Photo Show: Seattle

J and I had the opportunity to spend a night sans kid in a five star hotel, for pretty much free. That doesn't happen too often! I'd like to say I slept 10 hours in a row, but I didn't. I still didn't get any sleep, but not for the reason you may be thinking. J slept 10 hours solid like no one's business. I am just a hopeless insomniac.

We did have a great dinner and I had the chance to break out the long lens. That thing is awesome. Please enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shelly's 40th Birthday

I found on Facebook out that today is Shelly Baker Butler's 40th birthday. I met Shelly 10 years ago when I hired her to write for a website I was producing. She was beautiful, young, talented, funny, gracious and about to get married. We only worked together for a short while, and then she moved on to a full time job writing for REI.

Thanks to Facebook, I connected with her again a few years ago. I enjoyed seeing photos of her beautiful family on camping trips or family reunions. They looked so happy and together. I didn't communicate with her much, but I admired her from afar, and felt like I still knew her, at least in the fabricated way that Facebook leads you to believe.

I didn't remember seeing her post for awhile, so around December or so, I looked her up to see what she'd been up to. I was shocked to discover, through posts on her page, that she had been struggling with colon cancer, and had lost her fight. She had died just a few days before. She was only 39. She had two little kids, the oldest one was only six.

This news hit me extremely hard. I did a little bit of internet sleuthing and discovered that she had been keeping a blog about her experience with cancer. I read a few of the entries, my heart breaking a little bit with each one. I finally stopped reading when I came to the one where she was telling her daughter that she couldn't play with her before school because she had to go to chemo. I couldn't even formulate words to describe how sad I was to try and imagine what she had gone through, what her babies had gone through, and how her husband is feeling.

How can this kind of thing happen? How can a young, healthy, vibrant woman leave the world when she had two kids who still needed her so much? How do you reconcile your last days in this kind of situation? What happens now? I barely knew Shelly, but I am kind of beside myself with grief that this is possible.

Facebook can be a good thing. It can make you feel like you are still in touch with people and connected to the world. It just gets a little weird when people leave this world, and those traces of them are still here. It could be healing, I guess, in a way, to pay tribute to her life. I didn't know her or her people well enough to be comfortable leaving a message, but today I am reminded that Shelly was here, that she meant so much to so many people. She would have been 40 today. It seems to me that she deserved a lot more time than that.

Not Ready

A loves to look through her baby photos these days. She's got some sense of her growing body now, and some understanding that she used to be a little baby. When she sees photos of herself as a baby, she says really adorable things, like:

Ohhhh, look at how cute I was!

or

Look, Daddy is holding me. He loved me so much when I was a baby.

I have been a huge fan of family photos since I was tiny, too, and I'm so happy to share this lineage with her. I'm also setting her up with an amazing album that she will be able to enjoy as she grows. I have them organized by each month of her life. Photography and album organization is my main hobby these days, and just about the only thing I have extra energy for.

Last night she wanted to look through the Five Months Old folder. When she was five months old, she was just starting to taste solid food, she was sitting up, and she just had a dusting of hair. Her big blue eyes were very expressive. She was small for her age, because of her heart condition, I think. She was just creeping up on 12 pounds.

This was also the month she had open heart surgery.

I did take some photos of her right out of surgery, for documentation more than anything else. There are a few photos of her as she was recovering in the hospital and some of her stitches. There are even a couple of photos of her dad and I with the shocked expression on our faces as we left our baby with the anesthesiologists. I shudder to recall this experience at all. Even though my daughter is fine now, I'm still traumatized by it. The scars are on her body, but I carry my own unseen wounds.

Many parents in this situation will post these kinds of photos for awareness, or for other reasons, but I feel extremely private about it. I don't even like these images in my own mind, and I certainly don't want to share them with the world. I don't even really want to share them with my daughter.

She doesn't even know she has a heart defect. She doesn't know that her chest looks different from other kids. She's not aware of her scars or of how traumatizing this experience was. Maybe deep in her tissues, she does, but she will never remember it consciously. I don't want to keep her from her own history, but I'm just not prepared to explain it to her. I don't know how she would contextualize those pretty harsh photos. I don't know what kinds of things seeing them would plant in her impressionable mind. Someday I will share them with her if she wants to see it, but not just yet.

