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Sorry I’ve been slacking. Only excuse is I don’t have much to say…
Took Little Miss to the grocery store tonight, where she turned into poltergeist child and started throwing a fit, which included chucking a can of green beans out of the cart and screaming at me, “NO I WILL NOT STOP YELLING AT YOU.” I went through the store doing my best to ignore her tantrum and the looks of bystandards, and when we got in line at the checkout as a last resort, I asked her, “do you need a hug?”
She did. Tantrum over. Had no idea this one would be so easy to stop.
(And to you people out there without children: if someone gets in the line behind you to pay at the grocery store with a child having a melt down, PLEASE let them go ahead of you. I wanted to strangle the lady ahead of me that didn’t show that courtesy, and then held up the express lane for 5 minutes with a price check.)
Here are the pics I promised:
Little Miss started at her new in-home daycare yesterday. Being a typical Mom, I was overthinking things, and actually didn’t sleep very well on Sunday night, as I was debating if I had made the right choice, and was wondering how the transition would go.
I cleared my calendar at work in the morning so that I could stay with her until she was comfortable. I didn’t want anything to be rushed in the transition. We walked in, and Little Miss was soon giving two hugs to Mary Poppins (code name for our daycare provider). I chatted with Mary P. for a few minutes, and then Little Miss looks up at me and says, “go to work, Mom.”
It really took me by surprise. Part of me feels like my baby is growing up. Maybe it’s a sign that she’ll like this place better. And of course, there was also the maternal guilt that kicked in that she is so used to me leaving her during the day that it is expected.
The day went well at Mary Poppins’ house. They played with play dough, and Mary’s 6 year old daughter took Little Miss under her wing, and played dress up with her and rode bikes with her. I think this is going to go well.
What isn’t going well is swimming lessons. After two months of participating in weekly grossly over-priced swim lessons, Little Miss has made nary any progress. At most lessons, she screams and cries, and I’ve begun to think I’m doing more harm than good at this point. Last night, the second I told her we were going to swim lessons, she burst out in tears, and I had to bribe her to even go. I filled out our withdrawl form last night, but unfortunately, we’re still obligated for one more month (2 lessons of which we’ll be out of town, and no make up lessons are allowed).
If only I had the capital to open up my own lessons business… These people have such a hold on the market that some competition would do them good.
I think we’ll take up swim lessons again in the Spring. I’m hoping that by then, Little Miss will decide swimming can be fun and will want to do it.
As for the weekend, we had JB’s parents in town, and Little Miss just thrived under her doting grandparents’ attention. We ate some great food (mmm… sushi), and JB and I even got a quick date to the Chocolate Bar, where I paired port wine with a truffle (YUM).
We’re starting to get snow in the mountains, so I’m hoping to be skiing soon!
Oh, that reminds me… I went to the UNR Ski Swap this weekend and got Little Miss skis, boots and a helmet. It’s amazing how much they can charge for used, crappy equipment. Anyway, when I tried to put a helmet on her head, she started screaming, “I DON’T WANT TO GO SKIING TODAY”, which was just lovely. JB has proclaimed that she’ll be just as miserable with skiing as she has been with swimming, but I have hope that it will be better… I really don’t have plans to do much skiing with her this year, I just want to introduce her to it, and have something to do with her when we’re switching off skiing.
The words of my sister in law have been echoing in my head… She said that Little Miss is an individual, and I have to respect that (or words to that effect). Perhaps this is God’s way of telling me not to shove my favorite activities down her throat and let her choose what she will excel in. That’s fine and all, but she’ll definitely have to do her time at the ski slopes and at the lakes in the summers, as that is just what we do as a family!
Enough rambling. More later.
I think my life is on fast forward right now, and my blog is suffering. I have tons of pics to post from Pumpkin Patches (did 3 visits) to Halloween, but that will have to wait until I return from Seattle, where I sit right now.
I’m meeting in a building in downtown Bellevue, on the 11th floor with an amazing view of Belleview and Seattle. If you could just get rid of the layer of clouds, I’d love it here.
Halloween was full of princess fun. Little Miss picked out a “snow princess” costume, which I told her was Cinderella, as the Cinderella Disney costumes were overpriced pieces of you know what. Anyway, she spent the day with her cousins, one of which was also Cinderella (Little Miss had a blue dress, my niece had a pink one). The parade of princesses was adorable. I took the two Cinderellas (pronounced Cinderwella by Little Miss) to my work for cubicle trick or treating, and we joined my sister in law and both nieces for trick or treating in their neighborhood. The girls were thrilled with all of the candy.
We pretty much avoided our neighborhood until 8pm, as it is out of control on Halloween… All of the streets in our neighborhood were lined with cars on both sides from people driving into our area, and the streets were so crowded with rowdy teenagers that you can hardly drive. Oh, and they are RUDE. I put a bowl full of candy on the porch around 8, and it was gone within 5 min. No one seemed to want the snack packs of pretzels I put out. Anyway, thankfully no vandalism to our house due to our absence for most of the night.
Back to my business trip, I have two long days of meetings, but the reward is staying in a super nice hotel (Westin — love that Heavenly Bed) and dinner tonight at a wine bar and we’re doing a cooking class at the Culinary Institute tomorrow night for our dinner. Yum.
So a few of you know that I had two openings come up on daycare lists within the past week. When the first one came up — a list I had been on for two years — I was having a lot of qualms making the decision. I literally lost sleep, as I could weigh the pros and cons of each, and it seemed to be a wash, but with daycare lists being so crazy, it is rare that you actually have a choice.
And then, to my surprise, I got a call from an in-home care provider yesterday, one I had been on her list for six months. I have always been wary of in-home care providers, but the second I walked into her house yesterday, I had a sense of calm and knew this is what I’ve been looking for.
The care provider, we’ll call her Mary Poppins, as she kind of exudes that magical likability, is this adorable mid-thirties woman with bright sparkling eyes and a warming smile. She is super sharp, and I could tell that she would be much more stimulating for my daughter than the daycare workers we’ve experienced, who tend to be young girls without much direction in life. And her husband is a sherrif…
The house was immaculent, with a nice backyard, where the kids can play a majority of the day, and experience all of the weather — from rain to snow, to pool/splash days in the backyard. Our current facility limits outdoor time if the weather seems at all imclement, and I always felt bad for Little Miss being trapped inside for weeks at a time in the winter. So after a week of laboring over a decision between two daycares, I made the decision within minutes that this would be Little Miss’s new place during the week. And I think she agrees, as she said, “I’m never going back to *daycare name* again” as we drove away.
Back to Mary Poppins, though, she is a health nut that provides all the food for the children. You don’t know how much time that will save me, and it is so nice not to have to struggle with the sugary food that is made available at my current daycare. The kids get a hot, homemade breakfast of waffles, pancakes or eggs every morning, and they’ll occasionally make cookies together… I tell you…. MARY POPPINS. The cookies are a special treat, instead of a daily regimine.
I’ll turn in my 2 week notice at our current facility today… Which doesn’t seem daunting to most of you, but it’s a pretty big decision in such a competitive market for childcare. Anyway, I’m going with my gut on this one, and my gut hasn’t steered me wrong many times.
Here are some pictures I took back in September. I tried to add captions, but evidently Slide.com doesn’t work on IE8, and the Compatibility View is disabled, so until that gets figured out, no captions for you!
And let me pull out one of my favorites from this batch… Here is the next Cover Girl, modeling Mommy’s mascara!
