Today's lessons

1. Maybe Mabel actually is ready to potty train.
2. The hardest part of potty training might be just staying at home all morning. Especially because staying at home means she wants to nurse the whole time. 
3. Bringing the big green potty down to the kitchen from the upstairs bathroom might prove to be enough of a novelty to entice her to use it, even though the downstairs toilet is just a few feet away.
4. Just because she stays dry from 9.00 to 12.30 and goes twice in the potty on command, you should not assume that it's done and dusted. (I didn't. But it would have been nice.)
5. When you take off the (dry!) naptime pull-up, she will have a big wee to do. 
6. Even if she doesn't want to waste good playtime doing it on the potty.
7. And so she will wet the next pair of pants.
8. And the next.
9. Training child #2 is different from training child #1, because even inside the house there are now distractions. You must enlist the help of child #1 to listen to stories in the bathroom so that child #2 will stay still.
10. If you have a coupon for 20% off any full-price item at REI (big outdoor/sports store near us), you will discover there's something else you need to buy there the day after the coupon expires and the sale ends.
11. Any amount of money coming in, no matter how tiny, can be mentally allocated in total to more than one expense going out. For instance, if you are so proactive as to sell Monkey's last-year's sandals for $15, nominally towards his new sandals which were bought on Saturday, you cannot then also spend the money on a new sunhat for Mabel at REI. Except that you can, because you just did.
12. Children are amazingly adaptable. For instance, when Mabel accidentally ducks Monkey totally underwater by stepping on him as she climbs out of the pool, he might actually, after the initial shock, claim to have quite enjoyed it.
13. When making ratatouille, or anything resembling it, you always need the bigger pot. Starting out with anything less is just a waste of good olive oil.
14. If, by fiddling with the air vents, you somehow manage to make Mabel's room a little less like a sauna, your own bedroom will take up the slack and jump 10 degrees or so.
15. Swimming increases pre-bedtime craziness and resultant parental shouting by 50%; decreases time taken to actually get Mabel to sleep by at least 80%. Overall win.