Toast 2 Mom

Random

It's rainy outside, and quiet inside. The girls are napping. I should be napping, but duty calls. I'm surprised to not be tired, though. Not sure if it's been my few days of sniffles or what, but the past couple nights, I have been practically wide awake from the hours of 3:00 to 5:00. Last night I had company. Cheekers was also wide awake. I wanted to pull her out of bed to play but didn't want to start a bad middle of the night habit! I hope this is not a new thing, being awake at night, because I really love to sleep.

I suppose my mind has been racing a bit more lately with many things. I have Sydney's fourth birthday coming up that I am trying to think about and plan. I have been trying to get more and more projects done around the house. And I've always got my future on the brain - what I want to do with myself, what I want to be when I grow up, what I want to achieve and how a lot of that ties to the well being and future for my girls.

I also, unfortunately, seem to be in a down slope on my blog lately. I never want my writing space to feel like a task. The main theme of my thoughts and of this blog has evolved around the girls. They are on my mind a lot and I'm with them a lot. However, sometimes I don't want to fence myself in on my ideas.

So I guess today I don't have anything specific in mind I want to write about nor do I feel like I have to craft a story or come up with some memory I don't want to forget. While I really do have something to write about all the time, sometimes I just don't know how to do it...and therefore I don't.

Like today, despite the many things I have on my mind and would like to say, I can't seem to craft it. And even though I want to avoid my blog feeling like a task, I also enjoy its space, my space, to use however I choose. So today is random....I'm not sleeping very well, getting over a cold, my life is currently full of making lists and trying to make check-marks on those...and I'm hopeful that maybe tomorrow I'll feel more clever....but maybe I won't?

Getting there is the...easy part

I feel like I have this whole vacation destination via highway thing down. We just returned last night from Van-a-thon '09 Part II. This time we headed up to Nebraska for our niece's wedding. This was the first time the girls and I had been back since our move down south in December.

To make our thirteen plus hour drive, I know exactly now how to load the van and what to put in it. I know what kind of snacks to pack, what to put in the cooler, what to have handy right by my feet, what to have for potty stops and meal stops in my bag. I know what kind of entertainment to have in the girls' backpacks and how to easily access the stuff while heading down the highway. The girls ride like a dream and help pass the time marvelously. Yes, getting there is the easy part...

The hard part is getting them to acclimate and be "themselves" once we're there. I realize acclimate is the wrong word. I feel like expecting my one year old and three year old to happily and completely adjust to a foreign environment in four days time is a bit unfair. You see, leading up to our trip, though, I had all of these visions, hopes really, of how certain interactions and activities would unfold. I was always fully aware that these were high expectations...but yet, I had the visions anyway.

One of our stops in Nebraska was back at the girls' old day care. I was so eager to see the teachers and Sydney's old friends. I had a "vision" of Sydney joining her friends for a snack and Natalie seeing her old teachers and laughing and smiling. The reality was my girls drove in a van the entire day before, skipped a nap, played hard with their cousins the night before, slept eight hours at night versus a normal ten to twelve hours a night, woke up, hopped back in the van and went back to the place where I used to drop them off so I could head to work. Soooo, was their snack time and laughs and giggles, um, no. Pretty much the opposite, actually. Such is life. I did enjoy my visit, though.

Then there was the main chapter of the weekend - the wedding. I think I mentioned before I left how Sydney had two things in mind about this wedding, cake and dancing with Daddy. Well as time went on, and less naps and less sleep at night took place, I had to go to a bad place. I finally had to tell Sydney that if she did not take a nap prior to the wedding that there would be no cake and no dancing....the evil Mommy threat mode. It wasn't that I was actually going to not let her eat cake or dance with Daddy; but we were reaching such a stage of cranky, that I didn't see how she could possibly stay awake long enough in the evening to get them.

So even in my most desperate of attempts to keep my girls happy and polite, as they most often days are, there was only a fraction of a nap. It was at this stage that all I could do was hold out for adrenaline to push us to the finish line.

As luck would have it, though, even with minimal naps, even with lacking sleep at night, even with lots of play time with cousins, buried deep there was just enough energy in the day for a successful flower girl walk, some cake and yes, some dancing...

So while acclimate may not be the word or expectation of my girls for their big wedding weekend, I think they managed to successfully "pace themselves". And all in all, it was a lot of fun.

Here are a few more photos from the wedding...

 

Homeward Bound

A quiet ride home... Tonight, our own beds.

 

See you at 3:00 a.m.

I received a gift from a friend when Sydney was born. It's a wooden painted picture that says, "Party! My crib, 3:00 a.m." Well it has been quite some time since I've had to wake up at 3:00 a.m. for a party with my baby Cheekers. She's a big girl now and has been sleeping through the night long enough to recognize. The other night, however, we had to revisit those good old days. Cheekers had a tummy ache that has resulted in a very bad tushy rash - ouch. Poor baby. I spent 3:00 a.m. to 4:15 a.m. on the floor by her crib to keep her company while she was wide-eyed and whimpery.

When the alarm woke us all up later that morning, I was reminded how those middle of the night meetings can leave Mommy feeling a big groggy during the day. I was also reminded that while my day was a bit hazy, it really wasn't so bad knowing I was able to spend time with my sweet pea during the middle of the night.

It was that same friend of mine who gave me the painted picture that I was recently talking to about how just down right horrible mothers feel during those first couple months after having a baby. You feel drugged, feverish, hazy, forgetful. Some moms (like my friend and myself) feel hopeless, lost, deeply sad and so very alone. It's a period of time that you think will never end, will always feel that way...and you wonder what was I thinking? What my friend and I also discussed was how this period of time is over like that.