Not just for lashes anymore!
And without further ado, here are the rest of the pics, including my nieces’ birthday party and our last trip to Lake Tahoe:
I wrote this yesterday at about noon:
I feel like my weekend was robbed from me. It started out nice and calm. JB was on business in Las Vegas on Friday, so Little Miss and I had some quality quiet time, shared a large dinner, and after I put her to bed, I relaxed by watching TV and reading, staying up until 11:30.
Oh, how I wish I hadn’t done that… At 2am, I’m awoken by Little Miss crying. I go to her room, and she’s standing with her hand out to me saying, “what’s this?” I reach out and feel slime, then discovering that she had thrown up all over herself and her bed.
Hello, stomach flu.
I spent the rest of the night trying to keep up with the cleaning of the child and the linens as she continued to get sick. It was truly miserable. When things finally settled down around 4am, the poor girl couldn’t sleep, and wanted to wander around the room aimlessly…
That was where the post ended. And then about 20 minutes later, I started feeling sick. Hello again, stomach flu! Just when I thought I had gotten off scott free, fate kicks in to remind me who is boss. Am at home today nursing myself back to health. But hey — I lost 6 pounds in one day!
Said by Little Miss tonight as I was rocking her before bed:
“You’re my best friend.”
*sniff* It doesn’t get any better than that. It almost made all of the whining and tantrums she dealt out this evening erase from my memory. Almost…
Said last night, after 3 successful poops in the potty:
“I poop on my leg.”
So as there has been significant improvement, we’re still learning!
Here is yet another quote from my 2.5 year old that I don’t want to hear again:
“I poop on my foot!”
I had no idea poop on the potty was such a challenging feat.
Ah, it’s Monday again. As you can tell from the title of this post, we’re back in the groove with potty training. Things seemed to click for Little Miss while we were camping last weekend (much thanks to her older cousin setting the example), so I sent her to daycare last Monday in underwear… When I picked her up, she was in the same clothes — no accidents!
It was a huge breakthrough, as she has the pee thing down pat. The poop thing, well that continues to elude her. As an example, yesterday we went to Lake Tahoe with my brother and his family. I’d be lounging on the beach relaxing when Little Miss would announce, “I poop on the potty!” So, I’d pretend to be excited, would get up, and walk the 300 yards (of sand, mind you), I’d strip down her swimsuit, put her on the toilet, and nothing would happen… So then I’d get her dressed, walk her back to the beach, would sit down to relax, and then she’d announce, “I poop on the potty!”
And the whole process would repeat. I swear we did this five times at the beach, and the last time, I put her in a diaper, as I was sick of this game. When we got home, she announced again, “I poop on the potty”, so we went to the potty, took off the diaper… And nothing happened… I then tried to put a diaper back on her (because she’d been talking about poop for 2 hours, I knew it was coming), but she ran from me screaming “no diaper”, and she ran up the stairs. Not two minutes later, she proclaims, “I poop”, and a huge turd dropped down onto my stairs.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrggh. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about poop this much on my blog, but well, I thought my readers would get a good laugh out of my predicament.
Anyway, we had a lovely date night on Friday, including all you can eat sushi (and I ATE), and then we went to the KT Tunstall concert. KT rocked the house, and JB and I didn’t even bother finding our seats, as we found space at the back with a much better view, and we danced the whole time. I especially loved hearing the song that makes me think of Little Miss, Suddenly I See.
Have a great week!
It was pure bliss to be reunited with my girl when she woke up this morning. While she was eating breakfast, she turned to me and said, “Mommy, you had to go see attle!”
It was too cute.
Got home last night at 10:30, and am a walking zombie today. Luckily, there are fun plans for the weekend to do a belated celebration of JB’s birthday!
Little Miss has started to repeat a phrase to us that you can tell means a lot to her, but nothing to us… “Lucky Boom Boom”.
Doesn’t that sound almost a bit dirty to you?!
This weekend, we stopped by JB’s company picnic, and she kept going up to his boss saying “Lucky Boom Boom”. He’d turn to us and ask what she was saying, and I’d reply, “Lucky Boom Boom”. Who knows what is going through her mind.
Our maiden voyage in the pop up camper went really well. We even managed to get it set up in the pitch dark on Friday, and I really enjoyed having more substantial dwellings than a tent.
We camped at Donner Lake State Park, and they are REALLY strict on bear regulations. As in each site gets a bear locker, and all food and toiletries (including coolers, toothpaste, deoderant, lotion) must be in the bear locker unless actively in use. They threaten a $1000 fine if you don’t follow the regulations.
The first night we were there, I asked JB to take our toiletries out to the bear locker before we went to sleep. He said no, and said they were just trying to scare people into being compliant. I, on the other hand, was too tired to take it out myself, and threatened, “you know this could mean I’ll have a nightmare.”
And that I did. I’ve talked about my lucid dreams here before. It doesn’t happen often, but generally if I go to sleep with the slightest bit of unease (as in if JB is out of town, or I am thinking about bears), I will have a dream so lucid that it has me jumping out of bed and screaming.
Which is just what I did in the middle of the night at the campground. In my dream, a bear was trying to grab me through the canvas on the camper, and I didn’t wake up until I was all the way across the camper screaming at the top of my lungs. I somehow made it over the wobbly table and into Little Miss’s bed before waking up. I must have scared the be-Jesus out of my fellow campers. JB promptly told me to be quiet and go to bed, while Little Miss remarkably just groaned and went back to sleep.
Luckily, the second night I was better, as no bear encounters actually happened (unlike when we camp at Bullards Bar, where the bears come into the campground during the night and day).
So anyway, we had a good time, and I got in a lovely swim in Donner Lake, which makes me want to do the Donner Lake Open Water Swim again, where you swim across the lake (2.7 miles).
That’s all for today. Your assignment for the day is to go up to at least one co-worker and say, “Lucky Boom Boom” with a lot of gusto! You’ll get a great reaction!
Random thoughts to share from the past week:
- I had the worst trip yet to the grocery store with Little Miss last night. I left feeling like I had been through a battle. It started in the car, when she proclaimed she didn’t want to go to the store, and it took me 5 minutes to wrangle her out of the car, using the bribe that she could push her own little “customer in training” cart. She then decided she didn’t want to push the cart as we were in the middle of the store, but she didn’t want me to push or pull the cart, so in the middle of the aisle, I had to pick her up, push a mini cart, and go back to the front to get a real cart. I then strapped her into the full size cart, and the screaming ensued for the remainder of the trip. At one point, a clerk came up to me and asked over the screaming if I could use help finding anything. Though the gesture was appreciated, all I could do was think of was the snarky response of, “a babysitter?” Later, I thought of even better answers to her question, like “where is the hard alcohol?” or “could you hold this for me?” (referring to my screaming daughter. It took me at least an hour to recover from that trip to the store.
- This morning, Little Miss awoke while I was in the shower, so JB went up to get her dressed. When I emerged from getting ready, I heard all kinds of talking coming from her room, and I tip-toed up there to find that JB, still in his underwear (from sleeping) was reading her a Mother Goose story. It truly melted my heart. I tip-toed back downstairs so as not to interrupt them.
- My husband shaved his legs this weekend in preparation for the Donner Lake Triathlon this weekend. I can’t get used to it, but I think I like it… What I really like is that he will now have a new respect for how fast I can shave my legs, and I won’t get any more ribbing on how long my showers take when I have to shave.
