Spicy juice!

I wrote about Phoebe having many, many potty accidents the first little while after coming home from our trip. I began to worry she might be developing a UTI, but it was also a long weekend and I didn't want to have to take her into urgent care or anything (especially since she didn't have a fever or anything), so we just gave her plenty of baths, plied her with as much cranberry juice as she would take (which wasn't much, honestly), and encouraged her to void her bladder frequently. 

By the time Tuesday rolled around she was back to her regular potty-going self and has been great ever since. She takes herself potty frequently or will ask for assistance. It's such a relief! 

(Like most people on the planet, I don't actually enjoy potty training tiny humans (though I do enjoy the after math because, like most people on the planet, I don't actually enjoy changing diapers either)). 

The cranberry juice we got for her was 100% cranberry juice, which is as tart as can be! She was excited about the word "juice" because she'd had some apple juice on the plane (and that was yummy) and because one of her favourite books has the line "a moose and a goose together have juice." 

Juice is a pretty wonderful concept! 

We don't have it very often at our house, and—wow!—what a sweet treat it is!

But cranberry juice, as it turns out, was not delectable. The rest of us enjoyed drinking it, but Phoebe did not. I even watered it down for her and mixed in some honey...at which point I told Andrew he probably could have gotten one of the cranberry cocktails for her (the kind that are like 95% apple juice, 5% cranberry). 

In spite of the less delicious cranberry juice, the concept of "juice" was quite a romantic idea in her little toddler mind. 

*****

Andrew made pickled red onions last week. He doesn't like them, but the rest of us love them and have them on sandwiches and tacos and salads and things. The colouring from the onions turns the vinegar a beautiful pink colour.

We finished the jar up on Tuesday evening and Benjamin asked if he could drink the "juice."

We told him to go for it (knowing he wouldn't get too far) and Phoebe decided that she needed juice, too. 

"Oose! Oose! Oose!" she cried.

"Oh, you won't like that juice," I told her. 

"Oose! Oose!"

"It's not yummy juice."

"Ooose! Oose!"

"You want to try it anyway?"

"Yeah."

"Fine," I said, pouring a little taste of the pink vinegar into a cup for her. 

She drank it and shuddered. 

"Whoa-ho-ho!" she exclaimed, gasping for air. "Ispicy oose! SPICY!"

"It's spicy juice?" I repeated. "Yeah. It's spicy all right."

"More?" she said, sliding her cup over to me. 

"You want more spicy juice?!" I asked in disbelief. 

"Yeah," she said eagerly. "More!"

So I gave her another little taste, the crazy baby. Benjamin, meanwhile, drank a cupful himself (which satisfied his vinegar-drinking urges). 

*****

This has nothing to do with Phoebe, but instead is a story about her cousin Piper who once accompanied her mother (my sister Abra) to a prenatal appointment. As is standard for prenatal appointments, my sister had to prepare a urine sample for the nurses to test. I'm not really sure how the clinic was set up because every clinic I've gone to has either had the bathrooms adjacent to the lab, so you can put your samples in the little cubby between the two rooms and the nurse/technician doing the lab work can retrieve it from their side or I've been given a cup with a screw on lid to take into the restroom and then return to the lab myself. At one place we actually took the test strips with us into the bathroom and dipped them in the urine ourselves and reported the results to the nurse (or gave her the test strips? I can't quite remember). All I know is that the following story could never have happened at any of the clinics I visited. 

But she was visiting a clinic in a small town and...I don't know quite how it was set up to deal with urine samples. 

At any rate, she was in the room with the doctor, the urine sample, and...Piper.

Was Deklan there? I'm not sure. They were both so little when Malachi was born. But perhaps Deklan was at preschool or daycare and Piper, obviously, was not because she was with my sister at the clinic. 

So, the doctor was carrying out his measurements and so forth and Piper was supposed to just be waiting quietly on her chair. 

Instead they heard her exclaimed, "This juice is spicy!"

My sister and the doctor turned their attention to Piper and saw her holding the empty urine sample cup...which she had just guzzled. 

So I found it extra funny when Phoebe declared her juice was spicy, because it made me think of Piper.