Miss Independent

Jocelyn is going through a stage of insisting on doing absolutely everything herself.  She's always been very independent, but this stage is actually cracking me up.  :)  Most of the time I love it, it just makes me very proud and glad to see her wanting to learn everything and try it herself.  But with this comes a LOT of anxiety!! lol  Not to mention everything now takes 10000x longer with little helping hands =)  I wouldn't let her miss the chance to help or learn though, no matter how much it slows me down.

So in the last week she has:

• Made a PB sandwich completely on her own (she spread the pb on bread and insisted on eating it on an open slice) twice.
• Basically gave herself a bath.  She wouldn't let me scrub her clean, she took the washcloth and scrubbed herself.  She actually did a really good job.  I still scrubbed one side of her body while she was busy scrubbing the other side, but other than her little tushy and lower back my extra hand was really unnecessary!  
• She now has figured out she can pick up the step stool and carry it around the kitchen to get ANYTHING she wants.  Mostly this means pulling her cup out (which is at her level), dragging the stool to the fridge and getting herself some water.  
• She also insists on helping me clean her potty chair every time she's finished doing her business.  This part caused a little melt down, because well, the idea of her sloshing around the ickiness is a little much for me.  I've finally gotten her to the point that she's fine with us both carrying it to the big potty together and climbs up to the sink and help momma scrub it.
• In gymnastics, she  refuses to let anyone help her on anything so she does the balance beams all by herself.  The teacher keeps saying how impressed she is, which of course makes me feel great! :)

Absolutely anything I do guarantees a pair of tiny hands are in on the action. lol

Family not on facebook, I don't know if Mike told you guys, but Jocelyn came down with hand, foot, mouth disease AGAIN.  Apparently last year there was a new strain of the virus going around and it's a flippin epidemic!  The normal strain is CVA16and I guess this new strain is CVA6.  Since Jocelyn has already had this once, I assumed she would be immune, without realizing there was a new strain of this virus going around.  It's a much tougher form of this virus and starts out the same with high fever and sores in mouth.  After that, instead of just little goosebump size red spots, she broke out into a blistery rash.  It looks just like chicken pox!  Fun times.  Anyways, I ended up with it too and we're both on the mend right now.  Fortunately she seems to be healing quickly and has been in pretty good spirits.  She has had a few melt downs and been cranky a couple of times, but I've been surprised she wasn't miserable through all of this.  As for me, while I'm a bit itchy and sleep deprived, I actually feel completely fine.  Hopefully this is for real our last round of this nasty virus.

So Mike went to a wedding in California this weekend, it is adults only, so I told him just to go since we couldn't take Jocelyn.  I was actually planning on taking her to Elko to surprise a friend at her birthday party, but obviously with our highly contagious condition, that all fell through :)

It feels a little weird sending Mike off to a wedding by himself.  I love weddings!!!