As if I would be anything less!

R contracted a particularly nasty case of diaper rash earlier this week after she pooped in her diaper during nap time at day care. You know the sort – open-sored and blistery, red and patchy.

Obviously, changing her diaper has been a bitch since then, and though it’s improving, I’ve been letting her “run free” from the moment we get home until the moment we put her to bed, which is also helping with the potty training. More on that another day.

This morning, after we spend 20 minutes cajoling her into letting us take off her soggy night-time diaper, she grabbed my upper arm with her hand, stared me straight in the face and said, “Mommy, be BERRY GENTLE.” Then she laid down and lifted her legs in the air to let me change her.

Wha? Where did you learn the word GENTLE? And when did you turn 22 years old?

Gratitude

I worry a lot about raising R to be a good person, to be considerate of others and their feelings, to have manners. Dave and I try to model and praise good behavior and to gently correct bad behavior.

A lot of the time, I feel like it’s a losing battle. Sometimes she’ll throw a tantrum at the drop of a hat or lash out in anger with her hands or feet. “Please” and “thank you” still have to be prompted 80 percent of the time. It can be frustrating. She’s been such a fast learner with lots of other things – counting, ABCs, cleaning up after herself. Why is this stuff – arguably the most important stuff we will teach her – so difficult?

Then, just when I think she’ll never get it, she surprises me – shocks the hell out of me, really.

Sunday night, I made chicken tortilla soup for dinner. Nothing fancy, just vegetables and chicken and some seasonings and stuff. As she climbed into her chair, her eyes widened.

“Wow!” she said.

I smiled a little, pleased that she wasn’t shoving her plate across the table like she were playing air hockey.

We began eating, chatting and laughing and talking about visiting with her grandma, aunt and cousin who stayed with us over the weekend. When there was a lull in the conversation, she turned her sweet little face to me and smiled.

“Thanks for making dinner, Mommy.”

My eyes widened and filled with tears.

“You’re welcome, honey. I’m glad you like it.”

It was amazing. I started to cry so hard I had to remove my glasses. She continued eating, oblivious to my verklempt-ness.

She gets it – at least a little bit. And she has a sense of appreciation, and she notices that I do work hard for her and her dad.

Now if I could just get her to stop smacking me in the face when I tell her  she can’t have a snack right before dinner.

Here’s to sixty more

“Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half sorrow.”

                                                          -Swedish proverb

Six years ago, I walked down a 110-yard aisle at Allerton Park in Monticello, Illinois and married the man I knew would be my partner for life. Since 2002, we’ve been through a lot – unemployment, deaths in our families, moving, job changes, becoming parents.

I wouldn’t change it.

We look so young. We have no idea. We have a vague notion that it will be hard, that sometimes difficult, painful decisions will have to be made, that every day won’t be like this one. But we also know that we are in it to win it – that this is it for us, we’re all in.

We’ve had so many good days. And some difficult ones, too. But having him with me every day has made all the difference.

 

I thought I hit publish on this last night. Guess I was wrong. So the Big Day was actually yesterday and I am lame.

I am not a quitter

So, in all the pondering and mulling and considering I’ve been doing about giving up blogging altogether, I tried to remember why I started in the first place. I went through my archives, and I found that the posts I was most proud of, the ones that brought me some tears or a giggle or an “oh yeah, I remember that!” were posts about R.

And then it hit me – she was the reason I started to write here in the first place. I am a terrible chronicler of life. I have a scrapbook with five pages complete. Anyone who looks at it would know that in 2001, I got engaged in New Orleans, tried on wedding dresses and had a really cute puppy. And that’s it. R’s baby book is not much better – all the places where you’re supposed to “place photo of baby crawling here” or “place photo of baby’s first meal here” are blank, and a lot of the written entries are empty as well.

But this blog, oh, the difference! Here, I can read about when she started walking for real, when I first started to realize that I needed to start letting her go already, little milestones like throwing a ball, the time she ate dog food,  our first family vacation, her evolution into Miss Bossy, switching her from home day care to a preschool center, her trouble with transitions, our girls weekend, and talking about God.  

So I am resolving to keep this up, to try to write more about R. Maybe when she is older, she will understand how much I loved her and struggled with doing the right thing in raising her. And maybe she will also be able to realize, sooner than I did about my own mother, that I am not perfect and I make mistakes and that’s all okay.

How can I watch this little girl grow up before my very eyes and not record it somehow?

Feast

Zoot is talking about her kitchen today, and there is little I like more than talking about my kitchen. Well, not the actual room, but the accoutrements I have for it, the accoutrements I want for it and the extra room I wish we could build onto the house so I didn’t have to keep my blender and vegetable steamer and bread pans and muffin tins in the laundry room and my big slow cooker and stand-up mixer in the coat closet and my pretty mixing bowls and another slow cooker and canned goods and my favorite casserole dish and some cookbooks IN THE GARAGE (!!!the garage!!!).

