the world is my feeding tray

I enjoy the babycenter.com updates I receive weekly. They're often helpful. Sometimes, I think they're out to lunch. (no spanking -- ever!!)
But they're usually pretty on target.
I'm enjoying this little bit of encouragement today:

Your life: Housekeeping woes
When you get to the point that the mess in your home is causing you stress, remember these three powerful words: Lower your standards. It's hard to keep up with the cleaning, laundry, and organization the way you did pre-baby, especially once your little one is able to move about and scatter toys all day long.

Which explains the his, hers -n- baby's heaps of laundry (clean, at least) on our dining room chairs right now.

But I'm laughing at the advice because our baby has reached that stage where cleanliness is actually vital. Vacuuming is the one thing that must be done -- if we could, probably a couple of times a day.

We had friends over a couple of weekends ago. They have kids, so they totally 'get it.' Which was handy when the guy (Christian) found Maddie chewing on something -- a leaf, as it turns out. Which had been tracked in on the bottom of someone's shoe, and probably not that day.

In a moment of boredom, she will crawl over to something she sees on the floor, carefully pincer it and bring it to her mouth. Often, it's an errant Cheerio. But a couple of times, it's been a clod of dirt.

Thank the Lord our baby has a healthy gag reflex/choking mechanism. Good gracious.

irresistible lists

I can't resist lists. They make for such easy blog posts!
This one comes courtesy of one Ms. Erin ...

Copy and paste this into your own blog, if you want to participate. Then, bold the items that you’ve actually done.

1. Started your own blog (duh)

2. Slept under the stars (might have -- but don't remember for sure)

3. Played in a band

4. Visited Hawaii

5. Watched a meteor shower (tried -- can't recall if there were many meteors, though)

6. Given more than you can afford to charity (this one's a judgment call, it should be noted)

7. Been to Disneyland

8. Climbed a mountain

9. Held a praying mantis

10. Sang a solo

11. Bungee jumped

12. Visited Paris

13. Watched a lightning storm at sea (that would be a little scary!)

14. Taught yourself an art from scratch

15. Adopted a child

16. Had food poisoning

17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty

18. Grown your own vegetables (technically, I grew beans once as a kid as a school project. But I really shouldn't be able to properly count this one.)

19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France

20. Slept on an overnight train Oh, I'm QUITE sure I've done this one. Multiple times! Both on a sleeper train, and ... not.)

21. Had a pillow fight (I think?)

22. Hitch hiked

23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill (Many. But my kids were!)

24. Built a snow fort

25. Held a lamb

26. Gone skinny dipping

27. Run a Marathon

28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice

29. Seen a total eclipse

30. Watched a sunrise or sunset

31. Hit a home run

32. Been on a cruise

33. Seen Niagara Falls in person

34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors

35. Seen an Amish community

36. Taught yourself a new language (Taught ... myself? Really? Someone's taught themself a new language?)

37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied (uhhh ... I feel I should answer yes? But ...)

38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person

39. Gone rock climbing

40. Seen Michelangelo’s David (this is one of my huge European regrets. But the line wrapped around the museum, and it was our last day in Florence ... so my friend Jennifer and I spent our 4,000 lira on gelato, instead. But I hear I missed out.)

41. Sung karaoke Hee.

42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt

43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant

44. Visited Africa

45. Walked on a beach by moonlight

46. Been transported in an ambulance

47. Had your portrait painted

48. Gone deep sea fishing

49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person

50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (nope, just the first level. But I walked that far! Kind of impressive. [?])

51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling

52. Kissed in the rain (Does watching Spider-Man or Four Weddings and a Funeral count? Darn. Then, not that I can recall.)

53. Played in the mud

54. Gone to a drive-in theater

55. Been in a movie (only the home variety)

56. Visited the Great Wall of China

57. Started a business

58. Taken a martial arts class

59. Visited Russia

60. Served at a soup kitchen

61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies (Campfire girl candies, though)

62. Gone whale watching (really want to!)

63. Got flowers for no reason

64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma (and then went to softball practice an hour later. Made the sprints around the bases MUCH more interesting.)

65. Gone sky diving (really want to!)

66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp (Ugh.)

67. Bounced a check (not for a VERY long time, I'm proud to report)

68. Flown in a helicopter

69. Saved a favorite childhood toy (Mom will probably tell you that I've saved them all.)

70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial (Duh.)

71. Eaten Caviar (mmmm ... maybe. Not sure.)

72. Pieced a quilt

73. Stood in Times Square

74. Toured the Everglades (I was seven, but being in the water with alligators staring at you from water-level leaves a lasting impression.)