- Last week, my daughter came up to me and asked, “are you poopie?” and then she proceeded to pull down my pants to check, just as I do for her. It was really funny.
So that’s about all I have to say. We had a nice 4th of July, spending time with both of my brothers and their families over the weekend. I got in some good swims and a trail run, which was enjoyable. We’ve also been enjoying the outdoor concerts available through Artown.
More later!
Last night we went to an outdoor concert to hear the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, courtesly of ArTown. The band plays New Orleans style jazz, which is truly one of my favorite types of music. It was a beautiful night (despite the smokey haze from the CA fires), and the three of us danced like there was no tomorrow. Little Miss really got into the music, clapping with gusto and proclaiming, “I like that song!” after almost every song. She was still talking about dancing at the concert when she woke up this morning. It was definitely one of those evenings I’ll think back on later in life as one of those nights when everything was just about perfect for our little family.
On a side note, I went to the brand new Whole Foods store in Reno on my way to the concert. I have to confess that I think I’m going to be spending a lot of money there. It is such a nice store, with many healthy pre-made options for dinners on those nights when I just don’t have energy to cook. I wonder if I should just start an automatic payroll deduction to the store? With it being right around the corner from my work, this could be dangerous!
Last week, I was meeting with a corporate coach, and she was teaching me this strategy around how to convince people of a point you’re trying to make. She called it the Five Whys. In essence, as you prepare for the conversation, you state to yourself the change you want to make (or the stance you’re taking), and then ask yourself, “why”. After you answer why, you ask why again, and after five times of asking yourself why to each justification, you should have gotten to the root of the issue, and should be able to present it well.
And then this week, my daughter entered the Why Stage. It happened on Tuesday. It was like a faucet being turned on full force. No Whys on Monday, countless Whys on Tuesday. So now, she’s helping me practice this strategy at home. Except instead of Five Whys, it’s more like five thousand.
The timing was uncanny.
So the potty training… It isn’t going so well. Photographic evidence:
I decided to go “cold turkey” on diapers this weekend, as Little Miss seemed to be inspired by her cousins that we visited last week in Maryland. We went to the store, and I made a big fuss about buying her big girl underwear, and then we came home, and I cleaned up pee off the floor the rest of the day. (Except for the times she peed outside and I took the hose to her).
Last night, I had to bribe her with an M&M to even sit on the potty. I left for a second, and came back to the scene above. Perhaps that’s a sign that she’s just not ready.
Just last night, I watched the show about Jenny Masche, who had sextuplets a year ago (the show was OMG! Sextuplets! on the WE Network). This morning, I see a news clip online that she just ran a marathon. Here is the article. Good golly, that is impressive! She mentions that while she was recovering from heart failure during her C-section birth that she would dream of running again. I understand how she was feeling, as I literally had dreams of running while I was recovering from my C-section. It was so strange to go from being a strong, athletic person to being someone who couldn’t sit up, stand up, or get into bed by myself. I dreamed of running and swimming butterfly.
I’ve had my eyes set on running a 10K this year. I’ve been striving for it for months, and just as I’m making great strides in my running, it seems that I manage to get sick, which knocks me back again in my training. But good golly — that woman just did a marathon after having sextuplets! I just can’t phathom the idea. Perhaps it is because I’m just not built for running, but keep pursuing it anyway.
This article about a woman injuring her eye while trying on thong underwear was the talk in the coffee room this morning at work. I have to admit I got a chuckle out of it. We pondered the logistics of hurting your eye while trying on underwear a bit, which was a conversation that HR would have cringed at, but it was entertaining at least.
I have had one rant this week… It has to due with Pot Luck lunches at daycare. Little Miss’ daycare has these at least once a month. They peeve me up front, as don’t I have enough to do now rather than cook food for a Pot Luck that I won’t even be attending? But worse, it is what the other parents bring that is driving me batty. For the past two Pot Lucks, parents have brought in donuts and croissants. I’m sure it is repeat offenders that are doing this.
The first time this happened, I was so appalled (as in my kid could injest 1 week worth of fat and sugar in one sitting — woo!) that I wrote a note to the director encouraging her to ask parents to bring in healthy options for the Pot Lucks. I mean you should see what the classroom is like on these mornings, with 12 toddlers on a sugar high. The kids are literally bouncing off the walls. And for now, I can tell them I don’t want my daughter eating those foods, but the day will soon come when she’ll feel really left out if she can’t eat what the other kids are eating.
But really, who gives an entire Krispy Kreme donut to a 2 year old?! I struggle on a daily basis to give her healthy food, and then she is surrounded all day by people who think that donuts are one of the sections on the USDA food pyramid.
I’m fine with my kid having sweets occasionally… Cake at parties, homemade cookies, etc., but can’t we draw the line? Do they have to have a ton of saturated fat as well?!
The daycare director called me after receiving my letter, and said she agreed whole heartedly that they don’t want to be pumping sugar and fat laden food into our kids… But when the next pot luck came around, nothing had changed.
Do I throw up my hands in defeat? I guess I could argue that it is only one day per month that this happens, but it goes deeper…. Like what they serve at daycare for hot lunches (fries, tater tots, etc.), and what other parents pack for their kids to eat (one kid came in with a McDonald’s sandwich for breakfast today)… Soon my child will start coveting the food that her friends eat, right? I wish I could find a daycare facility that encourages and enforces healthy eating habits. I plan to teach her why we eat healthy foods, but I think a lot of it comes down to socialization.
Anyway, I know certain members of my family will hoot and holler about this, thinking it is a funny thing for me to get riled up about, but having spent a lifetime dealing with weight issues, I vow to fight to instill healthy eating habits in my daughter so that she doesn’t have to deal with the esteem issues that come along with the extra weight. Is that such a horrible thing for a mother to do?!
Ah, the potty training has begun. Up until this week, we’ve been all talk and no action. Little Miss would sit on the potty, push it around, or even put it on her head, but nothing ever happened.
That is, until my child asked for cake on Sunday (we’ve been to a lot of birthday parties lately), and I flippantly said, “I’ll bake you a cake if you go pee on the potty.”
She lit up, and announced she wanted to go potty. Low and behold, the kid peed. I guess she just needed a little bribery.
I didn’t happen to have the fixings for cake, so the next day, we went to the store, I found one of those microwavable single serving cakes (Lord knows my diet doesn’t need a full cake around), and we mixed it up, popped it in the microwave for 45 seconds, and voila! Cake! I gave her half of the cake, saying the other half she could have when she used the potty again.
So yet again, we talked a lot about the potty this week, but there was no action until tonight. It was mayhem at our house tonight. JB wasn’t yet home from work, so I was cooking dinner when she announced she wanted to pee. I dropped everything (despite being very hungry), and stripped her down, just to see that she was screwing around on the potty. I waited about 20 minutes, and by that time not only was I starving, but I was rather annoyed, too.
I told her that I was going to eat my dinner, and she could stay in the potty and call me when she went pee.
Mistake #1.
So I went to the kitchen, and got no further than putting my dinner on a plate when I heard, “I pee on the floor.”
Oh, that can’t be good.
I go into the bathroom to find that the kid had taken the removable bowl out of the potty, put it in the sink of all places, then proceeded to sit on the potty and pee, which of course went all over the floor. I admit I was getting rather cranky at this point. It was almost 8:00 and I just wanted to eat dinner, darnit.
I went back to the kitchen to get paper towels.
Mistake #2.