POOF, sixteen months goes by, and you now have a walking, talking, independent toddler. Spending one night lying on the floor next to the crib reminds you of all those sleepless, helpless nights. But the thoughts don't seem painful at all now. It's not even a relief that they're over. It's just another reminder of how darn fast those babies grow.

No Nap, No Fun

Lately Sydney has been resisting her nap. Now let me remind you, of my two, she is my sleeper. And my baby, the non-sleeping one, is actually finally starting to take good naps. It's a rare day around here when I'm able to coordinate the two. However recently I've been running them around in the morning and getting successful afternoon naps - aka, quiet time to get some things accomplished. Now, it is appearing that quiet time is going to be short-lived.

The so-so news, Sydney is very good at being independent and entertaining herself for awhile. The bad news is that even though she's not feeling like sleeping, she really needs to be. Her moods are drastically different from a good sleep day to a no sleep day. I find myself wishing I was the one taking the nap!

I'm hoping it's just a little phase and next week she'll be back to that afternoon rest I so wish for me....I mean her! :)

Write a check, find an Oompa Loompa

My ears are always open when my eyes cannot be in front of my girls. The girls have a playroom, which is so nice. It is a perfect place to contain their toys and entertainment. The good news is the playroom is an earshot from the kitchen. The bad news is it is not an eye shot from the kitchen. Because I have to spend a great deal of time in the kitchen, making meals, snacks, drinks, doing all that short order cook stuff us moms do, I have to use my ears a lot to hear exactly what is going on in that playroom.

Obviously I know to come running when I hear screaming or crying. I can also interpret thump sounds, "MOMMMM", grrrrrrrrr noises and crashes. It's the silence that always throws me. Silence should be good, right? Sometimes. I usually do a walk-by the room about every two minutes when it's quiet. Most of the time Sydney is coloring or looking at a book, while Natalie is flipping through a book herself or playing with Clippos.

Most days I am very good at remembering to do the walk-by every two minutes when it's quiet....and sometimes I am human....and get caught up in my tasks and forget to check out silent activities....like today.

It's very rainy and dreary in Austin today. A good day to stay in. We all slept in a little today (8 o'clock)...a RARE treat. The girls and I got up, dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. I decided to make blueberry muffins this morning. I thought I'd let the girls play while I was making the muffins. Sydney got a new coloring book that she wanted to color in this morning. She's really into coloring these days and I like to encourage her. The only trouble is her little sister also enjoys to color. I told Sydney when she's coloring to use the markers one at a time and put them back in the container so little sissy doesn't get them.

As the smell of blueberries began to fragrance the house, I was getting plates and glasses ready. Then I realized I had a bill that needed to be paid today. It was this distraction that resulted in me forgetting the two-minute walk-by. So two more minutes goes by. Ding, muffins ready. Bill paid. Then my ears perked at the silence in the playroom. I was hoping I'd find Sydney coloring her new book and Cheekers Clippo-ing away. Instead an orange marker had fallen on the floor and an Oompa Loompa had appeared -

 
She was certainly a happy Oompa Loompa. The orange marker had found her hands, neck, pants, feet and a chair. Meanwhile Sydney's coloring detail to Ariel's necklace (and therefore missing her sister's own coloring talents) was quite impressive.

Two things I thought about this morning following our little artistic moment - 1) playroom video camera  and 2) whoever invented Crayola washables was a genius!

The First Babysitter

The Hubby and I got our first official babysitter last night. That's not completely true. We have gone out before and left the kids at home. The rare times that this has happened though, we've used family to help us out to have a night off. A couple times we also used a teacher from the daycare. This was our first experience hiring a teenage girl, picking her up at her house, walking through all the babysitter details, providing numbers, showing where the snacks are and how the remote works and then walking out the door and hoping for the best. I am pleased to say the evening went very well...for everyone...and the girl even had some obstacles.

The plan was to leave after putting Cheekers to sleep. Nine times out of ten, when it's bedtime, she goes right to sleep. Nope, not this night. She was sitting up in her bed while we walked out the door. A part of me was ready to call the evening off; but we had not had a night out in a long, long time after a lot of busy, busy stuff going on.

We drove away from the house, and I wasn't sure how far we'd get down the road before having to turn back. We made it all the way downtown, around downtown, some shopping, to dinner, through dinner and no calls.

Despite the fact that I had my phone practically on my lap the entire time, it was a very enjoyable evening. I told Hubby it felt like we weren't out of practice of dining just the two of us at all. He agreed but said it did feel strange to not cut up chicken into pea-size pieces or tip extra big for the massive amounts of rice and Cheerios usually left under the table.

When we got home, there were no sounds of children running around or crying. I asked our sitter how it went. She said it went "great". Syd went to bed without any issues. Unfortunately Cheekers didn't drift off to sleep. In fact she cried and cried hard. It sounds like our sitter has the Midas touch, though. I told her to try a bottle or a pacifier. Those options did not work. (I bet she had some choice words for me when they didn't.) Our sitter decided to read her a book, over and over and over again. Natalie is very into books right now, and apparently our sitter must also be clairvoyant. After several rounds of a bedtime story, Miss Cheeks drifted off to zzz-land. Impressive.

I drove our gal home and thanked her for the great job! Except for the small detail that we blew through big wad of cash for the evening (because family is free!), we're excited for the next night out...