21 Months

Emma,

It’s true I’ve been slacking on posting about your new developments these past few months, mainly because it seems I have more specific occurrences to blog about, but believe me you have changed so much in just a few short months. It is what makes moms proud and sad (see previous weepy post.) For right now though I want to reminisce about all of your wonderful little 21 month old quirks! 

Longer Hair: Your hair has grown so much (to me) in just a few short months! I can see us needing to put it up when the warmer weather sets in because no one likes sweaty hair stuck to their neck. On the other hand, you hate it when I try to put anything in your hair so we shall see what kind of epic battles ensue.

One Week On/ One Week Off: Right now you seem to have dipped your toe into the terrible twos. I say that because every other week you will be beside yourself, literally falling on the floor when something does not go your way. I’m talking every morning I drop you off at daycare you are on the floor in a fit of hysterics and when we get home every day if even the smallest thing goes wrong you’re back to the ground physically showing your disapproval. Then, the tides will turn and we will go through a week of pure joy, laughter, hugs, kisses, patience and boy is it amazing! I hope we can keep this balance for the remainder of the terrible twos but for now I’m not counting on it.

 

Potty Training: Since I wrote a post a few weeks back you have maybe gone potty 4 times on the potty. I am nervous 2 years will come and go and I will have to “amp it up” as one Billy Banks would say. Hey maybe I can get him to come over to tackle this potty training thing. He seems ready to take on any challenge and his coaching abilities are top notch!  

Singing: I’m not sure if I posted on this before but you have become quite the song bird. Your current favorites are itsy bitsy spider and bingo.

Repeater: You don’t always do it right away, but you WILL repeat ANYTHING you’ve heard. Even if it was said in passing like a month ago, nothing is off limits. And I hate to admit it but lately God and Jesus have entered your vocabulary and not in a prayerful way. I am hoping you didn’t pick those sayings up from me but eeerrr uuumm you do ride in the car with me twice a day every day so yeah. Just so folks don’t think we are sinful name slanderers, you do also say “oh boy oh boy” and “oooooh maaaaaaan” and “yippie!” which I find ridiculously cute!

Reading: Lately you love to pick up books and “Read” them to anyone who will sit still for you. You’ve even memorized the book “Brown Bear Brown Bear” which is adorable.

Shapes: Your other favorite thing is shapes! Whenever we color together you always ask me to draw a circle, square, or triangle. Both your father and I have geometric minds so you seem to be following right in our footsteps.

And that’s it for the 21 month wrap up. Each month seems to very so much from the next. I promise to chime in on here when new and exciting developments happen!

Love,
Mom

Biology is Destined to Tear Us Part

Once again I have been reminded of how precious time is and I’m getting all weepy (read: WARNING this is a sentimental post).  These past few weeks there has been a momentary shift in my toddler’s never ending struggle for independence; she has wanted to cuddle at bedtime! I say struggle for independence because she’s not quite there yet. It’s frustrating for both of us, but as a mother, part of me wants to see her grasp new concepts and overcome physical boundaries but I also can’t help but be grateful for every misstep. Every time she can’t quite get her shoes on, every time she needs me to reach something means that I still have more time left.

I can see it coming all too soon on the distant horizon, my child growing up. The physicality of the situation got real a few weeks ago. Like I mentioned, Emma has grown clingy at nighttime. At first I found it to be yet another challenge in my parenting marathon but it didn’t take long for me to realize the amazingness of the situation. It was the first time in months…maybe even close to a year…that Emma has let me hold her/ rock her to sleep. Usually her bedtime routine consists of quiet playtime followed by story time followed by a kiss and then the blankie hand off in the crib. She was way too squirmy and rambunctious to hold at all. But lately, she wants to be held and rocked right before being placed into her crib and I love it! The problem is after months of not really noticing, Emma has grown to the point where I can barely hold her and rock her standing up for long periods of time!  My baby is growing up (insert sniffing here.)

