"My new kitchen!"

No, I do not have a new kitchen (nor will I probably ever have one). But Hannah has one, and she often exclaims "my new kitchen!" while playing with it.  After all the shopping we did for Hannah for her birthday and for Christmas, the only thing we didn't get her that I thought she would really love was a toy kitchen. But I couldn't justify it because of the price and because of our lack of space in our condo. But after the holidays, while I was trying to figure out what to get Hannah with her gifted birthday and Christmas money, I ran across the perfect kitchen for her. Perfect price. Perfect look. Perfect size. And boy does Hannah LOVE it.

I think it's adorable, and it only took me almost 3 hours to assemble (I'd read online that it would take 1-3 hours--I'm slow).

 

 It's the perfect size for Hannah and for our condo. And all of the toy food she got for Christmas fits inside it perfectly.

Hannah loves to make us food and to wash her hands. "I washing my hands." "I making _____." Super cute!

Bonus pic of Hannah half-dressed and mesmerized by American Idol. That's my girl! Notice she has a spoon from her kitchen in her hand.

And now the potty-training update some of you have asked for:

It's going about how I thought it would. Hannah uses the potty when she wants to (which varies depending on the day and her mood but averages to be about 75% of the time). We don't push her when she doesn't want to because we certainly don't want a repeat of her refusing-to-walk stubbornness. :) I actually think she's doing quite well, but I don't have any previous experience to compare it to. After only 3 days of training, she pooped in the potty. Yay! And she has repeated that since then. We put her in underwear instead of pull-ups for the first time last Saturday. Unfortunately, Scott and I hadn't thought that through. It was also Hannah's first day with her new kitchen, so she was too busy playing with her kitchen to give a rip that her pants were all wet. Silly us. We also haven't been able to be as consistent as we had hoped. Sunday and Monday were complete washes due to church, a trip to Salem, and then coming home to a broken furnace on Sunday night. And then it was still freezing all Monday morning, so I was not about to have Hannah sitting half-naked on the potty all day. After the repair guy finally left and Hannah woke up from her nap, we visited my grandma, and no potty-training had occurred for 2 days. Oh well. Hannah actually has done pretty well the rest of this week. She even only had 2 accidents yesterday. Today has been another setback thanks to our furnace breaking down again last night (lame). But now it is fixed, and potty-training shall resume.

So that's our potty-training in a nutshell. I didn't have super high expectations going into it. I'm in it for the long-haul, just hoping she gets it down in time for the arrival of the baby. I'm just glad that when Hannah's in a good mood, she still really loves reading books on the potty, washing her hands afterward, and getting a little M&M afterward. We actually have a lot of fun with it.


A funny side note. Some good has come from having our furnace break down twice within a few days during one of the coldest snaps in Utah's recent history--Hannah has picked up on saying "ridiculous." And it's ridiculously adorable. :)