Kate continues to display many personality styles she apparently inherited from me. For instance, at playgroup the other day someone pointed this out:

She likes lines and stacks and order. Her favorite thing to do with playdoh is to have me open each of the 10 colors so she can shake out the plug of playdoh and line them all up on her table. She has progressed to asking me to make a duck out of each color to line up. She’s not really a big fan of forming anything with her own two hands, though she will squish it with her hand if I give her a patty and ask her to. She’ll press stamp designs into a playdoh patty. But as for rolling and shaping? “No, mama do it.”

Getting her to color is a battle… a subtle, sneaky battle, but a battle nonetheless. I try hard to show by example (she likes to copy me) and encourage her to try herself without making her freak out. She does not like it when she does things “incorrectly,” even though I’m praising her up, down and sideways for her awesome job. However we’re making some progress! If one of us draws a circle (that meets her standards) she will then progress to drawing a line for the mouth, dots for the eyes, scribble for the hair, and lines coming off it for arms and legs. She will also draw a sun. Now she’s trying to draw letters; she can draw H, I and T… basically anything with straight simple lines. Angled lines and curves are tricky. I find it helpful to pretend I’m really busy doing something else, like laundry or changing Ember or cleaning the kitchen. Without me nearby she’ll take more risks.

She does love art projects, though! While coloring is frustrating she really loves stickers and glue and paint. I’ve joined a co-op doing a toddler/preschool curriculum (Funshine Express, if you are curious) and I’m finding it’s such a great starting point. I am the kind of person who needs order and direction so having laid out crafts and lesson ideas are great, we do our school for a half hour or so when she wakes up from her nap, when Ember is still sleeping and we need some quiet activities. Some of the stuff is too young for her, she’s bored in like 2 seconds. But sometimes she really latches on to an idea and loves it! We did a polar bear craft which she carried around for days, and the idea of watching a polar bear youtube clip and building a “polar bear den” (fort of blankets) was fun and kept her excited.

Her favorite toys right now are her musical instruments (drum, xylophone, bell, whistles, piano), the megablocks and lego duplos (I want to get more duplos for her, she loves the ones we have that make animals), her tea set and kitchen/food for pretend, tutu skirt for dancing, tool set, big ball for playing pass and sitting/bouncing on, and books for reading and stacking. Oh and all her stuffed animals who are now in the bed with her. That is new, the stuffed animals thing. She has always had a couple with her in her bed that I put in there, but recently she’s brought more in there and does pretend play and acting with them.

Bedtime has gotten really interesting with all those stuffed animals and the new blanket and the books. Reading a couple of stories at bedtime has progressed to her asking for more books, more books. After we tuck her in – which consists of covering her entirely with her blanket (“Under!!” she instructs if you leave her head out), turning on Puppy (my pal Violet), singing her a song (Twinkle Twinkle or ABCs) and giving her a kiss and leaving – she gets up, grabs her books, and reads loudly to herself in the dark. which wouldn’t be an issue except some days it goes on for hours and ends in her crying that Kipper or Puppy fell dowwwwnnnnn, where issss itttttt?? Now I’m removing all the books from her room. That sucks because she used them in the morning when she woke up. I can’t win!

She is not acting tired at bedtime, is waking earlier than she used to, and yet trying to sleep longer than 2 hours at nap time. It’s a tricky balance. I feel like she’s too young to drop that nap entirely, and, more importantly, I am not ready for her to drop that nap yet. For now I’m being consistent with an earlier bedtime (to make up for the waking earlier) and earlier nap and hoping it holds tight. Once she does drop that nap our bedtime will go a lot quicker, though! But really I can’t complain too much when that’s the only issue! She’s had zero problems with the big girl bed, she has yet to get loose out of her room even though she can open most doors in the house now.