It’s like the very fabric of our being is designed to encourage separation and independence. When I can no longer physically hold my child in my arms, I know time is ticking away. Just yesterday she could fit into the crook of my arm and now I am struggling against back pain and leg palpitations to hold up my sweet 30 lb little girl as her arms lovingly grasp around my neck. Her legs like tree trunks, swing toward the Earth below, ready to take root, ready to stand on their own. Every inch, every moment of growth takes her farther away from me.

Don't worry, this moment of utter weapery is coming to a close. 7 lbs, 30 lbs, or 100 lbs and 5 feet tall, it doesn't matter, she will always be my baby.

It’s Time to Get Real

Disclaimer: Emma, I am once again apologizing in advance for posting embarrassing pictures and poking fun at your toddler existence, but all things considered after some rough toddler times, mommy needs a minute to just laugh and considering how you will pretty much laugh at anything at this stage of your life I'm hoping you'll look back on these images as lighthearted memories and laugh.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen the article, but Buzzfed has a pretty good finger on the pulse when it comes to all things hip and trendy (do people even SAY hip and trendy anymore?!?) So I’m kind of surprised I haven’t seen any parenting blogs reference this yet but you guys… #thestruggle. That’s right, if you have a few minutes and promise not to get sucked into the survey taking, 21 reasons why, buzzfed vortex and return to my humble little corner of the Internet then here: the story behind the struggle. Geared toward teenagers yes, but BEGGING to be introduced into the world of toddlers. Actually it is the complete embodiment of the life of toddlers. And so without further adue, I give you toddlers: the struggle:

There is no snow on this particular patch of ground for which I can frolic about in and get stuck to have a tantrum. The struggle.

This fork inhibits my ability to shovel more of this vegetable free food into my mouth. The struggle is real. 

Putting the playdoh back in the cup when mommy asks you to so you can get dressed to face the day as society sees fit…oh yeah struggle.

These wood chips unfortunately will not throw themselves so I suppose I shall have to be bothered to do it. Struggle.

Um excuse me but I can’t fit more than 5 stuffed animals into my arms at the same time. I’m gona need you to invent something to solve this problem stat... struggle oh so real.

STOP…tantrum time!

Mickey mouse has tried to escape my death grip. He shall not. The struggle. 

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Getting up to actually use the bathroom…when I can just go in my diaper, yeah that struggle is real. 

Keeping crafting items out of my mouth... Total for realness Struggle.

Mommy loves you and believe me, we are "struggling" through these new experiences together!

100th Blog Post: My Blogging Process

Hurray! I have somehow managed to wrangle my wandering, unconventional thoughts and string them together into basic, cohesive sentences that people sometimes read! Yay for me! In all honesty, this is my own self controlling way of making a dream come true. I self publish! A few months back when I started the job I had before my current one, my co-worker asked (being an editor) if I was published. I paused for a moment very amused by the question and finally answered that yes, I was published in online; non-fiction and did not go into any more detail than that. I know how scholarly of me. 

I thought I would take my 100^th post to explain the method to my madness if you will, how I come up with and find time to write my blog posts. There is a very simple answer with a complex explanation. Everything I write is completely sporadic. I don’t know if that’s very romantic/ classic author of me or just streamline with how thoughts rumble continuously through my head. Either way, the words always seem to come. Sometimes they come all at once. For example, I am writing this post as a string of four separate posts. All of them are topics I just needed to get out of my system at the time. Now later on, I might only actually publish two or three of them depending on how passionately I feel about them or how relevant they are to my current situation. Believe it or not I probably have at least 20-30 posts written that I never published for one reason or the other. 

Sometimes I will be in the moment and want to write down what I am feeling. Other times I like to just be straight forward and talk about what we have been up to. I try to stay true to my blog theme of parenting and motherhood keeping in mind my kids will most likely read this someday. Maybe it’s because of this or the fact that it is difficult to be vulnerable with strangers and even more difficult to be vulnerable with people you know that I don’t share everything on here. I hope to be brave and get the most important stuff out. People do have to maintain some level of mystery about them so there is my doggy answer to the whole avoidance thing. I also self-edit which is why some of my writing is all over the place. It’s easy for me to edit the voice of others but I cannot for the life of me reword my own voice at all. I suppose if you have been reading PWOC log enough you’ve picked up on what I really mean to say or what I am actually describing. Believe it or not, I do click the spell check button every now and then.

