Hilarity ensues...

Ellie has had a cold since last Friday, but Monday night she was awake (or at least I was) with her coughing all night. Tuesday when she woke up her little voice was hoarse and she had the sick look in her eyes, so I decided to work from home and keep her home from daycare. Around 10am we took a walk with Daisy, and when we were about 1.5miles from the house she says she has to go potty. Well - what a dilemma since we are in a residential area and there are no gas stations, convenience stores, not even a house under construction where there might be a porta-potty (gross I know, but it would have worked). Here I have a potty trained almost 3 year old who will be devastated if she has to go potty in her pants. So...Ellie got to learn how to pop a squat. It was hilarious. I got her out of the stroller at this dirt lot area where we could hide behind bushes and told her there were no potties around and so she would have to pee-pee on the dirt like Daisy. Amazingly she did it without question. I think she might have even liked it. Her namesake - her great-grandma Joanne would be appalled - ladies don't do things like that!
Wait - there's more! Since Ellie hasn't been feeling well, we let her sleep in this morning until after I got out of the shower. Brant had already headed off to work, so I went into her bedroom to get her up. Normally when I get out of the shower I put my jammie pants back on, slippers and a bra. This is so I don't get too hot when I'm blow drying my hair, and quite frankly I usually haven't decided what I'm going to wear by then. So I go into Ellie's room dressed like that and while she's going potty and arguing with me about taking off her pull up (not nighttime potty trained yet) I tell her I'm going to go out back and feed Daisy. No problem - completely fenced in yard so it doesn't matter that I'm not wearing a shirt. When I came back to the screen I realized that either Ellie had locked the screen, or it had magically locked itself. Either way, she couldn't unlock the screen, so we were going to have to go to plan B to get me back inside. I know Ellie can open the lock on the front screen, so I told her to go do that. We have a door knob lock on the door so she can't turn the knob but I can open it from the front if she unlocks it. I ran through the garage and to the front door, in the meantime Daisy escaped and ran to the next door neighbor's house, but I ignored that while checking to see if Ellie had unlocked the screen. She hadn't. So I rang the doorbell a bunch of times and still she didn't open the door. Of course she didn't - we have told her not to! Why did she choose this moment to finally listen to us? I corral Daisy back into the back yard and go back to the screen in the back. Ellie is standing there and says "Look Mommy! I got dressed and put my shoes on the right feet! And someone is out there ringing the doorbell. There's someone at our front door Momma!" I told her it was me and I needed her to go unlocked the front screen - hadn't we just had this conversation? This time I ran around to the front door again and there were neighbors out front getting in their cars, so I just looked down and prayed that Ellie would listen and open the screen door. She did, I went inside, and we resumed getting ready for the day. To me the funniest part of the story is that she was so intent on getting herself dressed and her shoes on that she didn't go to the front door until afterwards. The poor girl - she got so many directions and was just trying to do what she was told...