I then hear a crash and crying. I come in to find that somehow, my kid has managed to fall on her back smack in the middle of the puddle of pee.
It was like the stars aligned to play a practical joke on me. Of course, at this point, she’s melting down, I’m still madly hungry, and I get to take her upstairs to clean her up, change her, and then go clean up the bathroom. JB showed up as I was cleaning the bathroom, and it wasn’t until I started recounting the story to him that I realized how funny it really was.
So the kid got to have her cake and got to eat it, too. I figured technically she did go on the potty, despite the chaos. I really didn’t want to bribe her for potty training, but it does appear to be a strategy that works.
I had a great Mother’s Day and weekend. On Saturday, JB and I went skiing at Squaw for one last trist on the slopes (this time I swear it’s the last of the season!). I applied sunscreen 4 times that day, and we had a lovely time and I didn’t burn myself silly like my last Spring skiing outing.
On Sunday, we did a picinic on the beach of Lake Tahoe with our family and JB’s parents. There was a cool wind, but Little Miss had fun collecting rocks and chasing birds. I have loads of good pics to post later on, but here is one to tide you over.
My present from Little Miss yesterday was a full 20 minutes of cuddling after she woke up from her nap. It was truly priceless!
And to my Mom, sorry I didn’t get to spend Mom’s Day with you, but you were on my mind!
Ack. Sorry for my lack of posting. After saying 2 weeks ago how our family had been remarkably healthy this winter, we all three got colds. Little Miss is healed (for now, knocking LOUDLY on wood), but JB and I are having coughing deuls that have relegated us to separate beds since it’s the only way we don’t keep each other awake.
I took Little Miss to the dentist this morning for the first time. Thankfully, her pearly whites are looking good, and she was an angel for the hygenist and the dentist (except for constantly wanting to pick her nose and eat the boogers during the exam). She LOVED the dentist, and kept asking to see her again after we left. I loved the dentist, too, who said to Little Miss after eating a booger, ”mmm, they taste salty, don’t they?”
When I picked up Little Miss the other day from daycare, she said happily, “I eat poo!”
I turned to her care taker and said, “she ate POO?!”
“Oh, no, she said. She ate GLUE. She really likes to eat the glue when we do art projects.”
Huh. I’m not sure that glue is much better than poo. That was when I realized that the stuff on her face that I thought was snot was glue. Lovely.
I showed up to an Easter egg hunt on Saturday and it wasn’t until I pulled into the parking lot that a light bulb went off above my head. You know what you bring to an Easter egg hunt?!
An Easter basket!
*smacking myself in the head*
Little Miss got to do her first Easter egg hunt with a plastic grocery sack, which looked a bit WT compared to all the fancy baskets that kids were sporting because it didn’t even cross my mind to bring a basket.
I also learned from a Mom friend that you’re supposed to practice things like this in advance, to prevent my experience of the hunt starting and my kid standing there dazed and confused. We paid $5 to do the egg hunt, and my daughter got ONE EGG. You know how many eggs I could have bought with $5?!
I’m still learning about how to do this Mom thing.
This morning, the first word out of Little Miss’s mouth was her yelling “MOM” at the top of her lungs. Through the baby monitor, there wasn’t any hint that she was awake until she started yelling for me, which immediately sent JB and I into laughter. Who wakes up yelling?!
I’ve determined that living with a toddler is a bit like living in the movie Groundhog Day. They are creatures of habit and thrive on repetition. For instance, our bedtime routine every night (EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT) is as follows:
1. Read books
2. Change into pjs, brush teeth
3. Turn on her Noah’s Ark music box that plays “row, row, row your boat”, but as I reach for it, she yells, “row, row!”
4. We have to get her blanket and her monkey and then rock in the dark to Row Row. When Row Row is done, she demands, “birds”, which is another music box.
5. I get up, put her in bed, and turn on the birds music box. She cuddles with monkey and her blanket, and then wriggles about and demands, “back!”, as she wants me to rub her back.
6. Before I leave the room, I ask her if she wants to be covered by a blanket. The answer is always no. If you try to cover her anyway she’ll have a fit.
7. I leave the room, close the door, and wait right outside the door, because without fail, after about 30 seconds, she will start demanding her blanket, so I go back in and cover her with a blanket.
It just cracks me up to have those same steps every night without fail. Another example of repetition in her life is that we have the same conversations numerous times a day. For instance, she initiates the conversations about how cars can hurt you whenever we’re in a parking lot by saying, “cars, hurter!” And every day when I pour her milk, she wants to hold the top of her sippy cup, demanding, “I hold dat”.
It all makes me laugh, and I know she is developing right on track. But it’s funny, no one ever told me that this is what parenting was like. When I was pregnant, all I could imagine was what it would be like to have a newborn. Little did I know that in a few years, I’d be living a Groundhog like life.
My daughter has embarrassed me twice in the past week, and I have a feeling that the fun is only just beginning.
Situation #1: In the locker room at the pool, after we had finished getting dressed. Another woman was changing next to us, and Little Miss pointed to her and exclaimed, “boobies!” I said, “yes, we all have boobies in here”, but meanwhile was pondering how to tell her not to talk about mammory glands in public.
Situation #2: At the grocery store when an older woman with short gray hair walks by us. Little Miss points at her and exclaims, “Grandpa!” The woman looked mortified. And so was I.
I bought a baby monitor last week… For my two year old. You see, my husband now prefers to sleep with a fan on for “white noise”, and I had one too many mornings where I wouldn’t hear Little Miss until she was in a full-on scream. Our old baby monitor was crap (used to wake up my girl by picking up neighbor phone calls), so I just started using a monitor again after not doing so for probably 1.5 years.
What I have found most interesting is what Little Miss says when she first wakes up. The first morning, she said, “OK, Mama”. It was like she woke up and decided she was all done sleeping. This morning, her first words were, “my ball.”
I’m also realizing that she wakes up in the night more than I knew, but manages to put herself back to sleep quite well. One night at about 2am, I woke to her saying, “Mama”, and then it was silent again. Of course, I couldn’t get back to sleep, so there are definite draw backs to turning a monitor back on.
Anyway, I have to say that Little Miss is at such a charming age right now, and I’m enjoying the heck out of her. I know she’s in the Terrible Twos, and yes, the tantrums and ever-changing opinions get tiring, but she has had two recent developments that floor me daily: comprehension and memory.
I can pinpoint right around when she started having memory of things that happened in the past, which was late January. It all started when my Mom’s dog popped her balloon in New Mexico (2 months ago), and I now hear about that incident multiple times daily. She also grasps concepts like skiing (Daddy skiing in mountains on snow, she’ll say), and her shadow (which I didn’t even think to explain to her, thinking it was too complex).
Her new favorite TV show is Tigger, Pooh, and Friends, where we can actually have discussions about the plot afterwards. And days later, she’ll remind me how Eeyore was sad when he lost his tail, or how Pooh had a rumbly in his tummy.
She knows where the park is now, and points it out from the highway, exclaiming, “park!” She has been loving swimming, and daily tells me how she jumps in the pool, does kicks, and her “scoops” (I call her arm movements ice cream scoops).
She points out birds, and then tells me when they fly away. She points out airplanes, telling me they’re flying in the sky, and also tells me when the sun is “hiding” behind the clouds. And all of these developments are just thrilling to me. I know they sound mundane, but I’ve been talking to her for 2 years pretending that she could understand, and by golly, now she actually does. I love our conversations, where she actually grasps when I start to explain the ways of the world. It’s like watching a beautiful flower opening a bit more each day.
