Category Archives: parenting

22 Months

Just a couple of months and our spunky gal will be 2. It’s just a number, but at the same time it signifies a lot in my mind. At 2, she won’t be able to be a lap baby on a plane ride and she won’t be counted as a “baby” under most other circumstances either. Granted, she’s technically been a toddler for a while, but my snuggle bug has been hanging onto her baby status for a while.

While she may still carry around her blankie and lovies and need a nuk, she’s becoming quite the big girl. We’re not pushing potty training at all right now, but it’s been her own choice lately to try and go now and then and she had her first victory the other night! Admittedly, I’ll be kind of happy when no one is diapers anymore, but I’m in no rush. You’ve got to love a baggy diaper butt, right? One thing that’s not to love is our suddenly very picky eater. I know it comes with the territory as her brother is pretty picky too, so we’ll just keep trying and offering new things and hope she changes her mind soon. 😉

Aside from her super endearing quality of being able to fall asleep while sitting up, she has so many others that make us smile each day. She’s getting really good at the alphabet as well as counting to 10 and now if Enzo asks her “What comes after ___?” She can usually respond with the correct answer. She has also started grabbing books on her own and sitting down to read. At bedtime she’ll have me read a couple of books, but then insists on reading them for herself, which is pretty darn cute. When I tell her it’s time for bed, she holds up her finger and says, “One more.”

She still adores dancing and singing songs, and I love listening to her start singing songs I’m unfamiliar with. Apparently they have a clean up song at daycare, so this weekend she started singing it while we tidied up. Despite her cuteness, she can also be quite the sassy lady, though, and one can only wonder what the next year or two will bring. We’ve entered the territory of tantrums and adamant No’s with a side of limp noodle and the need to do everything by herself, which in itself isn’t so bad. Independence is a necessity, even if it can be hard to come by at this age. Soon enough, little girl, soon enough.

Photo Dump and Thoughts…

I love a short work week, but it always throws me off… for a second I thought it was Friday, and then I realized it wasn’t. Enzo wound up with a stomach bug, and we’re wondering if it was slowly building up over the weekend, which would explain some of the extra crankiness and the unexpected vomiting in the car. He never had a fever until Tuesday night when he wound up being sick again. He started acting much more like himself last night, though, and ate a large dinner. This morning he wanted to stay home again with me despite feeling better. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to just say “Okay” and not go to work. I know it would be rough, but our next goal is to have me be a stay at home mom in the upcoming year. Enzo is a preschooler so he’d be in preschool part-time and I think that would be perfect for him. He loves preschool, but often gets overstimulated and burned out after being there all day long. I know it would mean giving up a lot going from two incomes to one, but I really do think it would be worth it. In time, I’ll hopefully be able to work part-time to help out as well. Now, we just need to see if we can make it a reality and get our debt paid off. Nope, wrong attitude. It WILL happen, there is no if, only when.

Where there is joy.

When I start to feel disconnected from the present either because I’m overwhelmed or stressed or distracted, I try and put away my phone, take a few deep breaths and sort of shake everything off while reminding myself that life is too short for ____. Some days it’s just a matter of telling myself that life is too short to worry about messy floors, laundry, and whether or not the kids get dressed. Other days it’s bigger worries, but if I remind myself to stay in the moment and be (annoyingly) optimistic, I start to feel better. And you know what? Generally everything does get better. I don’t think I’ve ever told myself that things will be okay and they haven’t been.

Kids are actually a great example of staying present and living in the moment. They have so few worries and can find such joy in simple things. While I may hate cleaning up the sticky mess, bubbles are one of those things that bring the biggest smiles and giggles and happy dances. Why would I deny that? Why is it that as we age we often forget what it’s like to be a child and lose some of the joy we once knew? There are times when I catch us saying “No” too often and I have to stop myself because I want them to know joy when it is experienced with great abandon. Isn’t that what I loved about childhood, after all? A little recklessness isn’t the worst thing, and a few scrapes and bruises aren’t the end of the world. They’re a badge of a well-lived childhood, in my mind. Some of my fondest memories involve somewhat reckless behavior whether it was steering a red wagon down our steep driveway and crashing into the fence or tumbling out and ending up with gravel in our knees and elbows or some other dangerous game. There’s nothing more frustrating than hearing “No” all the time, though, so who can blame a child for getting angry when they keep running into roadblocks. While I want to protect them, I also want to make sure they have their independence, so… balance.