Food is… annoying. She’s not as bad as some toddlers, though her favorite foods are oatmeal, yogurt (she asks for yogurt all day long and would easily eat three bowlfuls in a sitting, if I let her), peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and of course crackers. But her favorite meal is salmon with rice, she practically inhaled a huge bowlful the other day. She eats chicken and fish and pork and beef. She eats apple with peanut butter and was eating oranges in those snack cups. But veggies? Other fruits? She’s having texture issues at the moment. she’s always so proud for identifying pears and strawberries and grapes… won’t eat them. She picks out lettuce and green peppers and corn and beans. She throws a sobbing fit if she sees any pieces of something in her food. Even the yogurt that had strawberry chunks in it, that was a no go. The shredded chicken with beans and corn, only the chicken was acceptable. I’m making an effort here to set a good example, I even took some bites of green pepper and said yum (generally I leave it to Denis to display the great love of veggies… I am not a fan). Some of her refusals are just bizarre, things she used to love and ate all the time. I used to let her graze throughout the day but she started expecting to eat yogurt and PBJ all day whenever she asked so now she’s getting meals and snacks and I’m saying a lot of “No, you already had that,” and, “Oh you’re hungry? Sure, here’s your dinner you didn’t eat earlier.” She frequently decides that oh, she’s not really all that hungry after all.

She did recently have a growth spurt. I didn’t notice anything different with her sleeping or eating but boy did she shoot up! 2T shirts are now all too short for her, she gained a lot of torso height. Legs too, but not as dramatic and she fits nicely into 2T pants. She’s also losing her baby fat, we’ve noticed her cheeks don’t look so chubby and her body has really slimmed down making her look even taller. (Though she’s still short for her age! Now she’s just mildly shorter instead of whoa short.) I keep staring at her, at how big she’s gotten.

Devin’s birthday is quickly approaching. It’s on Wednesday. I have successfully avoided thinking about it until March. Every year we invite some of Den’s family over for dinner, if not on Devin’s birthday on the weekend before/after. I have yet to actually mention anything. I could say I’m distracted with the girls and other things, but in reality I just have let my mind slide around the whole topic instead of sitting down with it.

It’s been 5 years. He’s be starting kindergarten this year. 5 years feels like a long time… he has two little sisters now. I realized that I don’t really talk to Kate about Devin at all, I keep thinking she’s too young to understand. She knows the picture is Devin, but that’s about it.

His stone should have been placed finally. Maybe I should take a drive.

Today was a very good day. Everyone was happy and calm and there was very little whining. And when I tried taking a couple photos of Ember in the good late-afternoon light Kate sat down next to her, leaned over towards her sister and said, “Picture friends!”

Man, I just adore my girls.

This morning we all got up a little bit earlier than normal in order to go to a playgroup. I got everyone up, dressed and fed in good time, so I sat down at the computer for 2 minutes to eat breakfast.

I heard a loud fart/poop across the room. Nice, Ember. So much for that clean diaper.

Before I’d even gotten up Kate – who was in panties – gasped and said, “Oh no, wet! Mama, pee pee!” I see her standing in the middle of the floor, legs apart, looking down. There’s a few dribbles on the floor and her pants are all wet. I go over and help her out of the pants and try to keep her from stepping in the pee puddle. While I take her wet pants to her room to put in the laundry basket I hear her walking along behind me. She says, happily, “Mama, look! Paw prints!” and points to the wet footprints she left behind her all the way down the hall.

I got that cleaned up and went to change Ember only to discover that poop escaped the diaper and I also need to locate a new sleeper to put her in.

Needless to say, we were late for playgroup this morning.

We have finally battled through to where we are all feeling well for a few days! This is fantastic! It will not last long, but for now this is good. I am feeling energetic and happy and kind of calm for the first time in… um. I have no idea how long.

::

Ember is not quite crawling yet, but she seems so close! From sitting she leans forward on her hands and “walks” out until she’s on her hands and knees, then backs back up to sitting. Sometimes she flops onto her belly and then yells in annoyance. Yesterday she managed to push backwards from her belly until she was on her knees and then back up to sitting! She can do it pretty consistently now, unless she’s on the slippery hardwood. She also moves by bouncing on her bum, she manages to scoot across a room that way.

She is clapping and shaking her head when you shake yours. She loves to put her fingers in my mouth (or anyone’s mouth!) and thinks it’s hilarious when I pretend to eat them.

