She loves that rug. No clue why…but she regularly lays on, rolls around on, pretends to sleep on, retreats to, and in general shows a preference for it.
She’s never had a blankie or special stuffed animal or toy…maybe she has a special rug?
Today my daughter turned two. My thoughts have been a mixture of “she doesn’t even know or care”, “wow, she is such a little kid now, not a baby at all!” and, “two years ago at this moment I was _____ (fill in the blank with something gory and labor related.)”
Her bangs are trimmed, she has as many pairs of shoes as I do now, and she loves to play to an audience.
She had scramble eggs and grilled cheese for dinner…the two things left on her favorite foods list. Oatmeal was breakfast and peanut butter sandwich was lunch.
I made cupcakes. She (didn’t) blow out the candle. She opened presants. All the while oblivious to why so much attention was being paid her.
I guess that’s what being two is all about.
The past few weeks have felt like a valley. The kind you just have to walk through. I really wish the uphill climbs would return, because I need them. I need the exertion. The hopefulness. The promise that seeing the peak and knowing there’s an “other side” brings.
I feel like I’ve been in limbo for two weeks now, with this not-baby thing. It’s hard to trust God, with all of it. It’s hard not to cry. And it’s also hard to cry. So weird. I feel stuck in a state of “about to cry but I know I won’t really”. If only I could watch like, a really sad movie. That’d probably do it.
All of our bills are way beyond past due. Never known that to be stress free.
Our homeowners insurance got screwed up. (so mad about that. Local incompetent company.)
And today I bought groceries at walmart and when I got home, I realized I’d left one of the bags at the store. That never happens. And I hate when that happens. It costs more to go back to Destin to get it than it does to repurchase what was in that bag.
Griping aside, I KNOW there is hope. I don’t see it right this second, but I know it exists. It is there on Wednesday. And Monday. And next month, and next year. Which is next month. Never mind.
The step I’m on is ugly and dark. But the step ahead will be illuminated. I trust in Him with all my heart. And the next step, He directs.
And we did have one small victory today – Ella overcame her fear of playgrounds. Yay!
Having a toddler is cracking me up.
She thinks things and does things that most people do, but there is usally some flaw with the process.
For example, blowing on your food. Great! excellent skill to master. Blowing on your cheerios? Uh…not so much.
Learning how to turn in a circle? Wow, good job! Turning in a circle for 20 minutes and making yourself sick and dizzy? Hm. No.
Climbing up and down, yea! That’s good to know so you don’t get stuck somewhere. Climbing onto the piano and eating dirt from my houseplants? Now that’s just dumb.
One of her favorite words is “yeah.” she’ll agree with you on just about anything. Sometimes I think she knows what it means and other times I think she’s just saying it. She knows “no” as well, but hasn’t really applied that one yet, thankfully.
And then there’s yesterday…she runs straight to fountains whenever she sees them, but when you actually WANT her to play in them, oh heck no. She’d rather stand ten feet away and watch with her hand held out like the water should come to HER. She would rather pick up acorns and hand them to me than go down the slide. And she REALLY wants to go stand under the play area where the 8 year old boys are playing with lightsabres so she can get whacked in the head.
Yeah she cracks me up. And makes me shake my head in confusion. And makes me want to learn CPR. I should probably do that, huh?
This morning it seems Ella and I are having a contest to see who can be more annoying.
She’s winning, because while I’m losing my “good mom” badge for participating at all, I’m not a monster.
But she started it. Just so you know.
In protest of the assertion that I have too much time on my hands (I might. I might not.) here are some things keeping me busy recently. Did you really have anything better to read just now? Please, don’t answer that.
We like her. Can’t wait til she can wash dishes!!!
I’m just as susceptible as the next mom to herald my child all over teh internets.
But this blog is really about me. And this post is about me.
(Imagine I just said that in a deep creepy voice dripping with narcissism.)
“They” said a lot of things when I became a new mom. I heard a lot of comments, from a myriad of sources. Perhaps when you get married you get a lot of people suddenly offering words of advice you didn’t ask for. But parenthood takes that to such an extreme level, that in my opinion I should carry around little award stars and hand them out based on the merit of the advice.
There is this classic I heard multiple times when we got married…”Don’t go to bed angry with each other.”
“Oh yeah? Did you hear that one back in ’75 when you got married? or did you just think of that off the top of your head? Here, you get a green star. For effort. No, I take that back. No star for you. ” That one isn’t even technically marriage advice, it’s Ephesians 4:26.
Or how about this one…”Sleep when the baby sleeps!”
This one gets a silver star. Because it is GREAT advice. If completely impractical. I mean, new babies sleep for erratic lengths of time, what…every two hours? Trying to nap on that schedule requires a level of lunacy that, frankly, I’m not comfortable with. I never got the hang of it. You’re going to be dead tired anyway. No need to add to the circus.
Don’t get me wrong, some of this input as a new mom was great. I mean GREAT. Other parents really do have sage wisdom…they’ve been there, and they can tell you how they dealt with x, y, or z.
But I’m 18 months out of the gate. In a year and a half, I’ve learned that no matter what people tell me or what I “learn” from whatever source, my most valuable resource as a mom is to trust my instinct.
This was an “Ah Ha” moment for me. Literally a moment of realization when I stepped back and said to myself “Oh, right I see.”
That moment came when the first time I laid Ella down to sleep for the night. In her own bed. In her own room. About 3 months ago. See, up until that point she had been sleeping in our bed. And I heard from SO MANY PEOPLE “You’ll regret it!” But I loved it. They were wrong. Shannon loved it too, especially when she got older and she’d wind up on his side of the bed snuggled up against him at 5am. It really felt like the right thing to do. We rested better, and made us feel more like a family than any other way of spending time together.
