Sneezing and Muffin Tops

Evie is really into mimicking lately. On Sunday, while we were at Church, she found a kleenex in the diaper bag. She would squint her eyes shut and puff air out her nose and then wipe her nose with the kleenex. I think she was "sneezing." Whatever she was doing, it was so funny to watch.

A few nights ago we were going through the nightly rigamarole of trying to get Anna in bed. Both Dan and I were in Anna's bedroom. I admit that I felt pretty defeated, so I got in her bed and started to doze off. But before I was completely gone I heard Anna say, "Dad, you eat a lot of food? You got a fat tummy? You got a muffin top in there?" Maybe that's why Dan went to the gym this morning.

Last night Dan and I were talking about how to spend our tax return and making plans for our yard and our house. We had talked about finishing our basement but decided in the last week or so to wait until next year. Part of my reason for being so anxious to finish our basement is because Dan has said that he thinks two kids are plenty, but before he would even consider a third child, we'd need to finish the basement. Yesterday, I was looking at Evie and thinking about how quickly she's growing up. I have been thinking that we really should get started on the adoption application process. So last night I brought it up with Dan.

Me: So, how do I say this? I'm just thinking about the basement. Um, ... I guess what I'm really trying to say is that I think it's time to start the adoption application process again and I'm wondering if you're gonna make me wait until the basement is finished.

Dan: I don't think it matters whether we finish the basement or not because I think I'm done. I'm not sure I can handle a third kid.

Me: It's just that Evie's growing up so fast and it will take six months to finish the application anyway, so I think now's a good time to start.

Dan: No. I think we're done. Two is plenty.

Me: Well, in that case, can we get a swing set this summer?

That got an easy yes. Dan once swore that we'd never have a swing set because it's bad for the grass, but I've been coaching Anna all summer to ask Dad for a swing set and I think he's starting to soften, especially with my awesome negotiating skills.

The Pool of Bethesda

This is one of Anna's recent drawings. I'm looking forward to the day when she can tell me about her pictures.

Tonight as I was filling the bathtub, Anna set out about four washcloths on the edge of the tub. She often likes to wrap her bath toys in the washcloths and she says she's wrapping presents. This time though she told me that some of them were bad guys and good guys. I can tell she's been playing with little boys because the other day she told me she was Iron Man and she asks all the time if a certain character in a TV show is a good guy or a bad guy.

Then she told me, "These washcloths are by bubbly water, but Jesus healed them." Carl Bloch's painting, "Healing at the Pool of Bethesda" hangs in the foyer of our Church and lately Anna and I have been spending a good deal of time in that foyer. So we've talked about the painting and how the people are waiting to enter the pool to be healed, but Jesus came and healed them. Then today we were watching the Church's DVD about the life of Christ, which includes a scene modeled after Bloch's painting. I knew she was listening when we talked about this story, but I guess I didn't think she understood much of it. I guess she picked something up.

Anna still seems to be in the middle of the Terrible Two's roller coaster and veers wildly from content to completely distraught. I'm getting better and better at ignoring tantrums, but I could do without them. But at least a few times a day she still reminds me that she's a sweet little kid. Tonight in her enthusiasm, she scratched my ear and when I told her "ow," she gave me a big wet kiss to make it all better.

Egg Hunts

Last Saturday we had a ward breakfast and Easter egg dash. 

Evie looking cute after breakfast but before the Easter egg dash.

 Dad explains that the eggs should go in the basket.

 Evie loved picking up the eggs, but sometimes the grass got in her way. She'd try to grab an egg and grab all the grass around it too, but she did alright for her first egg hunt.

 Taking a bite of a mini Snickers--yum!

 Still working on that Snickers.

 Evie's thinking, "I wish these people would leave me alone and let me finish this Snickers!" She had chocolate drool all down her front.

 "Look at all these eggs! I'm sure one of them has got to have another Snickers in it."

Neighborhood Easter Egg Dash

Our HOA put together another Easter egg dash through the grass. 