Her eating skills have increased tremendously as well. She’s doing the pincer grasp now, reaching for bits of… okay, well, everything. She never put anything in her mouth until I started giving her tastes of food. That seems to have opened a door and now she is constantly wondering what does THAT taste like? Our carpet needs to get vacuumed far more frequently and she has a habit of worming her way over to the recliner, which the cats have shredded, and trying to eat the fluff from it. I need to tape that up or we need to replace the chair. (Replacing the chair is only an attractive idea until we realize that the cats will destroy the new one, too.) Complicating matters are her very sensitive gag reflex, so every time she does manage to put random fluff in her mouth she gags – not chokes, but gags loudly – and throws up. Then I have to stick my finger in her mouth to sweep out the fluff, causing her to gag and throw up again. The first couple times she did it I was shocked, now I just sigh and wipe her off. At least it’s just milk still.

She gets some bites of purees, but I am more likely to just mash or cut up something I’m eating to give her. She’s had little bits of noodles, chicken, fruit, toast. She’s doing very well with it. The purees she’s actually eating, rather than making horrified faces at while spitting it out. She does a lot of moving food around in her mouth, using her tongue and looking thoughtful.

The sleep situation has changed a lot since we returned from vacation. We previously had a co-sleeper set up beside the bed that she never used. She hated the flat, hard mattress compared to our lovely soft mattress. Now Kate is in a big bed we moved the crib into our bedroom, leaving the front off and side-carring it to our bed. She’s doing very well with sleeping in it – not perfectly, but she does start the night out in it every night and take naps in it, which is huge. Okay, most of the time I accomplish this by putting her in it and then leaning over her to nurse her. However when she’s feeling well (not sick and miserable) I have been able to nurse her and then leave with her awake, leaving her to fall asleep in the crib. She grumbles a little, sometimes whines and sometimes giggles, but falls asleep peacefully and takes a normal nap. I love this! I wish she wasn’t sick so often. But either way she’s now sleeping in her own space and I in my own space, which is like birds singing sweet songs of joy.

::

** Potty training below. **

So potty training just kind of happened upon us. For a while now I would let Kate run around naked after her bath or suggest that she got try peeing on the potty in between diapers. For months she had willingly sit on it, but never actually peed. A few nights ago she finally did. And it went just as I expected: we shrieked and danced and made A Big Deal out of it and she was proud as punch.

I figured, okay, she finally gets the point of this potty thing, I’m going to just leave her naked and see what happens. I was fully prepared for some puddles and me hustling her to the potty, but I figured that she really doesn’t like getting wet – she’s kind of prissy – so it shouldn’t take long for her to get the picture. I kept an eye on her but the kid can hold her pee like nobody’s business; judging by her diapers she pees only like 3 times a day. It took a long time, but hours later I saw her jump up from her toys, run over to the potty, and pee in it. Just like that. She gasped, “Mama! Pee-pee potty!!” and I again was jumping up and down and squealing things like “Wow! Good girl!”

In the evening we took her downstairs with us but it’s really cold down there so I put on panties and pants. She ended up peeing in them. To her pants = diaper = just pee.

The next day again I left her naked. She ended up running to the potty whenever she had to go – I have her little potty set up in the living room so it’s easily accessible. When Den took her downstairs in the evening he brought her downstairs he brought the potty and left her pants-less. It worked, no accidents!

Today was the big question. Will she poop on the potty? I was scared of that mess being a teachable moment, but I was watching her closely and asking her if she had to go. This evening she ran over to the toilet and sure enough!

Since then she’s had only accidents when wearing panties. If she’s naked she goes on the potty every single time. I’m not quite sure how to make that transition, but she definitely does not like having an accident. I think she just gets distracted and forgets she isn’t wearing a diaper unless there’s a breeze up in there.

We need to figure out the panties thing in order to attempt to take her out of the house. We have not tackled using an adult sized potty yet, which will also be necessary. But so far this is going far better than I would have expected!