And then the time came when it felt like it was the right thing to move her into her own bed. And then move her bed into her own room.
You know what? The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
She slept happily in her own bed. In her own room. The time was right, and when I realized I’d been right…that was my ah ha moment.
I did what felt right. And it WAS right.
The reassurance that I felt when I realized that was just immense. Possibly the best thing to ever happen to my mommy psyche. I know I’m going to make mistakes, and my kids will hopefully wind up great in spite of their parents. But on the whole…I’m going to trust my instincts more.
Lesson learned.
I started making this dress for Ella like, six months ago. At least. I finally finished it today. It’s the first outfit I’ve made for her, so I’m fairly pleased with the result. The matching pants are killing me.
I think I have a pretty good vocabulary. I was that nerdy kid who ran out of things to read so I read medical textbooks and the dictionary. My spelling of all those words sometimes fails, but nobody is perfect. Oh, and typos. I’ve decided not to stress about typos on this blog, they happen and I fix them sometimes. But the iPhone’s auto-complete and correct feature tends to kick me down a path of infuriating typos every day. A few days ago I tried typing “helper” and it correct the word to “leper.” very intuitive, apple – most people probably DO talk about leprosy with more frequency than they they do about helping. Granted, without the phone I wouldn’t be blogging at all, so the trade is more than fair. Just don’t think I’m a world class dolt because something says “of” instead of “is”. Or if lepers join the conversation without warning.
Words. Right.
So now Ella is building her vocabulary.
She understands rather a lot. But she only speaks a few of those words. Ok, like three.
Dad.
Cheese.
Uh-oh.
I don’t if uh-oh counts as a word, since it’s sort of like “huh” or “um”. Just a filler sound appropriate to the moment. But she says it when she drops something, etc., so she has it right at least.
I can only conclude that words do not exist for her when it comes to describing me. All lack of any consistant sound in reference to her mother is pretty solid evidence of that, right?
She has many gestures in place of words. Goodbye is a solid wave. All gone is a palms up move. No and yes are appropriate head movements. Pointing occurs with pretty much every third thought that flits through her mind so I don’t know how to qualify that gesture. Anything related to drinking is a search for her sippy cup. I guess that’s not a gesture – but it is the action accompanied by the word, so…
Ok. It’s not that many.
Time to word up, Ella. Your three words are cute, but they’re not going to get you far in this life. You have to add at least a few adjectives to make it past the front door. And people who just say “cheese” and “uh-oh” all the time aren’t people at all but are battery opperated toys made by Hasbro.
Overall good progress. Let’s keep it moving.
You know how sometimes you might hear someone say “Her eyes were throwing daggers!”
I’m pretty sure the women in this family have perfected that art.
At 4 months, it was a little crosseyed but there it was.
A year later, she’s still got it. A little more curiosity in that one, I think. Maybe it’s just my friend Lori, who knows how to get those expressions on disk.
I hear Ella comes by it naturally though.
When I was 12 or so, I went through a dramatic personality change. I went from being a happy-go-lucky girl with a smile and a curl, to a buttoned up deep thinking and soft-spoken teen. My answers to questions were “yep” and “nope.” With little elaboration.
In my teens, I discovered the truth behind the proverb “Even a fool is thought wise, if he keeps silent.” Not wishing to be thought a fool, I heeded the advice and learned to keep silent. I remember a time when I was 16 or 17, in a weeks time I could count all the phrases I spoke aloud on my hands.
As an adult, the practice of silence was so much a natural part of me that I woke up one day and realized I’d walled myself off from the world, in almost every way. There are benefits of course, to keeping to one’s self. Less opportunity for saying the wrong thing. People think you’re smarter than you are. But people might also think you’re arrogant, self-absorbed, or indifferent. I’ve experienced all of those things. And when people think you to be arrogant or engrossed in your own thoughts, there is no opportunity for building relationships. The only relationships I successfully maintained were with people whose own ability to communicate exceeded mine so greatly that the deficiency was absorbed. My marriage not excluded.
The courtship of Shannon and Leah can be summed up in one simple picture. Shannon on the phone in Florida talking for hours and hours, Me listening to him on the other line in Pennsylvania saying “uh huh” for hours and hours. You have to know by now that I’m not prone to exaggeration. That is exactly the truth.
I think it’s been a year, maybe just a little more, that I’ve discovered the art of conversation once again. The 11 year old me in breaking out, silence is no longer golden, and I am engaging in conversations more easily than I can ever remember. I’m glad, because it’s enjoyable. It still pays to watch my tongue…I find myself occasionally uttering the most annoying or insane things from time to time, and if someone is listening, well…I feel so embarrassed. But it’s a rare occasion. And I’m thankful for that.
I want to grow in my ability to communicate with others. I want to sharpen the economy of my words. I want to remember to choose what I say carefully. It is important to me that people hear me when I speak, so what I’m saying had better be worth their time. On that same token, even now, if I feel like my words would be dismissed or not heard, I prefer to say nothing. Shannon and I have been over this one a few times. He says “You never tell me anything!” and I reply with “It doesn’t seem like you are interested, so why would I bother?” And of course, the misunderstanding is rectified. But that scenario has played out more than once.
The less one says with one’s mouth, the more they say with their demeanor. I’ve noticed this over the years. If you leave the air silent, people feel the need to read your body language, and your facial expressions to understand you. They can’t not know what you’re thinking, so they read between the lines.
Sometimes what I think is an expressionless face is in fact a stony stare.
And It’s amazing, but my 1 year old daughter has the same ability. The silent gaze.
It’s not a cold shoulder…we’re just thinking about what we’re going to say.
