Josh, Lindsay, and Mackenzie

So, many of you know that I decided to do monthly resolutions instead of one new year's resolution. I decided to resurrect my old blog and use that to keep track of my progress month to month. So, if you want to check it out, feel free to go and read my updates. I'm not going to use this one, simply because this is our family blog and we try to keep that to things that center around Mackenzie or our parenting of Mackenzie. :)

The link to my resolution blog is: http://sparkplug208.blogspot.com/

We hope you are all doing well and we'll be writing a new blog soon! I will also be posting back issues of our family newsletter soon as well...probably when I write the one for February and then I can post them all at the same time.

For those of you that tried to access the newsletters yesterday or today, I didn't have them configured correctly. Josh fixed them so you are good! Enjoy!

I was just in the kitchen washing Mackenzie's dishes and she came into the kitchen holding the wrapper from the straw of one of her juice boxes asking "this" (this is her way of asking what something is when she doesn't know). So I looked down, told her it was the wrapper from her juice box and that it was trash. I repeated trash just once more during the conversation. She then repeated "trash" and walked away. I noticed she was walking toward the laundry room (we keep our trash bin in there). I didn't think much of it until I heard the door open, then close again. Out she walked from the hallway and she went into the living room. I immediately went to the laundry room to look and there in the trash bin was the wrapper from the straw.

I could not believe it as opening doors is something that she just learned this weekend. She also knew where the trash bin was and didn't get into any of the other stuff in the room.

Will wonders with Mackenzie never cease?

Josh

So, this weekend we learned two new things from our daughter.

1. She isn't a slouch when it comes to technology. She is now just under 3 months shy of her 2nd birthday and she can completely run the iPad. She now knows how to take the iPad from one of us, open the cover, set it down, press the home button, slide the open slider on the screen and then flip the pages to the one that has her programs on it. She then chooses the one she wants to play. She's not great at all of the programs just yet because only about half of them are visual only, but I really don't think that some of them are too far off. Oh, and she also knows where the videos are, how to pick her spongebob episodes, as well as how to turn up the volume. This has now led Lindsay and I to giving her the iPad completely. We are going to remove all of the programs that we run and leave only Mack programs.

2. She understands where the dog goes when she uses the dog door. Just this afternoon Lindsay slipped out to talk to me (I was working in the yard) and not but 2 minutes later Mackenzie was in the backyard with us. Lindsay turned around just in time to see her pulling her second leg out of the opening. What this means to us is that we used to be able to let her run around the house and be confident that she was somewhere inside the house and this fact is now no longer true.

Fun times at the Raker household.

Tonight we had a monumental situation. Mackenzie peed and pooped in her potty (which was officially the first baby shower gift we received)! We haven't really been working on potty training at all other than having a potty in both bathrooms and showing them to her. Tonight after dinner I asked her if she needed to go potty and she said, "yes". We went to the bathroom (I brought a puzzle just in case we were going to be there a while), and she peed and then pooped. I celebrated with her, showed it to her, and flushed it. Woohoo! We just found a new after-dinner ritual.