At this point I’m pretty sure we will not all be healthy at the same time until well into spring. It has been three and a half weeks since returning from Canada and at least one of us has been sick the entire time. And of course Ember was congested for the month leading up to the vacation and for the first week of said vacation. I am so sick of it! This time Ember is congested (no surprises there!), then I got congested and sore throat with cough. She had some weepy eye going on for a couple days, I didn’t think anything of it until yesterday I took a nap and woke up with one eye swollen, red and crusted shut. Pinkeye! Yay! Just what I wanted on top of the upper respiratory I have going on. At the same time Den came home saying he felt like crap. The only one who seems mostly unaffected is Kate; she has a tiny runny nose and coughs sometimes at night but that’s it. Unfortunately that means she’s still running around saying “Come dis way Mama! Play in my room!” while Den and I ooze from one couch to the next trying to move as little as humanly possible while at the same time ensuring that the two minions stay alive.

Needless to say nothing is getting done around here. Ember’s in disposable diapers. The clean clothes I did manage to wash are all stuffed in bins in the kitchen. I finally got around to throwing all the dirty dishes into the dishwasher. This is one of those times where I really wish someone could come take my children for the day so I could just collapse in bed and sleep without interruption. Alas, my parents live far away and who wants two germy kids anyways.

It is also super cold outside (or was this weekend), and today it is snowing. We are running out of groceries and no one wants to go out in this when we are already sick. I don’t even want to send Den out to shovel the driveway, but it has to get done somehow.

Whine whine whine. That’s how I feel right now.

Holy shit, a miracle has happened.

I always always dreaded the whole “no more paci” thing with Kate. She wasn’t just a paci user, she’s a paci addict. She LOVES those things. I never thought I’d have a 2.5 year old still using a paci, but there you go… life hands you unexpected hands. I introduced the pacifier to her at just a few days old, something I had no intention of doing, I was going to breastfeed on demand all the time, no pacifiers to screw it up! But then she was nursing for hours in the evenings, my nipples were raw and red and pinched and I was nearly sobbing in pain. That child just loves to suck. The pacifier gave me a break, and it ended up making no difference with the nursing (but then neither did the bottles, so don’t take that as a universal rule). And as hard as it was to get her to sleep on her own I would have given her a hundred pacis if it meant she slept in her crib on her own for an hour.

She was down to using it only at bedtime for a while when I was pregnant, then she was teething and out of sorts so I handed them over again. When sleep and attitude was restored it was back to just bedtime. For months now we’ve had an only-on-the-bed rule: she could use them at night but they stay on the bed when she gets up.

She just got her new “big girl” bed (a twin size mattress) and Den suggested taking away the paci at the same time. I was all OMGWTF are you crazy?! I’m dealing with Ember not sleeping well (and not going to sleep until like midnight), we’re changing beds around, you want to mess with the paci too?! I had fear in my heart, people. FEAR. I had images of sobbing and refusing to sleep and waking up 145 times a night. I suggested that was not at all a good idea.

So the night before we got her new bed we ended up putting up a tent – a christmas present – in her bedroom. Which was awesome until bedtime when she insisted (in that I’m-going-to-freak-the-hell-out-if-you-don’t-let-me way of a 2 year old) that she sleep in the tent. I wasn’t home so Den thought on his feet and in an attempt to get her into her bed said, “No pacis in the tent.” She handed over the pacis and got in the tent with her blanket. He rolled his eyes and left her there, thinking she’d be crying in 10 minutes and he could put her in bed. She fell asleep. She didn’t sleep all night, she woke once crying and confused but again refused to leave the tent and so didn’t take the paci. No fussing, no complaining. She fell asleep. Uhhhhh.

When we got her new bed I figured, what the hell, let’s at least throw it at the wall and see if it sticks. So we told her no pacis in the big girl bed. The entire day was kind of a mess (actually it was one big cluster$#@% of a day), but she went to bed without an issue. Without a paci. Woke up at 6am, though.

Last night didn’t go so well. She had woken up hours early and got only a car nap. By bedtime she was hyper and overtired. She went to bed without complaint but I guess couldn’t fall asleep. An hour later she was sobbing and just at a loss… she was so tired. We gave her the paci and let her get a good night’s sleep.

Nap time today? No paci. Normal 2 hour nap. At bedtime she climbed in, made sure her blanket was all correct, went through the song and book of our bedtime routine, and then went to sleep with just some kisses and a happy “Night night!”