 By now Evie has figured out that good things can be found in these plastic eggs.

 Anna had to grab eggs all by herself this time since Dad was still at work and couldn't help her this time. She did pretty well, but we need to work on her strategy just a bit. At one point, I pointed to a bunch of eggs and told her to go grab those, but she ran right past them to some eggs near a bunch of kids, as if those eggs were somehow better because kids were grabbing them up faster.

 Eating Smarties

It was a chilly, windy evening. We can't wait for warmer weather!

Little Scribbler

Evie loves to scribble with crayons, pencils, pens, whatever. Two weeks ago, I put a piece of paper on the kitchen floor and gave her some Crayola Twistables and she produced this picture. Since then she has been happily coloring. Last week we were shopping at Wal-mart and Evie desperately wanted the pencil I had stuck behind my ear. As soon as I gave it to her, she started to scribble in my planner and it kept her happy for the next twenty minutes, which is a lifetime for a baby, but not quite long enough for me to get through all my shopping. Now if I want  Evie to sit still so I can do her hair or something like that, I sit her in her bumbo chair at the table and give her some crayons. It's like magic.

Little Personalities

Sometimes I really hate the fact that as my kids grow up they have a will of their own. It can make simple things, like getting in the car, so much harder. But I also love to see their little personalities come out.

Anna has been talking for what seems like forever, but recently it feels like her speech has become more articulate and nuanced. For some reason these days she likes to ask me if she "should" do something. "Should I do it, Mom?" and if I say simply, yes, she tells me I need to say she should.

And whenever we go around a corner in the car, she often yells out, "We're tipping Mom!" I figured three isn't too young to begin talking about the basic laws of physics, so I explained to her that her body is leaning to one side because it wants to keep moving in the same direction it was moving in before we turned. So now sometimes she'll exclaim, "My body wants to keep moving in the same direction."

About a month ago, in one of our brighter potty training moments, Anna realized she was wetting her pants and asked Dad to put her on the potty, where she finished the job. I came in to the bathroom to celebrate this major achievement and she said, "Mommy, my body needs to eliminate." I know she picked that phrase up from me as I've tried to help her understand the concept of going to the bathroom before she goes in her pants, but it was so surreal to hear it coming out of her little mouth.

Evie isn't really talking yet, but I think she said the word "shoe" the other day (I guess it's been three weeks since she said it). She loves shoes and I think it's because she's figured out that when we put shoes on, we usually go outside. My mom was taking my girls for the day and loading Anna's car seat in her minivan. Since Evie likes to run out into the street, I was keeping her inside and she wasn't happy about it. She brought me one of her shoes and was babbling pretty emphatically and that's when I realized she was repeating the same sound, "shoe" over and over. I consider it to be her first word even though she sometimes says mama, dada, Nana, and for awhile there I really think she was saying no although not necessarily in the right context.

She is our little talker and I get the sense that she's probably using words, but I just don't understand her. She's figured out that she gets more attention when she babbles loudly, so she does a lot of that. And she's still growling when she finds something she really likes. She also knows that all the good food is in the pantry and if I open the pantry, it doesn't matter if she's on the other side of the house. She gets to the kitchen as fast as she can toddle and starts demanding food. It's only become worse since I've started using food more in my efforts to potty train Anna (still not going all that well).

Her other favorite things these days are my wooden spoons. If I pick her up near the stove, she'll point and start yelling at me until I hand her one. She loves it when I give her a bowl that she can stir the spoon in. Anna also likes to take all the letter magnets off our fridge and put them in bowls for the two of them to stir. Then Anna will put the magnets in small containers in the fridge. She tells me she's making soup or ice cream. The other day I opened my fridge and found that the bottom shelf on the door was stuffed full of wooden blocks and there were more in a bowl on another shelf.

A few weeks ago when I was visiting my neighbor, Evie found a bottle of lotion with a pump on top. She would put her hands around the pump and then rub her hair. I think she was acting out washing her hair. She did it several times and it was totally cracking me up.

Catching Up: January's Photos

Anna loves wearing my boots.