I don't want to set her up for life believing she's different, or compromised, or not as strong as her peers. I want her to use her experiences as strengths and never be bogged down by her limitations, especially emotionally. I want her to be informed, and therefore armed, for all the challenges she will meet in her life.

I'm just not sure that sharing these photos with her at three years old will accomplish that. I'm 100% for full disclosure, but to do that I need to be ready, and she needs to be able to understand. We have a little ways to go. I am keeping those photos in that folder, but for now, they're tucked away in a subfolder called Surgery. If she happens to be wandering through and I'm not looking, she at least won't accidentally stumble upon something that she, or I, can't handle.

More Famous Sayings

The entertainment never stops around here! More hilarious sayings from the three-year-old:

Daddy is snoring and it's making me sad and scared. (Me too, girl. Me too.)

You be the fridge, I'll be the freezer. Go! (Uhhhh...)

Mama and A have long hair. Grammy has short hair. Daddy has crazy hair. (Or curly, but we can go with crazy, sure.)

When I am a big girl, can I go to Weight Watchers meetings like Mama? (Hopefully, you won't have this problem.)

Baby (duck, dog, fox, cat, lion, elephant, hot dog, phone, etc.) needs his Mommy!

Lion and snake are in time-out for biting people in the hospital.  (???)

(After waking me up in the middle of the night, climbing into my bed and cuddling up): I need my stuffed animal! Go get it!  (To which I say - Go get it yourself! You woke me up!)

Thank you for doing my laundry. That was very nice of you. (I hope this one keeps up!)

And, my favorite: Mama Chicken! I love you Mama Chicken! Cheep cheep! (I love you too, Baby Chicky!)

These are good, good times. Three is my favorite so far.

I Want

We have entered the relentlessly exhausting world of, "I Want".  I want this toy, I want to play, I want more popsicles. All day long I Want I Want I Want. If she doesn't get it, I hear, "But I WANT it!"

I knew this was coming. I was a kid of many wants myself. I can relate. But in the hundreds of years since I was a small child, I've actually become very successful at tempering my wants. Or maybe just expecting not to get what I want, so not bothering to make a big deal of it.

As with most things, I blame myself for this behavior. She is my only little one, and sometimes, ok, a lot of the time, I can't help myself in the store. I love to see the delighted smile on her face when I buy her a little toy. I didn't get this a lot when I was a kid (I had lots of toys, but we weren't overindulged), and I love to do it because I can. Because how nice is it to live in a world where someone considers what you want and your wishes are granted. I want her to be happy, I think. What's the harm, I think. Well, I'm beginning to get it a little. If she gets something every time, she will expect it. And she does.

My husband is no better. He is fully on the hook for the request I heard the other day. The request that made me break out into a cold sweat while my heart stopped a little.

"Mommy, I want a Barbie Dream House."

You want WHAT?!?!? Nooooooooooooo, anything but that! You don't know what you're saying, little child. You don't really want that. How do you even know such a thing exists??? Oh, because you saw it on TV watching cartoons with Daddy? DAMN IT. Damn it all to hell. I will not have a Barbie Dream House in my house ever, if I can help it. You can have another kind of dream house, maybe, and other dolls, but not that combination. I just can't do that.

Aside from me being overindulgent and my husband not thinking it's a big deal for her to be bombarded with marketing, I blame the materialistic world we live in. We are always on the hunt for the new next best thing. We all participate in it. We all feed into it. At Christmastime, she got asked on the daily what she wanted for Christmas. Does she have a list? What is she asking Santa for? She didn't really get it then, but she gets it now!

When she's denied a request, she just says, well maybe Santa will bring it to me. Or maybe Grammy will get it for me. Or maybe we can go to the store tomorrow and get it. That's how it works, right? You want, and you get. Simple.

I'm going to make an extremely conscientious effort to manage this better. I'm going to restrain from getting her something every time. I'm going to help her set expectation that sometimes you just don't get what you want all the time, and that's ok. Maybe I'll teach her the Rolling Stones song that my mom used to sing to me. It went something like this:

"You can't always get what you want. You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need."

Well played, Rolling Stones. You were so right, all along.

Photo Show: Feathered Friends

I have this super duper new telephoto lens, and I have been having fun capturing these fine feathered friends from afar:

Medical Emergency

I was at an airport tonight, all the way across the country, missing my girl with every fiber in my body.