One Christmas when I was maybe about 8 years old I was given as a gift a nice little box with a bunch of beads. I’d never done much with beads but I liked the idea, and many of the beads I got were very pretty. I spent a lot of time putting the beads into the separated compartments of the box, planning what to make with them, sorting them by how much I liked them and how they might go together. I had all these ideas but I didn’t want to use up the beads that I had; if I used them for one project then I wouldn’t have them anymore for the next project, and I only had very limited numbers of the beads I loved the most.

I never used those beads. When I moved out they were still carefully sorted into the compartments of that box, stored in a cubby in my closet.

I still do the same thing. I still wait until every single duck is in a row, every possibility accounted for, every decision weighed and plotted – but of course few things in life can be mapped out so perfectly without deviation or uncertainty. I still wait for that next batch of spare beads that I never get.

And I’m not talking about things necessarily, either. Kate’s room is still only about 80% done because I couldn’t find the right wallpaper border – instead of a less perfect border there is a messy overlap of colors where a border ought to be. The frames I bought for my bedroom are still empty and unhung because I couldn’t decide which photos to put in them. I get lost in an ever-degrading spiral of options, I get overwhelmed, and then I walk away.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much time in my life I waste being weighted down with what really comes down to inconsequential details. Will it ever really matter if I get Kate the ladybugs sheets or the nature sheets? Unlikely. Maybe in some small fashion. But I just spent several hours of my life – hours of my time that I really don’t have to spend – researching every possible option. Part of it, okay, I do like decorating so it starts out being fun. But it always ends with me being frustrated and overwhelmed and ready to abandon the entire project.

::

Adolescence is a generally a time of making stupid decisions and taking risks. I, unlike pretty much any of my peers, was the one hanging back saying, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, someone’s going to get in trouble, this will inconvenience someone somewhere.” Which sounds really great in theory – how refreshing, a considerate, self-aware teenager! How wonderful! But there are lessons to be learned in adolescence, lessons about screwing up and getting back on your feet, about failure, about taking risks. Lessons that I never learned. I got through by always doing well, always getting the grades, always doing the right thing. I got through by being absolutely terrified of doing something wrong. That fear has never really left me.

::

Kate is a lot like me in many ways. She is sensitive and cautious and thoughtful. All wonderful things, I love her personality. And I have to admit, having a kid who is cautious and listens to you feels like a great thing with a 2 year old. But I see in her all the tendencies that I have… the fear to upset people, the fear to do something wrong. I am trying to help her figure it out, setting her on her feet and telling her she’s okay… trying to tell her that she can fall and get back up again. But I worry. How do I teach something when I haven’t really learned it myself?

Oh my gosh thank goodness Kate is getting caught up on sleep. She has been in a great mood the last few days – yes, still pouting over things not going her way, but it’s not a constant battle anymore and she’s actually being fun to be around again. *gasp!* We’ve had fun with stickers, drawing, legos, blocks, books… you name it. She’s very into pretend play and acting things out right now, which is funny to watch. Now instead of “tea” (which she never understood, but it was a teapot so we told her it was tea) she now gives us “coffee” in our teacups because daddy drinks coffee (and I drink hot chocolate, which she has decided is also coffee).

We had a momentous occasion yesterday: pee in the potty! She was running around naked after her bath and we heard her gasp, “Oh no daddy, pee-pee!” I immediately grabbed the kid potty and said, “Quick! On the potty!” She came running, sat down, and proceeded to pee a little more in the potty. We were all very excited and loaded praise on her, and this girl lights up like a sun when praised. She was beaming and pointing and just so excited. This is the first time I think she’s really made the connection, it’s always been a lot of talk about the potty, we read books and point out what we do, but she’s always just sat on it and done nothing. So now I need to catch her when she actually needs to pee. I think I may need to just let her go naked a bunch and she’ll train herself, but I am dreading the puddles. (Also, it is cold.) Hmm.

::

Ember is a hilariously frustrating little creature right now. Hilarious because she’s learned to babble and it is just really funny to hear language-like sounds coming from such a little person. She loves to echo and converse with us, making “dada” “baba” and “mama” sounds. The frustrating part is that she is congested (again/still) – both her and I have a cold and it sucks – so she’s fighting sleep and instead having great conversations with us in bed. At midnight.