For some reason, my kids love hiding in the cupboards, whether it's in the kitchen or the bathroom. Of course this means taking everything out of the cupboards first, which I hate, because then I have to put it back. Anna also left us a lovely mural in this cupboard. I guess she took some colored pencils in with her one time. But I sort of like it and I don't really need to worry about cleaning it up since no one can really see it unless they look for it.

Anna loves to sit in boxes or laundry baskets with her blankets and pretend that they are her "house."

Poopy Fingers and Silly Bands

Excerpt from today's email to Ryan:

Things are going a little better for me this week, in large part because I set very low expectations for myself. I decided that nap time and potty training weren't going to work well together. So I gave up on having Anna take naps and focused on getting Evie one good nap. Miraculously for me, for a few days there she slept for almost three hours. I was totally amazed since she has been taking one hour naps, but at the same time now that Anna's not taking naps, nap time isn't such a break for me. But it's nice to have a few hours in which Anna isn't squeezing the life out of Evie or yanking her toys away or doing whatever else that makes Evie cry. In some ways it was sort of nice not to worry about fighting with Anna to get her to take a nap and she does a better job playing on her own, so I did squeeze a few things besides laundry and dishes in this week.

The potty training is a less positive story. I guess I need to go back to the potty training books, but I feel like I have tried everything and it's just not clicking with her. We've reached the point where as long as I get her to sit on the potty (usually by bribing her with candy) every thirty minutes, then she keeps her panties dry. But I can't get her to anticipate the need to go at all, so I spend a lot of my day trying to get her to the bathroom before she has an accident and most days I forget at least once or twice. I made all these commitments about potty training and I haven't kept a single one. I said I'd never use candy to bribe her. I planned to have her potty trained early, and I said I'd never use pull-ups. These days it's candy all day long and whenever I can't take it anymore or we need to go out, I stick her in pull-ups, which she just treats like a diaper. And whenever I talk to other moms about it, they all give me advice, but that just makes me feel like a bigger failure because I feel like I've tried it all and it's just not working for us. I think what's really going on here is that Anna is training me to better understand her personality. She just likes to take her time about these things and I'm sure that one day it will just click. I guess I'd put her back in diapers at this point and try again in a month or two, but I don't think she'll wear them. She wants to wear panties, which is also a bit of progress.

In between the potty training and the lack of naps, I finally finished the DVD I was compiling for Anna's birth mom. For Anna's third birthday, I wanted to put together all the videos I have of Anna over the past year and send it to her birth mom, along with some professional photos of Anna. Well, Anna's birthday came and went and I was a long ways off from getting the DVDs done. I felt so guilty about being late because I know that birthdays can be a rough time for birth moms, but I just couldn't manage to find the time to get it done. I also ran into some technical problems. I had so much video of Anna that I had to burn it onto two DVDs, but the good news is that I finished it this week. I'm going to try to be a lot more careful now about starting projects with deadlines. I think I just do better if I have something I can work on when I do happen to have a few moments to myself, as long as I'm not trying to get it done in time for a birthday or a holiday, because something always comes up to interrupt me.

I've also managed to find some time to go running again. I'm hoping to find a half marathon around the middle of the summer that I can enter. Then if all goes well and I don't injure myself, I'm going to try for my first marathon in September. It's nice to be running again and most of the time it makes me a happier person, but I have such a hard time going to bed early enough and then I'm up at 5:30 so that I can go running and be back home in time to let Dan have his turn at the gym. And now that there's no nap time, it's hard to catch up on my sleep.

Speaking of nap time, by Friday of this past week, I was exhausted, so I decided that during Evie's nap time, I'd put Anna in her room for quiet time. Well, after thirty to forty minutes, I heard Anna call out. At first I planned to ignore her, but then I started to worry that she really needed me. So I went to check on her and after seeing me, she wasn't interested in staying in her room. I tried to close her door, but then she started banging on it. So I let her out and went to lie down again. Her loud banging woke Evie up, but Evie wasn't too upset, so I left her in her crib. Then a few minutes later, Anna started screaming my name. I told her to come to me and tell me what was going on. She came into my room and said, "Mom, I've got poop on my hands." Once again, she decided to stick her hands into her diaper after pooping. So after that I just got Evie up and gave up on the nap.