I sat down and noticed a little backpack sitting all by itself a couple of seats down. We're supposed to be suspicious of such things, but when I saw a mom and her two girls come to claim it, I thought to myself, no mom is going to subject her babies to a bomb in a backpack.

This mom proceeded to change both girls' clothes, I'm guessing about 2 and 5, into matching super-warm jammies. Then she brushed their hair lovingly. They were adorable. It made me miss my girl all that much more. She then made a phone call while the girls were bouncing all over the place.

Don't worry, I thought to that mom in my mind, I am not at all bothered by them. They seem like good babies and it's a handful to bring kids in the airport. She got dirty looks from some people, like why don't you control your kids, but I noticed something else going on. All the other moms around, including myself, were keeping good eyes on them, so they didn't get too far from their mom. This was all unspoken, and automatic. Moms have each other's backs like this. It's instinct. I do this all the time in public without even thinking about it.

We finally got on the plane and I am SO GLAD to be on my way home. About an hour into the trip, the plane was diverted to Toronto due to a medical emergency. This is always disturbing. I wanted to be home so badly!

I found out that it was this mother who was having chest pains. She didn't speak any English, and she is traveling alone with the two girls and nine pieces of luggage. I can barely handle the sadness of this situation, and I can't imagine what she must be feeling.

Now we are on our way home, but she is in yet another strange country, probably in a hospital, 4,000 miles from her husband, who was supposed to pick them up. Who is watching her girls? How is she going to get home? Is she going to be ok? All of these questions are haunting me, and I am so tired but there is no way I will sleep.

I wanted to hop off the plane with her and just hold those babies and tell them that it would be ok. I wanted to stay with her the whole time until she got back home. I don't know anything about that woman, but I know what it's like to love your baby. I know how hard it is to travel with kids. I know the fear of thinking if something happens to me, what will happen to my child?

The worst part is, I can't do anything for her but pray. When I get home I'm going to get my baby out of her bed, take her into mine, and cuddle her with all my might. Life is so unpredictable, and you never know, and all you have is this one moment to make the most of.

Seven Years

I've been feeling weird lately, more weird than usual. My body aches and I'm really tired all the time. It could be the flu, but it hasn't seemed to progress much past this, plus headaches, in almost a week. Very strange. I find myself exhausted during the day, and I try to get a nap around working and being a mom, but you know that's not easy.

However, the last couple of nights, I've woken up in the wee hours and haven't been able to get back to sleep. My body wants to sleep but my mind keeps on rolling. Going back to a couple of blogs ago, I think this is all the in-between mental work I was referring to. It's downright disruptive sometimes!

I've had little bursts of progress, though, and I'm really feeling good about it. I'm on a big campaign to live how I want to live, and that includes possibly random things like eating out of a bowl more, and straightening up the millions of piles around here. Less clutter, more simplicity. Little baby steps feel like giant bounds when I've been stuck for a while.

The other morning, about 4:30am, after being up for hours, I had this epiphany, and after it burst out, I was able to sleep. My epiphany is this: I have a seven year life change cycle, and I'm 42.

I was thinking back to a time when I was 21, and I was really burned out on my warehouse coordination job. I just had other priorities. I didn't want to spend all my time thinking about dock bumpers and Genie lifts and install schedules. I had poetry to write, bands to see, people to meet, and men to enchant. My job got in the way of my creativity. That job was the exact opposite of creativity, and the management was pretty shitty. It could have been a nice solid career starter, but I just was not interested in that kind of life then.

In my spare time, which I had plenty of, I volunteered at a thrift store where all the proceeds went to helping people with AIDS. I lived on Capitol Hill, where all kinds of wacky, alternative things went on, and I was, of course, way into that. Plenty of fodder for poetry and art. When a full time position opened up there, I jumped on it. My stuffy colleagues at the warehouse handling job made fun of me for leaving, and that just made my decision feel all the more justified. I consciously made the decision to leave something that looked stable to do something that was meaningful to my heart. I have not one minute regretted it, and it set me on the path to where I am today.

If I think seven years past that, I made a very similar decision. I was working at Microsoft in their media studio. I liked what I did, but I totally hated working at a big monster corporation. I was being compared to my peers on a bell curve, and not based on my ethic, effort or performance. It was so wrong to me. And, the boys club. Don't even get me started on that bullshit.

