I read a few blogs almost every day - Her Bad Mother, Alex Year One, My Merry Way, Julia at Here Be Hippogriffs (who just had TWINS for gods sake - and here I am about to whine about not having time to blog), A Parent in Silver Spring (an awesome new blog for parents in Silver Spring, MD btw) - and I am constantly amazed at how often these ladies blog, and how good their blog posts are - full of wit and insights and compelling content that keeps me coming back for more.
I hate that more than a week has gone by since I blogged. Maybe if I didn’t work full time I would be more consistent? Or maybe if I didn’t work from home full time - because ironically I think I would have plenty of time to blog if I were in the office five days a week. My days are filled with chasing Emma, cleaning up breakfast/lunch/dinner, getting ready for breakfast/lunch/dinner, checking work email whenever I can so as to put out any fires, and trying to keep up my job when Emma naps.
I think about blogging constantly, but somehow I find myself at the end of each day completely exhausted and wanting to just curl up and go to sleep. I compose wonderful, witty essays about my experience as a parent and about Emma’s adventures. But I compose them in my head, and by the time I get to write them down, they have disappeared, along with this week’s grocery list that I neglected to jot down when I had the chance.
So, for those of you who blog, here is my question for you - how do you do it? How do you find time to raise your children, keep your house in order, possibly work an outside job, take care of yourself (by which I mean take a shower occasionally) AND write those great blog posts that you write with inspiring yet daunting regularity? I really would love any tips, thoughts or pointers you might have.
For about four or five months now we have been using some very simple signs with Emma - “cat”, “finished”, “more”. I know American Sign Language and want her to know some basic signs, and also want her to be be able to communicate with us before her language skills are fully developed. So far, she has watched me sign to her with great amusement, but has never used the signs herself. She also has not started talking yet, although she clearly understands what is said to her.
The other day, Mike said to me, “Emma finished her bottle tonight, pulled it out of her mouth and I could swear she waved it goodbye.” “Huh,” I said. But then I saw her do it. Repeatedly. “Oh cute,” I thought “she’s waving goodbye to everything.”
FINALLY, about a week after I first saw it, it dawned on me that she was signing “finished,” not waving goodbye. “Finished” is very similar to “goodbye,” especially for a baby who has never done it before. Um, DUH. And also, HOLY CRAP my baby is signing!!
Tonight at dinner she pointed to her food on the table, just out of her reach, and gave us her signature “Eh!” We both asked her if she wanted more, and did the sign out of habit. Then, she put her pudgy little hands together and signed “more.”
I am sure, maybe sometime fairly soon, I will be yearning for the days when she couldn’t tell me her likes and dislikes. For now though, I am totally excited about her ability to communicate.
Ever since I got this license plate (and the DC versionbefore it)I have had fun watching the reaction it elicits. As I drive down the street I either get smiles and thumbs ups, or nasty glares and the occasional finger, although in the DC area mostly the former. I have also had a bunch of notes left on my car - pro and con - all of which I have kept. My favorite one is also the most recent - “JERK!”.
Now that we have a new car, it seems like a good time to retire these plates. It is a new time, one without W, and hopefully one with a rebirth of hope nationwide.
Luckily the plate will live on since it has been posted on several different blogs and forums. Here is where I have seen it:
I know I have been a complete slacker about getting pictures from the last month - huge apologies to out-of-town family and friends who have been waiting (especially Aunt Emily and Aunt Lexi, who both called me on my slackeryness - sorry guys!!). Here are all the pix from the last month or so. Each picture you see links to a set on flickr.
Emma’s first birthday. “The Artsy Caterpillar” picture was a complete mistake, but I like the way it turned out.
Emma’s first Christmas in New Jersey with Poppy, Nonnie, Aunt Lexi and Great Gram. During most of these pictures she was pretty sick, only we didn’t know it yet. Of course now that we look back at them, we can see it. She was up every 45 minutes that night - teething we think. Or maybe she was just mad she had to sleep and couldn’t play with the Cheetah?
Christmas Eve. Actually this picture isn’t from Christmas Eve, it was our Holiday card picture. But I love it, so I included it here. In most of the pictures in this set and in the next set from Christmas Day, Emma was, again, sick. Christmas Eve she was up until 4, throwing up every 15 minutes. Christmas Night she only threw up once before passing out. She still hung in with us throughout the day without complaining. What a trooper.
Santa came! Even though she was sick, she really got into opening gifts. She actually played with each of her presents and seemed to genuinely enjoy each one. The little gray dress with the pink shirt is one of the cutest things I have seen her in.
As requested by her Aunt Lexi, here is video of Emma twirling. And also loving the camera more than Chuck Norris’s wife at a Huckabee rally. We will be releasing the soundtrack on Virgin Records in the coming weeks.