So yesterday Anna got to go to a Princess birthday party. As part of the party favors, she got to bring home a mylar balloon and some of those silly bands bracelets. Today in Church Evie was playing with one of Anna's silly bands. She started to pull on it and she was totally stretching it out. I started to wonder if she was going to break it and then suddenly it was gone. It shot off her fingers like a rubber band. Then a woman a few rows up, lifted her hand up to the back of her head and turned around with a confused look on her face. I kind of mouthed, "Sorry. It was Evie," as they handed back the silly band. Anyway, I thought it was hilarious.

Transitions

This blog is the closest thing we have to a family journal, so I have felt loads of guilt over the fact that I haven't been posting anything lately. I have this dream that one day I will actually put these posts into a book. In an effort to record something of what's been going on at our house, I'm going to start including excerpts from my emails to my brother Ryan who is currently serving a mission in England.


Excerpt from email written on April 3:
So life has been crazy at our house. I can't decide if I keep getting
busier or if I'm just getting more realistic about how much time I
actually have. We've been going through a lot of transitions lately
with the girls. I guess it's been about a week and a half now that
Anna has been binky free. I was gone at book group and Dan couldn't
find any of Anna's binkies. He told her that the binky fairy came and
took them to help her be a big girl. Anna didn't think much of that
and kept saying, "the binky fairy needs to come back and give me my
binkies." Of course I found two of her binkies the next day, but I
figured I didn't want to lose the progress we had already made, so I
hid them.  We both decided though that we felt a little guilty using
the story of the binky fairy, so the next day I told Anna that Dad had
told her that story because he thought it would help her but there
really isn't a binky fairy. We just couldn't find her binkies. I guess
the story made an impression though because she continued to tell me
that the binky fairy better come back. Anyway, it was hard for the
first twenty-four hours and there was a lot of crying for her binkies.
She even woke up in the night, crying because she didn't have her binkies to soothe
her. The next day she never took her nap because she didn't have her
binkies and I noticed her sucking on her fingers, but by the second
day there was less crying, and she took her
nap. Even now when she is extra tired or really sad, she'll cry, "I
want my binkies," but most of the time she's ok.

About the same time all of this happened, Anna also decided she wanted
to start wearing underwear instead of diapers, but she's not so
interested at sitting on the potty. So I've been putting her in
panties every morning, but then I spend most of the day trying to talk
her into sitting on the potty instead of just wetting her panties.
Rarely does she ask to sit on the potty herself. Usually I have to
bribe her with jelly beans, Skittles, or today it was gummy bugs. Evie
doesn't really know what's going on but she knows that when I go to the
pantry it's to get Anna some candy. Evie follows me now and begs for candy
too, so usually I give her some. I'm afraid of her first trip to the
dentist. Evie loves sweets and already eats more than Anna got at this
age. We usually make it through the first part of the day by eating
lots of candy and I spend a lot of time in the bathroom waiting to
hear that magical tinkle sound. Usually at nap time I put Anna in a
pair of pull-ups and if I'm too tired I just leave her in the same
pair until we put her in her diaper at bedtime. She's making progress
but it's very slow going. I want to give up but I figure as long as
she asks for panties I should try too.

On top of all of this, nap time is falling apart. Evie has been
sleeping for only an hour a day and this last week Anna has taken only
one nap. I think she's decided she's done with naps. I wonder if the
lack of binky has something to do with it. So this past week I spent a
lot of time rocking Evie to try and get her to take better naps and
then I spend more time trying to convince Anna to take a nap. I'm
continuing to try to focus more on my kids than on my to do list, but
at the end of this week, I felt like all I had done was sit in the
bathroom or rock Evie to sleep or the dishes. It's been a hard week
for me.