I had an opportunity to go work for a competing corporation, and they had a division that created media for non-profits. A chance to use my skills, and expand my skills, get paid well, and still do something good for the world. I jumped. I didn't care about the criticism.

That gig was actually too good to be true, because I got out just before the division folded about two years later. Then I did a little bit of freelance project management before spending a few years at a small, friendly start up. I got on full time there and spent about four years getting some amazing experience in project and account management. Things took a turn there, too, as things do, and I was no longer on board with the direction of the company. I was stable. I was respected, mostly. I had mad skills. But my heart wasn't in it.

I remember being quite elated and refreshed to come to the company I work for now. It was small, and scrappy, and we did amazing work, fueled by amazing creative brains. I was so inspired and the transition was all good. I also had just gotten married and bought a house and had many dreams about many things. I was dedicated to my Buddhist practice. Things were solid.

Almost eight years later, it's a different place. They sold it to a big, monster corporation, and many of the key creative people have abandoned ship. I'm starting to see some of the same trends that I've seen in the past, and I just don't like the way it looks. I'm struggling to make progress professionally, and I'm just not spiritually into a big chunk of work that I have no choice but to do. It feels to me now that it may have run its course. Something needs to change.

I don't like this, because I'm comfortable there, or maybe just complacent. I don't want to put the effort into picking up and finding what's next. I don't know what's out there, or if I'll find anything else that will be as richly satisfying. I have a family to support now, and the stakes are high.

Once I've had a realization like this, I know from experience that it won't just sink back into the shadows. I can try to ignore it, but it just causes a lot more suffering. I don't know what this year will bring, but if the patterns in my life are any indicator, I'm in for some changes. These changes, it appears, are overdue.

Gulp.

Potty Party

Potty training is not exactly a party for us, but you wouldn't know it by looking at these sticker "charts".

There's a party on Mars all day long.

 

 

But, we soon ran out of robot stickers, so we moved on to butterflies.

Butterflies were a good time, and she even got a few for going poop! But then, they were no longer that motivating, so we moved on to...monkeys!



 

 

Her imagination is going wild lately. It's so delightful to watch. She makes up stories and songs for everything that she experiences. Her entire life is one long running commentary. And, she is very methodical about everything. She carefully chooses which sticker goes next, and its placement on the background. She puts similar stickers together. With the monkeys, she was making sure that each monkey got a banana or a flower for a while. When the scene was complete, she tallied up the girl and boy monkeys, and told stories about what they were all doing.

 

We've moved on now, to frogs. I asked her what kind of a background she wanted, and she wanted the frogs to be hopping on rooftops and trees. I may have gotten a little crazy with that one. We'll see.

 

Maybe I'm making this a little bit too fun, though, because what I really want is for the potty training to be OVER! She's really dragging this one out. We've tried all kinds of methods, and we refuse to make it a fight. I just need to have faith. All parents I've ever talked to, and the pediatrician, say that one day they just get it, and it's done.

 

Of course, as far as I'm concerned, if she wants to collaborate on these scenes even after she's going to the bathroom by herself, that's just fine with me. A little art never hurt anyone.

It's a New Year

It's a new year. We're off and running. I was thinking about resolutions and there are many things I should probably accomplish this year - lose weight, get more money, be happier, yada yada yada. All noble goals, but I'm going with something else this year, something a little more general but fundamental to driving all other goals and desires.

I want to work on ridding my mind of my fear. Lofty, huh? Fear fuels anger, anxiety, failure, confusion and inaction. I want to be done with all these things. I need to conquer and destroy what is keeping me from my happy mind. This is probably going to take me longer than one short year. It might take me my whole life, but I have to get back on the path.

I've been in quite a mental slump lately, and I want out. Slumps are super uncomfortable for me because I like to set my mind on something and get on with it. Slumps are also necessary. Sometimes you have to (or be forced to) pause so that you can allow the right answers to come to the surface. Sometimes I have to shut up a little bit and tap into the wisdom around me, so I can make the right decisions. These are the in-between times, where all the real work is done.

I don't really have a methodical plan for how to get rid of fear. It's not an effort comparable to pulling a semi-truck with my body like a strong man. I think it's more of a graceful mental massage. Staying in the moment. Mindfulness. Meditation. I need to tap back into that stream because I can't survive with this wild painful mind. I need to regain my mental suppleness. I think I can do it, but I have to keep my eye on the prize, with constant vigilance.

