The Best Brush Ever!

Please excuse the grodie looking picture, but it was the biggest I could find online. This brush has changed my relationship with Sassafrass forever. It used to be that from a very young age she would cry or scream or make a huge fuss when I would do her hair. I had to bribe her with candy and/or cartoons to make her hair look nice. She is 7 now and was still crying when I would brush her hair. I have really curly tangled hair myself and a tender head and so I would brush her hair really gently while holding it so it wouldn't hurt so much, but still the crying and carrying on and accusations that I was hurting her on purpose. Since I got this brush, she has asked me to brush her hair because it feels nice. There is no more screaming or crying. And I can use it myself on my tangled curls and it brushes through without me crying as well. So if you have daughters (or sons) with long hair and hairdo time is an ordeal, I highly recommend this brush. It has changed my life (at least regarding hair).

Nice holidays

This year for the first time since 7 years, our Christmas-New year holidays were great. Because of what? Because out of 6 persons in our family, nobody has been sick over this 2 week-period of visiting the grand-parents, playing with the cousins, going out here and there.
What a change! Good nights of sleep, nice evenings of talking to each other while eating great food, glorious days out with the family and relatives walking on frozen lakes, playing with snow, and giving gifts to each others at Christmas and looking at the kids so happy.
I so appreciated not being too tired, too exhausted or too sick to enjoy myself!

Dummy Dilemma

Headbanger, who will be two in a few months, is hooked on her dummy/pacifier, even though she only gets it when she sleeps. I would be happy for this to continue, but she often wakes up during naps and in the middle of the night and can't find the beloved pacifier. She then starts to cry, waking everyone up, and continues to cry until I find it and give it back to her. I've used pacifier tethers, clips and strings, but she knows how to remove them and usually does.

I would really like to get rid of the pacifier but I'm dreading all of the crying that will happen before she learns to live without it. I have a goal of throwing the last one in the bin by the end of the month, but I doubt that I'll have to resolve to do it.

So I need to hear your dummy tips and experiences. Are there ways to make this process less painful? Should we just throw it out and make her go cold turkey?

Potty Kitty

Before becoming a parent, I often imagined parental work as changing lots and lots of diapers. Now that I changed lots and lots of diapers for two children, its really not so bad. In fact, its probably one of the easier things that I do. Still, it would be nice to cut down on some of that work and not to have to buy so many diapers. Headbanger has been showing signs of potty training preparedness for some time, and yesterday I finally bought our first potty.

My goal for today is to get her to sit on the potty and she got there, though I started out a little too fast. I got her pajamas and diaper off and sat her on the potty and she started to freak out. She was clearly bothered by the fact that I was asking her to sit on a hole. Not wanting to traumatize her forever, I got her dressed and we left the bathroom. Since then, she has returned to the potty and started to play with it and gradually they are becoming friends. Kitty, her favorite toy, has even spent some time in the hole and has shown Headbanger that its not so bad. After that, Headbanger worked up the courage to sit on the potty, which she has now done a number of times, though fully clothed.

So for those of you who have done this before or observed the process - how do I proceed?