The funniest thing she has done lately was one day when she was having a melt-down, and came running into my room for comfort. I happened to be changing in my closet, and she ran in and saw me half naked and immediately perked up as she exclaimed, “Boobies!” Yes, my boobs can stop tantrums. It’s quite a talent.
She also recognizes when someone in our family passes gas, which doesn’t seem to grow old. Just yesterday, she exclaimed, “Daddy poop” when JB let one go. When she does it herself, she says, “I sarted”, and then will say, “excuse me”. My gosh, people, it is so hard for me not to constantly pinch her cheeks or smother her in kisses – she is THAT CUTE.
So before you all get sick from all of this gushing, I’ll sign off. I promise to post some pics soon… I had left my camera in my desk drawer at work for the past month, and hence no pics.
I feel like my life has been on fast forward lately, and that I just can’t seem to get caught up. It all started with coming back from vacation at the beginning of February, when I had to catch up at work for a week, then I went on a week business trip and got sick on the trip, and had another catch up week, and in the midst of it all, my daughter turned two and got sick herself.
For the past two weeks, I had what I was calling the “death cough”, which was unrelenting and I just felt tired and run down. Little Miss came down with the cough on Thursday, and we both ended up going home sick for a half day. On Friday, we both went to the doctor (and yes, now I’m behind at work again).
Saturday morning, JB left for a ski clinic at Kirkwood, and Little Miss started the day by puking all over me (soaked down to my underwear). I think she had the flu, as she was feverish and wouldn’t drink or eat anything besides apple juice for two days. She also kept telling me that different things hurt, like her back, her hands, her face… Sounds like the aches to me. Couple that with an impressive 3 day storm, where the hubby got snowed in at the ski resort (thanks to my brother and his family for letting him shack up in their condo), and there was a bit of cabin fever in our house.
I did manage to round up a sitter on Sunday afternoon, as I was really itching to get up and enjoy the fresh powder (I had been monitoring the snow levels at the ski resorts and was green with envy about the hubby being “stuck” at a ski resort with a free place to stay and a season pass). Unfortunately, the storm was in full force by the time I headed up the mountain, making the drive a bit hairy. Top that off with the fact that all 4 pairs of goggles that JB and I own ended up in his ski bag with him at Kirkwood, my visibility was nil the first run.
I borrowed the world’s cheapest goggles from Lost and Found, and was able to salvage some good runs out of the day. By my last run (1.5 hours after arriving at the mountain), I started to worry about the drive home and wasn’t enjoying the white out whipping wind blizzard conditions, so I headed out. The drive home was super scary, as there were points where the wind blew the snow so hard that it was complete white out conditions, and I had to just stop because I couldn’t see the road or other cars. Luckily, no one crashed into the back of me. Things were made worse by all of the aggressive drivers out there passing people (i.e. me) on blind curves in white out conditions.
There was a nasty wreck towards the bottom of the highway, and they even shut down the highway shortly after I got home. Anyway, even though it wasn’t the best ski day for me, it did cure my cabin fever.
Little Miss and I are both well now, and it is taking an insane amount of self discipline for me to not play hooky and head up to the mountains, which just look way too inviting right about now. I can see the Mt. Rose Chutes from my office, which doesn’t help matters!
That’s all for now. Sorry I don’t have anything more inspirational to share.
We had Little Miss’s second birthday party this weekend. It was toddler heaven with mass chaos, a duck cake and a Dora ball pit (courtesy of her uncle’s family). We also managed to get a bit of ski time in this weekend, where the conditions were wonderful — warm, bluebird skies with awesome snow.
Little Miss and I are off to the Bay Area this week. Me for work, and her for time with grandparents. I’ll write when I get a chance!
Party pics:
I’m in Seattle today. Ironically, when I left Reno, it was cloudy and here in Seattle, it’s completely clear skies. The weekend went well, but remarkably fast. I spent Saturday doing laundry, cleaning, hanging with Madelynn, going to the park and a side trip to Wally World. I was amazed to see how high my calorie burn was (via the Body Bugg) that day. I burned just as much as a day when I go to the office and work out really hard at lunch. Hmmm…. One more arguement in favor of being a stay at home mom!
On Sunday, I got a half day of skiing in at Mt. Rose right as a storm was blowing in, and the wind was wholly impressive. The Body Bugg claimed I burned 980 calories in 2 hours of skiing, which I’m not sure I believe. I figure half of that time is spent on a chair lift, so I’m wondering if all of those bumps runs wigged this contraption out a bit.
Little Miss has a new game she likes to play. She’ll go to a hiding place and announce, “I’m hiding”, and then she expects me to come find her. When I do (as she beckons to me so that her hiding place is painfully obvious), she acts extremely surprised. She’ll then go hide again. In the same spot. And she wants to play this game over and over and over and over. After I’ve found her in the SAME spot about 20 times, it tends to get a bit old.
She is also developing some bad sleep habits. I’ve been rocking her to sleep for quite a while now, and usually I can rock her for a few minutes and place her in her crib where she’ll roll over and sleep for about 11 hours. But this week, as soon as I get up from rocking her, she clings to me and screams “Rock!!! Rock!!!” So then I go back and start the process over again. After about an hour last night, I determined I’d just let her cry herself to sleep, but 20 minutes later, she was still standing in her crib screaming her lungs out. The only way I’ve been able to get her to sleep the past two nights is to lay down with her on the bed in the guest room, and once she’s asleep, I’m scared to move her after all that effort, so she has spent the past two nights in a queen sized bed, which doesn’t seem to phase her. Any of you Moms have suggestions for me? I’m thinking I’ll have to set a limit on the rocking and try to let her cry it out, but she is proving to be rather stubborn.
That’s all the news from bean town (Seattle is big on coffee, dontchaknow).
P.S. I’m curious to see how many calories I burn in a day-trip to Seattle for work. I walked over 2,000 steps in airports just this morning!
I think it’s time to talk to Elmo about the birds and the bees, because he seems to be reproducing at an alarming rate, putting rabbits to shame.
That’s right, we are the “proud” owners of FIVE Elmo dolls. Is it any wonder my kid has an Elmo obsession?!
Note to my Mom: she likes the two you gave her the best!
I feel like we packed about 3 weeks worth of activity into the past week. It has been strange today to return to the office, where 90% of people are off on vacation. So here is the download on what we’ve been up to:
Friday: Little Miss and I hung out with my parents for the day, dinner with my brother’s family, but my brother was missing because he got his snowmobile stuck and was trapped in the forrest until about 11pm. We were all imagining him hunkering down in a snow cave and losing some fingers/toes, but luckily he made it out safely.
Saturday: My parents watched Little Miss as JB and I went skiing at Kirkwood. We met my brother and his family up there. JB, who was in charge of packing our equipment as I made us lunches, was so focused on which pair of skis he wanted to bring that we managed to arrive at the ski resort with two pairs of skis for JB and NONE for me. I had intended to use my new powder skis. Luckily, my SIL let me borrow a pair of her rock skis, and considering the insane amount of rocks I hit that day, I am thankful that my powder skis did not get marred.
Sunday: Little Miss and I joined my other brother’s family and my parents on a sledding outing. We tried to find a sledding spot without lots of people, which meant trekking through snow as deep as my thighs whilst holding a petrified Little Miss and her sled. After about 40 minutes, we found a spot that was well packed, and Little Miss got in a few good sled rides (on a tethered sled with me pulling her).