Also, I want to go real easy on myself this year. Easier than ever. I will be more forgiving and less demanding of myself. I will sit down when I need to rest. I will get out when I need a break. I will walk and do yoga more, as a favor to my body. I will ask for help when I need it. I will break down and weep when I feel out of control, instead of saving it up for a convenient PMS excuse. I will surround myself with the people that I can safely share my happiness with, and my sadness.

I will save some energy for myself, because challenging fear is a huge feat. It's not going down easy. If I have nothing left for this battle, I'll be in this same place this time next year. This is one resolution I don't want to slip away into obscurity.

Wish me luck.

The Three Year Old Says

I've been collecting some pretty funny, and surprising, sayings from my darling girl. Every time I think she should watch her mouth, I think that I should watch my own mouth. And so it continues...

One morning, I woke up to the sound of A in her room, rummaging around, saying:
"I can't find my binky! I'm freaking out!"

Every time I try to comb her hair, especially when it's wet, she will cry:
"You're making me crazy!"

This one is a little disturbing, but I think maybe it was caused by pine needles from the Christmas tree?
"There's a needle in my pants!" 
After an exhaustive search, no offending needle was found.

Every time I leave the house, I hear A in her sweet voice, pleading:
"Can I go with you?"

This one makes me smile a little, but it doesn't amuse her Daddy very much, especially when it's applicable:
"Daddy's a grouch!"

And then there's this. I am not taking the blame for this one, because I very rarely say this version of the f word. She, however, applies it to many things. Daddy gets the dagger eyes from me on this one, because I think he started it and it makes us all sound like very disrespectful people.
"I don't want no fricken juice!"
"Turn off the fricken light!"

She knows it's not cool. We were out in the yard the other day and a neighbor was using a power tool.
"Mama, what's that fricken noise?"
Me, trying to keep a straight, stern face: "What is the word you are not supposed to say?"
A, head down: "Fricken. I'm not supposed to say fricken......but what is that fricken noise?"

We're working on that one, and trying to explain why it's ok to say "freaking" but not "fricken". I always thought I had a good grasp on the English language, but the subtleties are killing me here.

Photo Show - Toys and Play Time

The birthday/Christmas season has been good to the girl. Lots of new toys and experiences were introduced around here, and three bags of old toys were donated to make room for the new.

Here are portraits of some of our favorite, and most photogenic, toys:

Hello Kitty and her people, all lined up (arranged by A, me playing with depth of field)

 

A smaller group (arranged and shot by A, with a little help)

 

Whoooooo?

This guy talks, walks, and rises up on two legs!

 

This takes up her entire room. We can't wait until summer, where it will make a perfect deck tent.

And, the dreaded bath paints. J does not like these, but we have fun anyway. They're soap!

This one's mine, but isn't it amazing? I can't wait to put it out in the yard in better weather!

 

It's Lunch!

Ever since A started preschool, I've kicked lunch up a notch. I'm not sure why I feel so serious about it, but I do. I searched for a while for just the right lunch box. I make it a point to make her lunch myself so that everything can be healthy, colorful and nicely arranged. One night J started cutting stuff up for her lunch, and I heard myself tell him, "But, J, that's not right. You need to do it bento style." For real, I said this. I'm not sure if A even notices, but it matters to me.

Organic juice box, carrots, mandarin oranges, peanut butter & jelly mini-sandwich,

granola bar, pirates booty (veggie flavor)

Of course I love my baby, but I also really like being this girl's mom. It means a lot to me to do it right, and even to do it with some sort of style. Maybe it's a little overkill in preschool, but it's never too early to have a fun lunch, in my opinion.

I remember making my own lunch when I was a kid. I remember very vividly the last sandwich I made myself in first grade. It was peanut butter and banana. By the time I got to eat it the banana had gotten nasty. From then on, I'm pretty sure I just bought lunch. It's not that my mom didn't want to do it right, or do it with some sort of style, but she worked full time and she had three kids going on, so she just plain didn't have time.

I always intend to make time to make lunch count. It's part of expressing my joy in being a mom. These little things count, even if it only counts to me.

Mixed Media

The girl has declared herself an artist. I'm so ok with this it isn't even funny. I don't care how messy it gets or even how much money I am sure to spend on various supplies. I'm even secretly hoping she runs with it. Ssshhhhhhh!