See, I used to be a foodie. You know, before I became a high-powered, driven career woman, and when I had a big kitchen with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelving and a pantry that was enormous (oh, who am I kidding, even then my slow cooker was kept in the garage), and most importantly, when I was childless.

I subscribe to two cooking magazines (still, though they mainly sit on my nightstand for 6 months). I have expensive, obscure spices like saffron and cardamom on my spice shelf (one entire shelf in my smaller pantry). I own soup tureens and a mini-muffin pan and a Bundt pan and a potato ricer.

Dave once told me I was not allowed to ask for kitchen stuff for Christmas/birthday gifts anymore. But I don’t think some new, non-slotted serving spoons really count. They don’t take up that much room.

I would spend hours preparing new and exciting dinners, always healthy and almost always delicious. I loved shopping at the gourmet grocery. I tried to bake, but, other than my world-famous chocolate chip cookies and some decent strawberry cream cheese muffins, I’m just not that good at it.

Last Sunday, after I had cleaned the bathrooms and in between loads of laundry, I spent R’s two-hour nap cooking me up some beef carnitas to have later this week. As the hours stretched before me and I chopped and seasoned and simmered, it was almost like the old days. Of course, I didn’t have a glass of wine at the ready and I knew my reverie would shortly be interrupted by a request to play Barbies or watch Dora.

I do miss using all my fancy kitchen stuff. I have a contraption that is supposed to allow you to cut your fresh-baked bread into uniform slices, but I can’t tell you the last time I baked fresh bread. But I guess the trade-off is worth it!

Pear-shaped

I have all these big huge topics that I want to write about floating around in my head, and for some reason they have paralyzed me from writing about anything else (at all). But, given the comments on my last post about my physique, I thought maybe it was time to address one of them, and if it isn’t a witty and sparkling and insightful commentary, oh well.

Like many women, I have long been plagued with a poor body image. My boobs are too small, my ass is too big, and now pregnancy, child-bearing and breast-feeding have not only magnified those two problems but also given me a small layer of cushiness around my midsection.

When I was 22, I kept a picture of myself at 14 – all knobby knees, bony hips and flat chest – hanging on my refrigerator at grad school in Springfield, Illinois. That was what I aspired to – prepubescent thinness.

By 29, I had lost that picture, though I do remember the bathing suit (orange, green and blue flowered one-piece). In its place I mentally hung a picture of myself at 21 lying with my college friends on Daytona Beach in a blue two-piece, freshly-pierced navel and kicky short blonde hair. I didn’t catch the irony at that time. I was unhappy with myself at 22, but just 7 years later, that 22-year-old’s body looked pretty good to me.

After I put up that picture of myself in the bathing suit earlier this week, I started to wonder: Seven years from now, will my body today look pretty good to me? With its cellulite and stretch marks and just-three-more-pounds-and-I’ll-be-happy-itis? Will I wish, as I do of that 22-year-old body now, that I had appreciated its beauty and wonder when I had it? Will I regret that I wasted so much time worrying about my fleshy parts and not enough time being grateful for the parts that are strong and good and functioning?

A week before Memorial Day, I started working out regularly. For two months, I didn’t miss a day on the elliptical machine (or, when I travelled, running or some other form of exercise). About a month ago, I started running on days the weather allowed. I wanted a goal, something to work toward, and the 5K on Thanksgiving seemed like as good a target as any.

In less than three weeks, I was running more than a 5K on my regular, every-other-day schedule (I even ran on Saturday morning at my mom’s boat last weekend, much to the shock of my lovely husband. Hell, he’s shocked by the whole damn thing). The numbers on the scale haven’t dropped very much. But I feel good. I feel healthy.

Why isn’t that enough?

How I spent my Labor Day Weekend, photo edition

Subtitled: See, I am not afraid to put crazy pictures of myself on the Internet.

Singing along to Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” – after not-very-many drinks. Not as many as it looks like I’ve had, anyway. When the song was over, I turned to the DJ and said “AWESOME!” followed by the universal symbol of massive approval – the thumbs up.

Prior to what R will forver refer to as the “Dance Party,” we took a day trip on my parents’ boat. Here, my mom, R and I pause for a picture with Payton, their puggle, standing guard in the back.

R, making her strong face. That strong face was nowhere to be found when we tried to get her to go swimming with Mommy and Daddy. Only tears, woe and utter despair. Grandma’s snuggles were all that would console her.

R and her Daddy very much enjoyed the Dance Party as well. It was very reminiscent of someone’s wedding reception, and R was decked out to the nines with her flowered lei and Scooby Dew shades.

Just before we went home, we took a short cruise on the pontoon boat they just got. R seized the opportunity to nap, therefore thwarting her parents’ attempts to get her to nap on the 3+-hour car ride home.

And oh yeah, I came back to work and got promoted. What do you know. They do notice.