That night, we all went bowling. It was a bit of toddler torture, as there were BALLS everywhere, yet she wasn’t allowed to play with them. I was shocked when she actually picked up an 8 lb ball and dropped it on the floor (thankfully missing her feet). Towards the end of the night, I decided to help her do one attempt at bowling. We went up to the end of the lane, and I encouraged her to “push” the ball. She did so, with my help, and away went the ball. Next thing I know, Little Miss is running down the lane after the ball. My immediate instinct was to run after her, which is when I quickly learned that the lanes are oiled and extremely slick. Within a split second, Little Miss fell on her back, and I fell backwards onto my elbow, sliding into her. It was like a scene out of a cartoon, except for the fact that it hurt like heck and she was screaming her head off. Here I am carrying her on my knees back to safety, as I knew I’d fall on my rear again if I tried to stand up.
Monday: We actually didn’t do much besides visit with family and laundry. That night, Christmas Eve, we went out to dinner with the family. Dinner at a restaurant with three toddlers is always an adventure, and my toddler proved to be the most challenging that night. After Little Miss went to bed, JB and I spent about 1.5 hours assembling her gift — a spring horse.
Tuesday: Merry Christmas! Little Miss loves her spring horse, which she seems to be calling Pacey for some reason.
Mom and I spent most of the day cooking, and that night, we hosted dinner for 13 family members. There were 8 adults and 5 little people under the age of six. It was a fun form of chaos in my house, and we had a blast watching the cousins unwrapping their gifts and playing with all of the toys. Little Miss spent a lot of time with her 3 year old boy cousin, with whom she was dancing while holding hands and rocking with in our recliner. My brother’s family and their dog spent the night.
This morning, I was in denial, but was thrust back into our routine as I took Little Miss to daycare and got myself to work. It has been a quiet day, which makes for a relaxed working environment.
That’s all for now. Here are pics from the past week. I fought with Slide.com way too long for this show. It managed to delete my captions multiple times, so I gave up and here is the show sans captions.
Little Miss is always presenting JB and I with tiny treasures she finds, such as a piece of lint or a hair that she has found on the floor. Tonight, she walked up to JB, and handed him something. He took it, and then started to inquire what it was. It almost looked like a grain of rice.
He sniffed it.
And sniffed.
“I smell poop,” he said.
I grabbed her hand, and it was covered in poop. Evidently, she had put her hand down her dirty diaper, and felt the need to share it with Daddy.
I can’t tell you how hard I laughed as I remembered JB unknowingly taking the piece of poop from her and then sniffing it not once but twice.
As I was changing her diaper and cleaning her up, she learned a new phrase: “stinky poo-poo”.
To fully chase my ba-humbugs away, Mother Nature finally sent us the gift of snow. We’re having quite the storm hitting us, and I was so excited to see about 5 inches of snow in our yard when I woke up this morning. I was even more excited to see Little Miss’s reaction, as I’m sure she doesn’t remember snow from last winter.
As I expected, she was very intrigued, but tentative. I fully documented the experience with pictures and video (did you expect anything less?!).
Video of Little Miss experiencing this winter’s first snow
Here are the pics:
I think my biggest challenge with Little Miss right now is feeding her. She has developed a picky toddler palate, and I never know what she will eat and what she won’t. I provide healthy options for her, but many days it gets thrown on the floor. I’ve been trying recipes from Deceptively Delicious, and I swear the kid has radar detecting when I have added vegetable puree to a food. Without even tasting it, she’ll outright refuse it.
For instance, this past weekend, I made her homemade mac and cheese. I didn’t add veggie puree because I was tight on time. She gobbled it up, and I finally had to cut her off, as I thought she was consuming unhealthy amounts of mac and cheese. Anyway, after she went to bed, I added a tiny bit of cauliflower puree to the mac and cheese, and the next day, she wouldn’t even touch it, even though it doesn’t look or taste any different.
Yesterday, I made the recipe for chocolate chip cookies, which includes garbanzo beans. She LOVED the cookies. Kept asking for MORE, and once again, I had to cut her off. This morning, all she wanted for breakfast was cookies, and you should have seen how pissed she got when I told her that cookies weren’t for breakfast. *sigh* When does this get easier? It sounds so simple to just offer healthy foods, but she sure makes this challenging.
P.S. JB has no idea the cookies he took to work today were loaded with BEANS. Fooled him on that one, too! I have to say they are remarkably moist!
I hope everyone had a great holiday. We sure did, as it included a lot of quality family time, relaxing, and good food and drink. We flew with Little Miss to visit her Grandparents in the Bay Area, and she did remarkably well on the flight, despite us being on the delayed last flight of the day on the #1 and #2 most traveled days of the year.
We went to a really nice restaurant for Thanksgiving, and she was a little angel until about the time the entrees arrived. At that point, she hit the wall, and entered tantrum land, from which there is no return. I ended up taking her outside and letting her wail, as she didn’t want to be held, but wanted to stand by a trash can and cry it out. Ah, life with a toddler.
On Saturday, we took her to Ardenwood Historic Farm, where she joined in the Barnyard Buddies program and got to help feed the farm animals. We saw clydesdale horses, cows (including a week old calf), sheep, lambs, chickens and bunnies. All was well until the poor kid got pecked by a chicken, to the point that it drew blood. Luckily, we cleaned her up and found a display where they were serving hot chocolate chip cookies made in a wood burning stove, and all was better.
We got home last night around 10:30pm, and Little Miss was in bed by 11pm. I unpacked, and then packed for a business trip (leaving this afternoon), and right as I got comfortable in my own bed, she started crying. Little Miss then stayed up until 1:30am, which was loads of fun, but I guess that’s what we get for getting her so off her routine.
So after spending one night in my bed, I am heading to Seattle this afternoon for a lovely (said with sarcasm) 4 day meeting, consisting of days where I’m booked from 8am to 9pm, and I’m somehow supposed to keep up with the hundreds of emails I’ll be receiving while I’m in those meetings. I guess I won’t be sleeping much, eh?
Anyway, don’t expect to hear too much from me this week. Toodles.
Updated to add: The fun just keeps getting better. Daycare just called, and looks like Little Miss has been exposed to Hand Foot and Mouth Disease, and has blisters in her mouth. Hence, she is kicked out until further notice and I’m about to go get on a plane. Lovely timing, I tell you!
Updated later to add: blisters in mouth and on hands and feet have been confirmed. Calling in the emergency backup support. It’s days like these (as I have a trip I cannot get out of) that being a working mom just plain sucks.
On Saturday, the hubby was under the weather, so Little Miss and I took off for a girl’s day. We started by meeting some friends at the park, then went to tour the Lake Mansion in downtown Reno, where they were having an open house and pictures with Santa. When we walked in, Santa said ‘ho, ho, ho’, and Little Miss got very frightened, which is how we ended up with a picture of me in my sweats (totally unprepared for a pic) holding a cowering toddler as Santa stood behind us.
From there, we went to watch the guys that were jumping off a ski jump on top of the Silver Legacy Casino. Unfortunately, due to wind conditions and a jumper getting injured earlier in the day, they didn’t jump when I was there. But I looked up the video online, as I was especially curious to see Jesse Hall, who got his ski caught in his parachute lines and blew out his knee in the process. I’m sure glad nothing more serious happened, and it definitely makes for some dramatic video.