In addition to the amazing scissors and glue sticks she recently acquired, she got a frame decorating kit for her birthday. She proceeded to use every single sticker, jewel, color of paint and glitter pen on every millimeter of space on the frame. Hey, it's her vision!

 

The work in progress:

 

 

 

When she was finished with that, she took the paint and branched out to the paper on the easel:

 

 

 

Not wanting to be confined by medium, she proceeded to paint over all the Christmas stickers and faces that she had already drawn:

 

 

 

Still not satisfied (I like the spirit!), she added some crayon the next day:

 

 

 

Perhaps the final touches will be this layer of glued on paper for contrast, and some fringe cut on the edges:

 

 

 

She seems to constantly be in the cycle of creation and destruction. It's a fascinating (and kind of maddening) process to observe. I love how deeply concentrated she looks when she's really into it:

 

 

 

I hope she never loses her experimental spirit, and is never afraid to express herself.

 

 

 

 

Mars

As you can see, the Mars landscape (aka potty chart) is coming along nicely. Lots of mid-size stickers for pee and a couple of big ones for when she tried to go #2 in the potty.

Here is a typical scenario and conversation about pooping:

A goes in the other room, out of my sight, and gets very quiet. The only time she's not talking, singing or otherwise chattering, is when she's asleep and when she's pooping where she shouldn't be. I can usually find her behind the couch or the curtain. Head down, eyes up, looking guilty.

Me: A, are you pooping?

A (quiet, strained voice): No.

And when I go in there, I'm greeted with: Get out of here! Go away!

I'm not sure what I can do with that, other than stay calm and keep encouraging her to go in the potty. This child does not take the easy way, ever. She will get it eventually, I can only assume.

Mars is getting crowded. I'm about to switch out that background for a nature scene for all the beautiful glitter butterfly stickers I just got. I'm hoping to populate it with many LARGE butterflies.

Best of Times, Worst of Times

If you wake me up in the middle of the night, watch out. I am not friendly. The longer you keep me up, the less friendly I get, until I am just downright mad. It's not a good scene. I try to keep it under control, and just remove myself before raising my voice, but sometimes I can't restrain a frustrated growl. Surely you can relate, right?

Just after midnight I was rudely awoken by the little one climbing out of her bed, slamming her door and creeping to the kitchen to play with her new scissors. J intercepted her and then she came to snuggle with me. But she didn't sleep. I was drowsy enough to put up with this for a while, but after a couple of hours, and maybe a little growling, I just got up and went to lay on the couch.

After an hour or so, I sensed a disturbance in the force. I opened my eyes to see a little head, bobbing just over the top of the couch, making her way to the kitchen. It's a little eerie when she does this because her padded feet are practically silent on the wood floor and she looks like a floating shadow ghost baby. I've opened my eyes more than once from sleeping and jumped out of my skin, with her standing right at my face, looking at me. But this time I was onto her.

She snuck into the kitchen.

"A! Go to bed!" I say to her.

"No." she replies in a tiny but completely firm voice. She ain't doing it.

I get off the couch and drag myself into the kitchen. She is standing there at 3am, in the dark, her big eyes puffy, her hair a tangled mess, her cute little round toddler belly sticking out in her footie pj's, and she's holding her scissors. She has a total cow when I take them from her hands and put her back in bed.

"Mama took my scissors!!!" she wails.

Putting my sleep deprived monster mind aside for a moment, I had to smile, just a little, to myself. How cool is life when you are so excited about your new scissors that you feel compelled to get up in the middle of the night to cut paper? That's a trouble-free existence right there. I want her to have as much of a trouble-free life as she can when she's little, without making too much trouble for my life as a result. Is that so wrong?

We'll figure it out. I hope.

Also, the potty training, not going so well. She seems to be unlearning all the good habits she just learned, just to keep us on our toes. At least she's predictably unpredictable. Sigh.

Like A Boss

I'm feeling like a genius today. I know this is nothing new in the scheme of all things, but in the scheme of our things at home, I see some great things happening.

We've been having some setbacks with the ol' potty training, especially when it comes to the poop. She's holding it at school (still no accidents there!), and then when she's home the next day she explodes, in a bad way.

She gets stickers at school for going potty, and has been asking for stickers at home. She loves the stickers, so I've been trying to figure out what kind of potty chart to put up at home as an incentive. This morning, it all came together, and thus, I am a genius!