I wrote a few days ago about how excited we are in our house at the outcome of the Iowa caucus. What I didn’t write about is all the other things that have happened around here in the last week.
On Sunday Mike and I won our Fantasy Football league championship - for the second year in a row. Sweeet! Seeing as it is also only our second year playing fantasy football, we were pretty psyched. Of course now no one in our league is speaking to us, so maybe we would have been better off throwing the game.
On Monday we bought a new car. We got the Mazda5 in Redskin Red (ok, the dealership calls it “copper red”. Whatever.) and we are in love with it. It is zippy and has zoom zoom and doesn’t make me feel like a soccer mom. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s just not where I am at this point in my life - give me a few years though. You had to be a contortionist to get Emma into her car seat with our old car. Now I don’t even have to bend over. W00t!
She had her first day of daycare this week. It was a half-day really, so we could ease her into it. Yeah, I know, it wasn’t to ease her into it, it was to ease me into it. She didn’t even cry when I left. By contrast, I was a mess. They do art projects and go on fieldtrips and play outside at the daycare, which will be really good for her since I seriously think she may be bored with me at home. Of course now I am going to have step up my game on the days she is with me or she is going to start asking to go to daycare every day.
Emma had her first real playdate this week too. It was with a little boy who is almost exactly her age. We went to his house and she was a little more restrained than I expected. To be fair, E. was flinging balls at her head a lot of the time, so maybe she was just figuring out how to get home alive. Neither of them have gotten to the “sharing” stage quite yet, so there was a lot of parental intervention required. We had a good time though and E. and his mom will probably be coming here in a week or two.
Emma started twirling this week. She looked up at me one morning and then started spinning around in a circle until she got dizzy and fell over. She laughed the whole time. I have no idea where she learned it (daycare?) but now when I say “Emma, twirl!” she spins and spins. It is a riot.
She continues to love music and uses her knees to bounce up and down and dance. She is a great eater and so far has not shown an aversion to particular foods that I have read so many toddlers develop. Speaking of toddlers, she has had a couple of full blown lie-on-the-floor-and-kick-your-feet type tantrums which were amazing to behold. The tantrums were short lived and luckily we were at home, but we are really hoping they aren’t signs of the “terrible twos” coming a little early.
Her only word is still “Da” for her daddy, but (terrifyingly) she seems to understand a lot of what we say. She follows simple directions like “go get your Bear” or “sit down in the bathtub”. Oddly, it seems for some reason that when we say “don’t touch the dog food” she hears “please pick up that very full bowl of dog food and dump it all over the kitchen floor”. I guess we should have her ears looked at…
I continue to be amazed at how much FUN it is to have a little person to hang out with. It’s the part of parenting that not a whole lot of people really talk about. Mike and I could sit and watch her play and dance and laugh for hours and hours, and once she starts talking? Fuhgeddaboutit.
Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus tonight, receiving 38% of the delegates.
To say that we are happy about the results is a huge understatement. I think Mike and I had not really admitted to ourselves how invested we are in Senator Obama’s campaign. We haven’t been able to be as active as we would like, but clearly our hearts are in it all the way, as evidenced by our tears as we watched his acceptance speech. I think we were both a little surprised by how much this meant to us.
So, uh, Christmas was a little more sick and dramatic than I was planning. Since Christmas is my favorite time of year and I am feeling a little sad about it being kind of a bust, I am just going to move on and start planning for next year.
Let me just mention, by way of a little bit of advice, that if your baby throws up for hours and hours, she is probably sick. And even when she stops throwing up you might not want to expose others to whatever it was that made her sick, even if it is Christmas Day. Because if you do, every. single. person. who comes into contact with her may end up throwing up for hours and hours, which would really be a downer at Christmas.
So, moving right along…what else is happening…oh yeah - the Iowa caucus is tomorrow! Four years ago I was doing field for the Dean campaign in Henry and Washington Counties. I was living and working in a tiny room in the home of a supporter in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa and made more phone calls in a four week period than I ever thought possible. I attended a caucus in a little town whose name I have since blocked out, and I knew before that caucus was over that the outcome statewide was not going to be what I had worked and hoped for. I got ragingly drunk that night, then packed up and went to the U.P. of Michigan to continue working for Dean. Good times.
It is a little mind boggling to think about how much my life has changed in four years. But even with all the changes I am still riveted by what is happening tomorrow. I am afraid to hope for too much, the last campaign taught me that, but I am pulling for Barack Obama. When I ran screaming from left Iowa, I lost contact with all the folks I worked with while I was there, so I can’t even check in with them to see what they think is going to happen. I just hope my favorite precinct captain, Mary Ellen, is an Obama supporter. If she is, we have nothing to worry about.