Now how many cities can claim that they’ve had guys going off of ski jumps off of a 40 story building? One. That would be Reno. Talk about ‘America’s Adventure Place’! Read the article.
Anyway, the next day, JB took Little Miss to the park while I went trial running. Trail running is my new pass-time on the weekends. It is a really hard workout, but is almost therapeutic to be running in the crisp Fall air with the leaves on the ground.
Unfortunately, Little Miss fell on the playground, and hurt her shoulder. I spent the afternoon consoling her, and this morning, she woke up screaming in pain. We determined she needed to go to a doctor. I spent the morning taking her to the doc, and just like always, she seemed to have a miraculous recovery right before the doctor walked into the office, and I ended up trying to explain why I’m not insane for bring my perfectly well child into the doctor. She’s still a bit sore, but the doc and I think she will be A-OK in a few days. She got a sticker for putting up with the doc’s poking and prodding, and seems to be none worse the wear. And yes, I’m glad for that outcome.
That’s all that is happening around here. Two dramatic falls in one weekend. Looking forward to a short work week!
I had been seeking a copy of Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious cookbook for about three weeks now, ever since seeing it on the Oprah Show. You see, for about two months now, Little Miss has been on a vegetable strike. Up until about September, I had a kid that would eat a wide variety of foods and most of the vegetables I prepared. Now, she’s picky. She won’t eat anything that LOOKS remotely different than the small palate of favorites that she chooses.
So the premise of this cookbook is how to incorporate vegetable purees into healthy and kid-friendly foods. As soon as I saw it on Oprah, I knew that was going to be my next plan in trying to get my toddler to eat healthy. Unfortunately, the publisher WAY underestimated the demand for the book, so it has been very hard to locate. I ended up mail ordering it and paying a bit of a premium to get it before the next printing is available in 5-6 weeks.
Anyway, the book arrived on Friday, I read through it on Saturday, and made up some vegetable purees on Sunday. Last night, I made homemade maraconi and cheese, fortified with cauliflower and carrot. It tasted delicious.
Too bad Little Miss refused it.
JB is happy, as now he has an entire batch of homemade macaroni and cheese to devour without scrutiny. I’m hoping it was just her mood, and we’ll try it again today, but after all that build up, it was very frustrating to have my ‘deceptively delicious’ food outright refused.
Ah, life with a toddler…
Updated to add: Just called daycare, who said she’s having a great day, but wouldn’t eat her Mac N’ Cheese. Refused twice!
Little Miss has recently started speaking in sentences. And I have to admit that I’m a bit surprised every time I hear a full sentence come out of her mouth. For instance, last night, she came up to me and said, “I want my milk.”
I hesitated a bit to digest that she had just spoken a very clear sentence, after almost 21 months of working up to this feat. I gave her the milk, she drank some, and then went about her business (dancing, more on that later). I later told her it was time to go get ready for bed, and she said, “I WANT MORE MILK.”
So I replied, “then go get your milk,” as it was sitting on the coffee table. And low and behold, she did. That’s when I realized, that we’ve advanced from one way communication and we just had a very efficient exchange. It just feels like all of a sudden a light went off in her head, and low and behold, we have sentences.
Her very first sentence was, “I love you,” which melts my heart every time I hear it. I prompt her to say it a lot, and though I know she can’t grasp the entire concept of love, it is a bit of reward for all of those sleepless nights, crying fits, etc.
So now on to her most favorite pass-time lately, dancing. It’s like Dance Dance Revolution in our house every single day. We have like 4 children’s CDs, and JB and I are admittedly sick of them, as we hear them way too much. She is constantly asking to “DANCE!”, and she’ll go up to the CD player, motion towards it, and start dancing just in case we didn’t get the message. Neither her father or myself can resist such a cute request, so it’s constantly on. She wants to dance even before breakfast. We recently tried to get her dancing to adult music, such as country, rock, Frank Sinatra and even big band. All were rejected. She will throw a tantrum until you put on the kiddie CDs.
Now she’s taking it to the next level, making song requests. Her favorite songs are “Pop!” (Pop Goes the Weasel) and “Duck” (Six Little Ducks). She wants to hear them over and over and over. It’s to the point that both JB and I will burst into kiddie songs unconsciously at random points during the day, and we’ll usually wake up in the morning with one of those songs in our heads. It is out of control. To my In-laws, who started all of this, YOU HAVE CREATED A MONSTER. OK, yes, a very cute monster, and we can’t resist her, but we may have to do some pay-back by singing to you our new medley of songs!
I have a new shipment of children’s CDs that are arriving at my house today, and I am excited to at least add a bit of variety to this insanity.
So I’ll leave you with that this Friday afternoon. Have a lovely weekend, everyone!
For the first time this summer, Little Miss enjoyed her time in the pool. Does it still count if it’s the kiddie pool in our back yard? We beat the record heat this weekend by hanging out in the pool together. She had a ball. FINALLY. Now if only we can get her to like the real pool!
Yesterday after work, I picked up Little Miss and headed to the grocery store. She was tired and cranky, and kept signing for milk. Of course, I didn’t have any milk. We also didn’t have any food for dinner, so I was wanting to get in and out of the grocery store fast.
I picked up a few items, and Little Miss started having a melt down, so I left without getting food for dinner. On my way home, I called JB and said, “I went to the grocery store to pick up something for dinner, but they didn’t have any food.”
I didn’t even realize what I had said until JB repeated back to me, “they didn’t have any food?”
Shows how frazzled a screaming toddler can make a person.
I had a dream the other night that child predators used my blog to track down my daughter. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this, and decided to take the initial step of protecting her privacy by removing her name from my blog. From now on, my daughter will be referred to as Little Miss on this blog.
I am also considering making this site private, accessible only through a login. I’m not sure I want to do that, though, as this site has only brought positive contacts to me, and has reunited me with all kinds of people from my past.
So as I mull this over, Little Miss makes her debut. I am also changing references to family members, using their first initials when at all possible.
Little Miss is in the process of moving up to the toddler room at daycare this week. Each day, she’ll spend a bit more time there, and by Thursday, she’ll be moved there full time.
This is a big thing for my little girl. It is exciting for her. I see her light up when she enters a room where all the kids are walking around and playing. She now gets to go outside and play on a play structure twice a day. They’ll have structured activities throughout the day, with music, story time and arts & crafts. This is a big change from hanging out with the babies.
I can tell that she has been bored in the baby room for about the past month. She has a great bond with her caretaker, which is sad to let go, but as I’ve learned in the past year, my outgoing little girl will soon bond with her new caretakers, and she won’t miss a step.
I am fighting the urge to leave work and go observe my daughter as she explores the new world of the toddler room. I picture her running around with a huge smile plastered on her face.
Yet this transition doesn’t come without worries. The teacher child ratio is now 1:8, down from 1:4. She’ll take one nap a day at a scheduled time, and this child has never followed a strict schedule with her nap time. And I can only bring a cold lunch (i.e. they won’t refrigerate or heat up any food), which now makes packing her lunch more challenging for me, as she has a typical picky toddler palate.
But overall, I think it’s good. My little girl is growing up. And it’s really fun to watch.
This past weekend, we finally took Little Miss on her first camping trip. The trip was with my brothers and their families, so it was a Cook Cousins reunion of sorts.
Little Miss dealt with her aversion to dirt pretty well. There were times that she would realize she was standing on dirt, and would freeze on the spot, wimpering. The whole weekend was one big adventure to her, and she didn’t want to miss any of it by napping or sleeping. She stayed up late and woke up at the crack of dawn (5:45am). Of course, when she woke up early, she started screaming at the top of her lungs because she thought it was funny.