I already had some super cool robot alien stickers to donate to the cause.

 

 

 

I drew a Martian landscape (use your imagination and it looks just like Mars!).

 

 

When she pees in the potty, she gets a small sticker and when she poops, she's granted a big sticker. Hopefully within the week an amazing sticker story will appear on the paper. And hopefully those big stickers are cool enough to do the trick.

 

I'm so optimistic about this project, that I'm already planning my next background...



Something Delicious

If you are so inclined, might I recommend a delicious alcoholic beverage that I have recently discovered? I don't know what it is officially called, but it is deee-lish!

The Recipe:
One bottle of Angry Orchard hard apple cider
One shot of caramel flavored vodka

Alternate Recipe, in the case that you can't find caramel vodka:
One bottle of Angry Orchard hard apple cider (maybe another kind would work too, I don't know)
One shot of regular old vodka (I used Grey Goose)
One splash of Torani caramel syrup (I could only find sugar free, and it was yummy!)

Now, I will say that while I don't mind frilly chick drinks, I always roll my eyes at flavored vodka. I mean, really. What is the deal with marshmallow flavored alcohol, or cotton candy? Yuck! I've never been a fan of any kind of sugary drinks (although I like sugary food maybe more than I ought to), so sugary vodka sounds like a big ol' head bomb to me.

This concoction, though, puts the caramel flavor to good use, and it balances nicely with the bitter cider. It's not hard on those of us prone to alcoholic headaches, either, and that's a bonus! It's a nice treat for when you are in the mood for a relaxing, yet not taxing, adult beverage.

The Potty Train

All aboard!

I *think* we are getting potty trained! We have had several days in a row wearing underwear during the day with no accidents, even at school, and even pooping in the potty. I don't want to jinx it by declaring it a done deal, because this kid keeps us on our toes in all other areas, and I expect her to hold out on us with this too. But, so far, so good.

It helps that she can't wear pull-ups to school. She went through 3-4 school days with 1 or 2 accidents a day, and then a couple of days with no accidents at all! Once she went to school, we just went all underwear during the day at home too. It's been messy, but less and less messy every day.

She seems to have an enthusiasm for it lately, which is good. It just gets a little pesky when we're out in public and she wants to use the potty several times just for sport. She just trickles out a little pee and then she wants to do the whole routine of getting toilet paper, flushing, washing hands, and in the process she touches every surface available. It's gross, just thinking about all those nasty germs!

Then, ten minutes later she wants to go again, because she can! Who am I to rain on this parade? It's all part of the process, and soon she'll discover that going to the bathroom is quite dull and only done when really necessary. Until then, lots of hand sanitizer.

The pull-ups at night seem kind of silly now, because she often wakes up dry. She waits until morning to pee in the potty. I'm keeping the pull-ups for the time being, because sometimes she sleeps in my bed, and I don't even want to think about an accident there. It has happened, but only once, and once is quite enough of that business.

It's a pretty cool milestone unfolding around here. All parties are excited!

Now, to get rid of that binky...

Halloween Report

Halloween was a huge production this year. It had ups and downs. I'm thrilled to be able to experience this through the eyes of a 3-year-old, but, oh, man, the life of a 3-year-old can be dramatic, exhausting and a little spazzy.

Highlights:
- Hunting for and carving pumpkins!

- Super fun preschool party with all her new classmates and her new best friend, Miss Heather

- The spooky soundtrack that Daddy played. She loved it so much she woke up the next day asking repeatedly for the "ghost songs". They creep me out, but this little lady can't get enough.

- A and J decorated the house and yard with vampires, bats, ghosts and lights

- Making cookies together for Daddy!

Lowlights:
- Under no circumstance would she don the adorable bear costume we got for her. Not when she's at a party with all of her other dressed-up classmates, not with the promise of trick-or-treating (and candy!), not with me dressed up in my bear costume, and certainly not when J tried to beg, plead, bargain, cajole and otherwise influence her. She wasn't having it. "No, I'm good.", she would say. Uh, ok...

- Thus, no going around the neighborhood "scaring" the neighbors in our bear costumes, as planned. More of a bummer for me than for her, clearly.

- Way. Too. Many. Sweets.

- Squirrels munched on our pumpkins! What the hell?

All-in-all a fun and interesting experience. I'm up for many more years of Halloween with my favorite original, headstrong and hilarious girl.