It had been a couple weeks since we last raked and so Cory was able to rake a pile at least three feet high. We let Petra play in it. It was really fun and super cute to watch.

Look how cute our puppy is.

I don't usually put videos on the blog, but I just had to share this one. It's short, I promise.

Back to blogging

I put off writing anything in here because I got my wonderful job at SirsiDynix and life got busy and I didn't really have the time or desire to blog. Now, however, we live in Missouri and I'm working for myself again, so I really want to keep all of you updated on how the Davises are doing, especially since we live much further away from most of you than we did in the past.

I never in a million years thought that we would be living in Missouri. It's been quite the change from Utah but we absolutely love it. We have the cutest house in the middle of the country and we recently adopted a dog, which has always been a dream of Cory's.

Cory has started school and is really liking his Master's program. We're going to apply for vet school again for next year and hope that he gets into the University of Missouri so we can stay here. We've made some great friends and just love it here.

I am now working as a health coach for a wonderful program that has helped so many people lose weight and stay healthy for life. If you would like to learn more about it you can check out my website HealthCoachKristen.com and send me a request for more detailed information. I'd really love to tell you about it.

I'm also going to start my weight loss blog again. There's a link in the side bar if you want to follow that.

Here's some pictures!

We had a lot of stuff to pack up, and my mom is so wonderful that she came to Provo to help us get ready.

Our beautiful new cabin home. This was while we were still unpacking so there's lots of empty boxes and other junk on the porch. 

Our new pup, Petra. She really loves Cory.

Updates

• I start a new job in a little over a week at SirsiDynix. They make the library database software that we used at the Harold B. Lee Library. I'll be a technical writer there, and will get to write their help manuals. It doesn't sound like much, but I'm super duper excited about it!
  
  
• The band I'm in, Milo, has been rocking it up lately. We had a show on the Saturday before Halloween, which was awesome despite my being sick. Most recently, we played in the battle of the bands at Muse Music last Tuesday, which was also totally awesome. There was a great energy there and we had a blast playing our music. If you haven't already, you should like us on facebook. (There's a link to take you to our facebook page-on the word Milo-but for some reason I can't get the color to change to be noticeable.)
  
  
• I started a new diet, and I've already lost 7 pounds in a little over two weeks. I'm hoping to be down 10 pounds by the end of the third week. You can read a little bit more about it in my health journey blog (link's right over there ----->). My goal for this diet is to have lost 40 pounds by my birthday at the beginning of March, and I'm thinking it's totally do-able. I only have 33 left to go!
  
  
• We have the Davis's coming down for Thanksgiving tomorrow. It's going to be a blast having everyone here. Although, I'm a little wary to cook a whole Thanksgiving meal in my uber-tiny kitchen. We'll see how that goes.
  
  
• Derby's been sick with a sinus infection for the last two months. We've taken him to the vet and he's been prescribed antibiotics, but it just doesn't seem to go away. I wish it would, because I really want to have him fixed so he'll stop being a stinker and peeing all over everything, but we need to wait for this to clear up before we can do that.

Happy Birthday Nicoley!

My baby sister turns 20 today! Weird... Sometimes I still think of her as being a little 8-year-old, mostly because I tried to mother her when we were younger. I'm only about 3 and 1/2 years older than her, but for some reason that makes me feel a lot older and responsible for her.

Growing up, it was just the two of us, and boy, could we fight. I was not a nice sister. I attribute this to two things. First, our radically different personalities, and second, the lack of another sibling to go to or to also fight with. Two was just not a good number in our house.

I'm happy to say that now Nicoley and I are the best of friends. She's the one I want to talk to when I'm bored. She's the one I want to hang out with when I have free time. She's the one that I can talk to about pretty much anything. Not living together has been great for us and our relationship. It's funny because when we have to be in close proximity to each other for extended periods of time again, we fall right back into our old habits. We took a three-day trip this last summer to go back home for my cousin's wedding, just the two of us, and we had a blast for the first two and a half days of it but after a full day of driving, a busy wedding day, and another full day of driving, we were mad as hell at each other. We spent the last almost five hours of the drive in absolute silence. It was weird.

Anyway, happy birthday Nicoley. You are the best sister in the world, and I love you so much. I'm so glad that we're friends now and that you laugh with me over the stupidest stuff. We really do need big neon signs on our foreheads to proclaim to the world that we're not crazy, just sisters.