The fighting sleep is getting pretty literal, too. She’s been resisting falling asleep for a while now, I have to make it as dark as I can and nurse her and sometimes sing (but now singing causes coughing fits, which does not help). And she’ll even drift off a bit. But laying her down wakes her up. She is not normally a child who is sensitive to such movements while sleeping, so this is just a very unfortunate flashback to Kate… and it may have been the single most frustrating aspect of her first years. So now Ember takes forever to get to sleep in the first place, I have to be very careful about laying down with her, and then I get to practice some advanced form of yoga as I hold extremely awkward positions and move very very slowly in an attempt to extricate myself without waking her. And sometimes despite all of that she wakes up just as I creep towards the door and I get to start all over again.

The other night she kept waking up as I put her down over the course of an hour and I think after several times jolting awake just as she finally fell asleep she kind of lost her shit. I was rocking her, hushing her, holding her upright and bouncing her – everything I could, basically. Her head would drop towards my chest and then she’d throw it backwards, arch her back and scream at me. There was a lot of screaming; that girl has a voice when she wants to. I was getting pretty ticked off, we were afraid she’d wake up Kate would would have made my night even better. She didn’t want to nurse, she did NOT want to lay down, she wanted to be cuddled but then freaked out when I cuddled her… it was a mess. I think I finally got her out of it by holding her up and more or less waking her up, staring at her saying, “WHAT? Stop, stop! Ember!” She pouted at me, snorfling through her stuffy nose, and then and held her and rocked/jiggled her until she fell asleep again. And then I waited a long time before laying down with her. The whole thing took forever, and then she was restless all night to boot.

The kid really doesn’t sleep much, all told. She goes to bed after Kate does, wakes at about the same time, and takes one good nap a day and usually fall asleep briefly in the evening (in my arms). Once she’s no longer sick I think she’ll do two naps a day and go to bed before Kate, but right now this is what I get. She doesn’t seem any worse for wear though. You know… other than the fighting sleep thing.

::

I myself am worn down. After the vacation-that-wasn’t-very-vacationy and now having this stupid cold still I’m feeling tapped out, and with Ember not sleeping well it means I am not sleeping well. I find myself sleeping wrapped around her, contorted in awkward positions with arms numb and neck sore by morning. Den took two days off this week to help watch the kids so I could get some sleep (we were up nearly all night, with alternating children), which may be the only reason this cold didn’t get worse than it was. He’s working this weekend. I’m just tired. I’m managing to get dishes clean, I did some laundry (but didn’t put it away), and I got groceries. That’s the sum total of my entire week. I wish I could just settle in bed with some books for a few days. Being sick and still having to take care of the children kind of sucks. Thankfully I have the TV, Kate is getting more self-sufficient all the time, Ember is happy for periods on the floor with some toys, and my couch is relatively comfortable. I feel like a slug, though.

Kate woke up, I could hear her shifting in bed. Then I hear sobbing. I go in to get her and she’s sitting on her bed, one sock off and the other half-off. She’s sobbing hysterically about “sock on.” I go to pull it on, she yanks her feet out of my hands and sobs. Okay, I pull the sock off. She howls and pitches a fit. It continues like this for some time even though I crouch next to her and try to discern what she wants. “Socks off?” “No!” “Socks on?” “No!” She’s inconsolable. But every time I try to leave the socks behind she lunges for them. I am utterly perplexed.

Finally amongst the gibberish I hear something that sounds like “Kate socks on.” Hmmm. I wonder if this is one of those times she wants to do it herself. I ask her and that at the least doesn’t cause more howling, so I could be on to something. I hand her a sock and encourage her to put it on. She can’t of course, and that causes some sobs but I gently help her get it on. The next sock follows.

Tears dry up and she jumps to her feet, excited and proud! Whew! Tantrum weathered! She asks for yogurt and I gladly go get her some. I put the bowl down on her table. She takes one look at it and shrieks, “Kate pour it, oh no!!!” and melts to the floor for round two.