I usually write my posts in the evenings after work but every now and again I sneak one in during an afternoon nap on the weekends. This is why they have dwindled down to just one a week or even less. I have become overwhelmed with exhaustion at the end of each day now but I still can’t let this part of me go. It’s the one part of me I have that I do on my own. It’s a one man band back here on the other side of the keyboard and I cherish these few moments I get to reflect and unleash my pent up creativity. 

So I guess that’s it. Yay for 100 posts! Here’s for 100 more to capture a million more memories.

Laundry

There it sits, my fickle foe, staring at me from the basket below

It starts out small, quite tame and mellow

Then has the nerve to grow and overflow

Out of control colors and darks, whites, lights, delicates, and the like

By looking at me you could not tell that so much of my woes belonged to this foe

So much of my physical aches and pains, so much of my emotional turmoil flairs up

At the sight or even mention of its name

My soul is but an extension of the cold white plastic basket

The completion of which holds the success of my motherhood in its balance

A lost pair, a forgotten shirt?

Oh you cyclical ball and chain you hurt!

You hurt the fiber of my very being and yet your fibers depend on me so

I am ever faithful and loyal to your needs and somehow I find myself succeeding

In your completion oh can it be true

The mounds have faded away the time it, flew

When I think I’m in the clear, I breathe a sigh of relief

Then my glance moves sideways, just to take a quick peak

And marvel over my glorious feats

But there it is, staring right back at me, not gone just diminished temporarily

And still it waits mocking, longing, suffocating my existence for another day

Laundry.

My Toddler Isn’t the Only One Who Repeats Mistakes

I really feel like a broken record a lot of the time. I will explain to Emma why to do or not do something and there she goes doing the exact opposite. I have started to realize that with young children repetition is just a part of learning. The thing I don’t do is to think of how I might need to apply this concept to my parenting. And I am of course referring to enrolling Emma into gymnastics.

It all started several months ago when I thought it sounded “cool” to become a soccer mom. Seriously what was I thinking?!? I guess it was a fun “organized activity” that got us out of the house but honestly having a ball and a field would have worked just as well. 18 month olds (at least mine) are not meant to follow directions…like at all. My real light bulb moment should have been when a few minutes into the last soccer session Emma spoke her first sentence, “I want to go.” It blew me away (grasping so much vocabulary!) and then the actual meaning behind the sentence finally struck a chord with me. After weeks of her running away from the coaches and throwing tantrums every few minutes what should have been obvious from the start finally came to me, my child was not ready for organized sports. I guess somewhere inside of me I clung to the idea that maybe, just maybe she just didn’t like soccer. Soccer to me was the negative balance in the equation when it should have been so obvious that she just wasn't ready.

Fast forward a few short months and the polar vortex must have frozen my short term memory because there I was signing Emma up for gymnastics. In all fairness, I thought gymnastics would really be more her thing since she loves climbing and tumbling. So far on that front I have been right on. In fact, she climbed out of her crib for the first time THE DAY after her first class, so at least she learned something. The problem? She will not sit still or follow directions. Yup, we’re right where we left off with soccer, only this time it’s me running around an enclosed, echoy gym after a screaming toddler. I hope I haven’t scared her for life because each experience was only me trying to share a something new with her but I’m pretty sure that’s not how she saw it. It was more like here, come to this awesome place where there are soft things to climb on but you can’t climb over there, the big kids are gymnasticsing over there and oh yeah now it's time to sit still for 10 minutes to do stretches. 

Again, it’s been great to have an indoor activity to go to during this unbearable winter but this past Saturday, we barely made it half way through the class before I couldn’t take the tantrums anymore and we just left. I’m starting to wonder if following directions isn’t Emma’s thing at all or if she is just testing boundaries with me or maybe it’s just what I need to own up to…my kid is too young for this stuff. It’s not her thing yet, although I hope it is one day. I really want her to find something she loves doing, something like what basketball and girl scouts where for me, a way to express herself and fully embrace who she is.