A few Saturday's ago we went to Home Depot to get some stuff. When we were walking around the store, Sydney kept asking what all that noise was. Naturally, I came up with some random explanation about the workers hammering in the back. Imagine my surprise when we turned a corner and found a whole bunch of kids were actually the ones hammering! Of course, Sydney wanted in on the action, so even though the kid's workshop said it was for ages 5 and up... it seemed simple enough and there were other younger kids participating. Sydney and Andy got to make a pencil box for her colored pencils while I played camera person and cheerleader. It was Sydney's first experience with nails, hammering, paint, and glue! She had a ton of fun. I think most Home Depot's hold kid's workshops for free in the morning the first Saturday of every month. We have it written on our calendar and definitely plan on going every month. It's so fun to see her start to make her own creations and be proud of them :). Plus the cute little apron they gave her to bring each time she comes is adorable and really handy at home as well!
I also have to point out Sydney's oufit. Making her wear matching clothes is not one of the battles we have chosen to fight, so most days she'll agree with what we choose, but when she doesn't we just let it go unless we have to go to church. This particular day she has on a pink turtleneck with jeans, no shoes, and a princess dress over it all to top it off. What a stylin' little girl :D
The berries are ripe in Juneau, so last week we took an adventure to seek them out on a nice day. We hiked up Blueberry Trail and saw all different kinds of berries almost immediately. We were sad we hadn't gotten a berry book yet, because we didn't know which ones were safe to eat. It turns out that almost all of them are... we found out when we got home. Anyway, the trail is about a mile and half long up to the top of a ridge where about forty years ago they cut down a bunch of trees to make the approach path to the airport clearer. The ensuing meadow made a great place for berry growth! Andy carried Sydney in a hiking backpack since it was a decent incline all the way up, and I straggled along :). The blueberries here are quite different from the ones in Oregon. They are almost black when they are fully ripe and taste a lot more like blackberries. Andy and Sydney love sour, so they were fans... I only ate a few and picked the rest for them. We had fun! It was a double win since once we were at the top, we were literally right below the approach path to the airport and got to see lots of helicopters and planes fly right over the top of us. I'm pretty sure we'll be venturing back to this trail again sometime, even if not this year, to pick some of the other kinds of berries we passed up.
This post is long overdue... but I thought I better document Sydney's progress so far. At the beginning of June, Andy and I picked a weekend to have a potty party and potty "boot camp." We took Sydney out Friday night to pick out her new panties, decorations for her cake, and I secretly got some helium balloons (her favorite). The next day we had a party, ate cake, did "The Potty Dance," and tried on her new panties. We stayed home all weekend reminding her every 30 min to an hour to go potty. The first day we had mostly accidents but by Monday we were accident free! We were really impressed with her fast progress because on Tuesday and Wednesday we had no accidents either. Dare to be optimistic :). Anyway, I think Tuesday was our first day out of the house and even on our adventures she still did amazingly well at holding it until we could get her to a potty. For about three weeks we were mostly accident free. Then I think the novelty of it all wore off, and we've been really up and down since then. Until about two weeks ago, we were still wearing panties during the awake hours of the day and having mostly success, but Sydney then decided she hated any reminders to go potty and if you reminded her there was no hope in getting her to go at all. So after trying lots of different things this is where we stand... in light of her previous success, we know she can and knows how to hold it and use the potty consistently, but simply doesn't want to. We opted for a more relaxed approach now. Through experimentation we've found that she is less resistant and stressed about the whole process if we keep her in training pants all the time. It seemed like having accidents really made her feel down and after a couple of accidents in a row, she was really stressed about the idea of going potty at all. So now we are just putting her in training pants on a regular basis. We still remind her about four-ish times a day to go potty and most of the time she does! We have a potty chart where she gets to put stickers for her success and when its full we get to go play at McDonalds because she loves it. It usually takes her about a week to ten days to fill her 30 square chart. Most days she'll tell us at least once before she has to go potty but still goes in her training pants pretty regularly other times of the day. At this point, we feel like since she knows how, we just need to keep the idea positive by not pushing it or making her feel bad by completely giving up :). We figure she knows how and when she wants to she will. Hopefully over time she tell us more and more often before she goes in her training pants, and we wont have to consistently remind her every few hours. In the meantime... she's not even two and half and so we've got time. I think the moral of the story is: although she had all the signs of potty training readiness, she didn't have a very strong desire. She was excited by the novelties of the potty chair, potty books, and the panties but didn't really care being wet or poopy even for extended periods of time... she still doesn't. For our future children, we will probably wait until they have that very strong desire to use the potty so they don't get their pants dirty, not just for the fancy new underwear or stickers they get. Overall, I don't regret starting the training process as early as we did; I just realize that it will take a little longer than we had hoped, and we're gonna go Sydney pace for now. Two big successes however in the past few weeks: She will know use about any potty anywhere with our travel potty seat, which she wouldn't do before. She has become a pro at going potty in the wilderness on leaves, rocks, sand, or wherever which was a big deal here since at first sometimes Andy had to sprint her back down a trail to the potty seat in the car ;) In fact, going outside is one of her favorites!
As summer draws to a close in Juneau, there are still some things yet to see! My dad asked me on the phone last Thursday if I had seen any bears yet... I hadn't, Andy had. Anyway, he said there really couldn't be as many bears here as people said there were if I hadn't seen one yet. I wondered if he was right, so the next day Andy and I decided to put that to the test. For the past few weeks the pink, then chum, and now sockeye salmon began running up every river in the area to spawn. You can spot a running river from a ways away because there is almost always a big flock of birds surrounding the area eating the carcasses of the fish that didn't make it. We went and looked at our first run at Salmon Creek and the DIPAC fish hatchery about a week ago.
The DIPAC hatchery has a fish ladder for the fish to return to a climb when they spawn. One area of the ladder has this tank window. Apparently after the fish reach the top of the ladder the separate them by species and put them somewhere else to spawn and then release those who live... I'm not really sure how this whole process works. You can see the ladder below. There are hundreds of salmon in each section at this time of year.
Anyway, this time we decided to venture further upstream on a river to where the bears would be feeding on the salmon who made the journey to spawning grounds:). Near Mendenhall Glacier about a five minute drive from home, there are some bear viewing platforms over Steep Creek, so we started there. Apparently there are so many bears in this area that most of Steep Creek Trail is closed now and fenced off to prevent to many human/bear encounters, but the raised platform trail is still open since you are suspended above the creek and feeding area on this part of the trail. It took us about 10 minutes to find this little guy with the help of a very excited tourist.
We watched him climb around the tree for about 15 minutes and then got tired of waiting to see if his mom would be back soon. We then ventured on another nearby trail called the Trail of Time. Towards the end of the trail, we came across another black bear.
I was getting rather nervous when the bear looked at Andy and Sydney and started walking toward them. Happily he ended up going under the bridge instead of onto it where we were standing :). It was awesome to see them. As the video shows, the bear was trying to sneak up on the sockeye salmon in the river but he missed. He kept walking down the river jumping to get salmon, but I don't think we saw him catch any. Both bears were black bears based on their size even though their coats are more of a cinnamon color. We only spent about 45 minutes in our whole endeavor and I have to admit, although exhilarating and exciting, being in the areas where the bear population is so concentrated right now definitely makes me nervous. I was happy to have seen them but ready to be out of their way. Plus we can't let Sydney out of the stroller and allow her to run freely on trails like we usually do right now... and you can imagine how she feels about that. Anyway, the moral of the story is.... there are a lot of bears and salmon to had in the area these day, and if we go looking for the bears, I'm now pretty sure we'll could find them.
