After about three months of refusing a bath and taking only showers, I finally convinced Anna to sit in the bathtub and take a bath this week. I finally spotted a bottle of unscented Mr. Bubbles at Megamart and that was the trick. The whole time she was in the tub she would look up at me and smile, "you're taking a bath!" as if she had never taken one before in her life. I still don't know what the problem was with taking a bath before but now she's getting into it a little and is requesting a bath instead of a shower (the shower was actually quicker, but I think the bath is more relaxing for her).
Anna has peed on the potty three times and pooped twice now. We're still not "officially" training because our successes have been more about my timing than her desire to not go in her diaper. She also refuses to believe that she can pull her pants & diaper up and down (she did do it once before shortly after we arrived in Doha). This is probably something that Nana and Grandma will have to convince her to do because she obviously doesn't believe me!
She is memorizing more and more of her books but we luckily still have quite a stash of books she hasn't read yet. Her current favorites are Kitten's First Full Moon, Mickey Mouse Heads for the Sky, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Cat in the Hat, The Best First Book Ever, What Do You Do with a Tail Like This?, and The Tiger Who Came to Tea along with a bunch of other random titles.
One note on Anna's speech is that her pronunciation is off on words that start with s and are followed by a consonant. She basically just drops the s on those words: tairs (stairs), poothie (smoothie), top (stop), etc. If the s is followed by a vowel though she says the word clearly. One of my favorite words to hear her say is "complicated" just because she says it so well (it's in Mickey Mouse Heads for the Sky.
Anna still seems really into music and is singing new songs all the time (this morning it was Yankee Doodle, last week I heard her singing one of the songs from music class). We are going to continue the music classes for the next session to have that bit of stability when Baby Sister arrives. I asked her if she wanted to go to the beach or to church this morning and she chose church so we could sing church songs (she does hold out hope that we'll sing Mambo Italiano at church though!).