I personally didn’t sleep well because of the prevolence of bears in the area. Every noise had me wondering if a bear was right outside my tent. I think it was the Momma Bear in me, feeling the need to protect my little girl.
I got to do some nice open water swimming on both days, and the rest of the time, I caught up with my nieces, nephews and brothers and sister-in-laws. Little Miss loves roasted marshmellows and graham crackers, so we have a S’mores lover in the making.
Here are the pics I took this weekend. Unfortunately, my youngest niece, Cousin K, is missing from the photos, mainly because she was napping as I snapped pics of the rest of the cousins playing in my brother’s boat (as it was parked at the campsite).
According to this article, if an infant receives multiple courses of antibiotics in their first year, they have a 20 percent increased chance at having asthma.
Little Miss went through several courses of antibiotics when she was 3 months old to deal with the sinus infection that resulted after an accident we had where her nose hit the ground, and she had to have surgery to repair her septum. Each course of antibiotics was stronger than the last. I have to wonder if that is having long term effects and is one of the causes of her asthma.
I’ve also read that children can have lung damage that lasts up to a year after having RSV. Little Miss had RSV this past February, and coincidentally, that is when she was diagnosed with asthma.
I look forward to discussing my unprofessional Internet fueled opinions with the Pediatric Pulmonoligist that we’re seeing next month.
Antibiotic Use in Infants May Up Asthma Risk:
The drugs might kill off bad and good bacteria, study suggestsGiving antibiotics for a non-respiratory tract infection to an infant younger than 1 greatly increases the odds that the child will develop asthma, according to new research.
The study found that the risk was highest for those infants who received multiple courses of antibiotics and those who received prescriptions for broad-spectrum antibiotics. Broad-spectrum antibiotics tend to kill a wide range of bacteria — both good and bad.
“Asthma is a multi-factorial disease, and we’ve found evidence of an association with first-year-of-life antibiotic use and asthma,” said the study’s lead author, Anita Kozyrskyj, an associate professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.
One hypothesis, Kozyrskyj added, is that broad-spectrum antibiotics are killing off too many good bacteria.
“It may be that you need the presence of good bacteria during the first year of life for the immune system to develop normally, and the antibiotics are killing off some of the natural microflora in the gut,” she said. Read entire article.
Setting the scene: Little Miss is eating her breakfast, and is screaming at the top of her lungs in between bites. This is happy screaming. It’s screaming for the sake of screaming and to see just how loud she can yell.
JB: When does the screaming phase end?
LB: When she’s 18.
Those of you that know me know that I love to swim, and I love to hang out at lakes/beaches/pools/the ocean, etc. This past weekend, Little Miss made it obvious that she is not yet signed up for this plan with me.
I decided it was time to start her acclimation to the water, so I took her to the pool today after work. My first challenge was changing into my swim suit as Little Miss tried to walk her way back out of the locker room. I never even anticipated that being an issue.
Then, on to the swimming lesson. It was pure baby torture. She screamed the whole time and clutched to me for dear life. Last summer, she loved the pool. This summer, she has discovered fear.
I used to teach Parent-Tot swim lessons with babies from 6 months of age up to 2 years. I have seen some kids throw some impressive tantrums the first few class sessions. I’ll have you know that my daughter’s tantrum today would have rivaled the best of my former pupils.
I will not be discouraged, though. I know this will take time and perserverance. Much to her chegrin, we will be headed back to the pool on Friday, and then at least twice a week after that until she becomes the Water Baby I know she can be.
I am back from spending four days in St. George, Utah visiting some friends. We had a great time hanging out and catching up with our good friends. The traveling with Little Miss went relatively well. That is, until we missed our return flight. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
We spent every day of our vacation going to local lakes and hanging out on the beach or on our friends’ boats. It was very relaxing, and I was able to get in some nice open water swims each day, which makes me very happy.
Little Miss has a ways to go in becoming a good beach baby… She absolutely hated the sand, and also getting her feet wet. I didn’t even try to get more of her wet because she threw such a fit when we dipped her feet. It was the only time this vacation when she was still (besides naps). She wouldn’t move from the beach towel.
I was right to think that vacationing with a toddler isn’t really a vacation, as I spent most of my time following her around and trying to keep her happy. She was crabbier than usual, which I think was just due to stimulation overload.
Things really got interesting on our return trip. We spent Sunday at the lake (and our host’s mother graciously volunteered to watch Little Miss for the day, so I was FREE - yeah!!!). Par for the course with us, we stayed at the lake as long as we could, with each of us getting in a nice 45 minute swim. On our drive back to our hosts’ house, we started itching. All over.
Turned out that we picked up some kind of parasite in the lake. FUN!!! So there was a bit of a delay as we figured out what was wrong with us (as we had rashes all over our bodies), put on Calomine lotion and our hosts dug up some allergy medication for us to take. We then hit the road for the 2 hour drive to the Las Vegas airport. It was relatively smooth until we got turned around trying to find the rental car return. Next thing you know, we’re REALLY tight on time. We checked our bags, ran to the gate, and arrived just in time to see our flight — the last flight to Reno of the day — pulling back from the gate.
We tried to reclaim our baggage and were denied. That is how I found myself in Vegas with three diapers and… wait for it… ONE BABY WIPE to last me for the next 17 hours.
We went to the info desk at the airport, where we told the guy behind the counter that we were looking for a decent hotel that was close and with a free shuttle. He called the Knight’s Inn and made a reservation for us, saying it is “nice”.
And it was… FOR A CRACK HOUSE. Oh, golly, that was a miserable mistake. They didn’t have a crib for Little Miss, and the only store within walking distance was a gas station. We walked to the gas station in search of diapers, milk and wipes. I found everything but diapers. That is when I got creative, and purchased some super duper maxi pads, in hopes that they would extend the life of the three diapers we had on hand.
So, Monday morning, we woke up (after sleeping in our clothes and having absolutely no toiletries available to us), I finger combed my hair (i.e. we were looking ROUGH), and headed to the airport. And that was when we were reminded how smart we were when we decided to travel on Sunday and avoid the peak travel period of Memorial Day. Ah, the best laid plans. It took almost an hour to check in and make it through security.
Little Miss did about 2 laps of the C Gate at that airport. But she was in good spirits, waving to everyone, and saying one of her new words, “hi”. She also picked up another word on the trip, “Eee-iiii”, as in “eee-iii-eee-iii-ooooo” from Old Macdonald.
We made it home around noon yesterday, with everything intact. We felt like we had been run over by a mack truck, but we were intact. I put Little Miss down as we brought in the luggage. She went straight to her Dora car (the one my brother and his family got for her because he knew how annoying it would be), and she pushed the button that made Dora say, “We MADE IT to the Carnival!”. It was very appropriate, as the entire day had felt like some crazy carnival ride.
A few minutes later, I saw some wet spots on the carpet. I thought “where did she get a hold of water?”, and as I investigated closer, I found that we had reached max-capacity of that third and final diaper (with a maxi pad stuck inside). Her pants were soaked and there was a mini-puddle on the carpet.
I couldn’t help but think of my luck that the diaper didn’t give out while she was sitting in my lap on the plane! Wooo!!!
So that was our “vacation”. I took limited pictures (as I was too busy chasing after Little Miss), and will post them later this week.