Life is just one big balancing act… although sometimes it’s juggling, and sometimes it’s definitely acrobatic. The point is, life (and parenting especially) is just one big circus. I’m beginning to realize that so many things are really out of my hands and it’s up to me to make the best of any situation. Sometimes I fail at doing this and I let the emotions and actions of others affect my mood and it can be quite an effort to ground myself, take breaths and find my joy again, but it’s always worth the energy it takes to do so. It is my hope that I can one day teach Enzo how to “deal” with his highly sensitive nature, since he is so like me, which was once again very apparent during this busy holiday weekend. We’re very sensitive to the moods of everyone around us and we can be having a great time, but all it takes is a few negative interactions and we find ourselves getting irritable and “off.” When I can ground myself, I can positively deal with a tantrum and it’s over so much more quickly than when I have a bunch of emotions bottled up and I’m trying to contain them and they just explode all at once. Oh yeah, he’s definitely like me. We are very emotional people.

Emotions are good, though, and while our highly sensitive nature may mean we struggle at times, we can still also find great joy in the little things, like watching bubbles reflect light in the sun. There’s also no greater joy than listening to tiny feet dance around hundreds of falling bubbles. That, my friends, is magic.

Friday Parenting Rambles

The funny thing about becoming a parent is that you never really know how it will affect you. Some people remain fundamentally the same person they were prior to having children, but others are changed and different. I can’t even really remember when or why I decided I wanted to be a mom so badly. I was never the type that fawned all over babies, and they actually made me really nervous when I was younger. Hold your baby? I don’t think so! At some point, though, especially after Josh and I married, this strange primal need to become a mom took over my every thought. I would be incomplete without children, and so when it took longer than we had hoped to actually have Enzo, I became all consumed with the horrible idea that I might never have a baby to call my own. After months of supplements and whatnot and the heartbreaking realization we’d have to keep trying, I finally took a breath and came to terms with the idea of potentially not having children. I envisioned what that would look like and recognized that another life wouldn’t be as awful as it seemed. We’d fill the void, as it were. Within a few days I was pregnant and those alternative plans never needed to be visited.

The plan, however, was that we would travel and distract ourselves and do everything we could think of that would be easier with just two. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t have maybe postponed having kids just a couple of years so we could have gotten some traveling under our belts, but c’est la vie. I really wanted to have at least one kid before I turned 30… the idea of being “old” when my kids graduated was not a pleasant one. Hindsight is always a funny thing, though; since when did 50 become “old?” It always sounded like such an ancient number when I was a child, but now it’s just another number. You’re only as old as you feel, right? After 50 we’ll have plenty of time to do all the things we didn’t get to do before we had kids, but even more fun is that we’ll get to share so many adventures with them.

While parenting has definitely altered me in many ways, I think fundamentally I’m still the same person I was before, but somewhere along the way I lost a little part of myself. I’ve adapted to being a mom more easily than I ever thought, but it has taken 3 years to start to find more of a balance between being a mom and also allowing me to be… me. The me that isn’t “Mom.” I was stretching myself too thin during that highly coveted thing called Free Time, and was resenting my kids when they encroached on that time. Sure, there are still some nights when we get frustrated because we only have maybe an hour to do what we want, but that is also why I’ve started looking at how I spend my time and figuring out what is most important to me. For instance, I’d have more time if I watched less TV in the evening or was on my phone less often. I would have more time to read, clean, work out, or do other things. It’s all about choices. I can choose to be stressed out all the time because I feel like I have no time, or I can choose how to use my time more wisely and in a way that will make me feel more fulfilled and satisfied. And that my friends, is what I’m working towards… peace and satisfaction and where I will find it.

End Rambling.

Camping: Part 2

Paul Bunyan Land is one of those kind of over-priced, small-town amusement parks that you go to because it’s random and there isn’t a whole lot else to do. It’s kind of cheesy in a fun way, really only has a handful of rides for kids (most of which aren’t running all the time), a petting zoo and some wacky dioramas. It also has This Old Village, which is kind of fun, but we didn’t have time for it with the kids. Right away Enzo saw a few rides that he wanted to go on, and a few more that he stared at for a while, but said, “Maybe next time when I’m bigger.”

Phoebe was fairly nervous and since they wouldn’t allow parents on the rides with small kids, we took a gamble putting her on a ride alone with Enzo after previous experiences. She held on for dear life, but I think she was okay because her big brother was next to her having a blast. They both loved the train (of course) and the boat was also a big hit, which sort of surprised me. I figured Phoebe would panic when the ride operator picked her up and plopped her in the boat rather than me, but she thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Dino and Bunnies

Every day adventures