75. Been fired from a job

76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London (seen 'em, but not changing)

77. Broken a bone (can you believe, never? as I hastily search for wood to knock on)

78. Been on a speeding motorcycle (speeding? I guess?)

79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person (again, seven. Again, lasting impression)

80. Published a book

81. Visited the Vatican

82. Bought a brand new car

83. Walked in Jerusalem

84. Had your picture in the newspaper

85. Read the entire Bible

86. Visited the White House

87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating

88. Had chickenpox

89. Saved someone’s life

90. Sat on a jury

91. Met someone famous

92. Joined a book club

93. Lost a loved one

94. Had a baby

95. Seen the Alamo in person (I might have when I was a kid. I guess it did not leave a lasting impression.)

96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake

97. Been involved in a law suit

98. Owned a cell phone

99. Been stung by a bee

Second in line

There are a lot of things to love about having Kid No. 2. For instance, I just popped up into the attic and fetched down four toys -- three of them on the more expensive side -- and now Maddie's playing with them. All for the low low cost of just storing them for a few years.

When we cranked the first one up, the music (insert total plug for Leapfrog products here) made me nostalgic for the many, many hours Lizzy and I spent with the thing. It's a small table that encourages a growing baby to stand. Maddie's a wee bit young for it, but she's trying to pull herself up on stuff already. Mostly, she gets to leaning toward it, then falls into, say, a table leg and bonks herself on the forehead and cries. The cost of learning.

Maddie has no lack of help in figuring these new toys out. Lizzy just loooooooves to play with these toys, in the guise of showing Maddie how they work. We're watching this happen, sort of picturing Maddie never developing at all, learning soon that she can sit back and let Lizzy do all of the work. Ahhh, help. When you want it, it's unavailable, and when you do get it, it's in all too great a quantity.

In other 'news,' we saw the circus today. I was hoping for some stellar scrapbook photos, but the light doesn't allow for much of that. I'll try to see if any of them are worth posting later on. All in all, though, Matt and I are pretty sure that's the last show of any kind we'll see for awhile. Lizzy just isn't that wowed any more. She spent a lot of time being upset that we weren't in the FIRST ROW (we were in the second row, though!), because the FIRST-ROW spectators were taken out to the floor and driven around during one of the manic Disney meets Cirque de Soleil numbers. (this was actually Barnum and Bailey, for the record.) And the people-movers were even shaped like teacups! The injustice!! So, we'll stick with buying necessities for ourselves instead of lavish productions for our spoiled suddenly pre-teen. Oh yeah -- Lizzy has informed me that she's too old for Disney princess stuff. She traded her pink Disney princess backpack for a blue High School Musical-themed pack last weekend. Ahhh, the end of an era.

Until Maddie gets there -- hurrah! I'm already looking forward to it.

Is change gonna come?

Don't worry -- I'm not suddenly going to do a political post. :) Just business (so to speak) as usual, for this space.

Our joyful little Maddie has always seemed to get a huge kick out of being on the changing table. I don't know if it's the up-close face-to-face with some of her favorite Big People, but she smiles and smiles and loves to interact there. That's where she giggled for the first time, in fact, on Halloween. (and I don't think she was just laughing at my football jersey and the black under my eyes. But I guess you never know.)

These days, though, she's so active, it's become a real challenge to get that dirty diaper off and a clean one on. It feels like I'm trying to change a diaper on a chicken roasting on a spit; Maddie will flip over to her stomach, then her back, and just keep on revolvin'. She loves giving Mommy a challenge, perhaps?

The generally sure-fire weapon in my arsenal has been my long hair. If I dangle it over her face (putting my head sideways), she grabs it and yanks it back and forth, but at least she is thus occupied and holding still, on her back. This also hurts, and puts my face uncomfortably close to the "action," but it works, so I deal.

What I really don't like are the couple of times she has grabbed my hair, yanked my head close and then employed her froggy kick to my chin. This child is STRONG, y'all. Strong and playful, and almost always happy. I suppose I can't get too upset at damage she doesn't even know she's causing.

easter

Maddie let us keep this rabbit hat on her head for more than 0.3 seconds! Longer than her sister at her age, that is. Yay Maddie!

Wee Maddie has really gotten into the crawling. At least, fundamentally -- she can do it pretty well. Something about her slightly jerky movements reminds me of a mechanical toy. It's just the cutest thing -- like seeing a chubby plastic doll chugging along.
She doesn't really love it, though. It's more a method of convenience. If everyone, or the people she wants (Matt or me), leave a room and she notices and doesn't like it, she'll trek into the next room, looking for us. (but it's not like we leave her for long; don't get concerned!)
When Lizzy learned to crawl, she was everywhere, as I recall. Loving it; testing the new skills to the limit. Maddie seems more of a content child, dipping into the newest skill only when practical.

mourning my lack of dink-dom

I've been pondering off and on lately, for some reason, a life stage that I didn't experience.
The fact that I missed it is my own fault (obviously, for those of you who have known me for years), and so I'm not blaming anyone. More just wondering what I missed, I suppose.
Because it seems like there's a lot of value in knowing one's spouse for years before having children. I know some people do things "the right way" -- marriage before kids -- and still a kid comes along almost instantly for them, as well. But I rather envy the folks who had a few years between wedding and firstborn.

I recall as a singleton thinking that certain tasks -- a classic example would be, bringing a nice home-cooked dish to a potluck -- should be more the area of the married couple. I'm the single person. I can get away with providing the bag of chips or bakery cookies or easy salad or something. What makes me laugh now is, I give myself the same excuses as a married parent. Hey -- I have no time, right? So someone else will still have to provide the really good stuff. (this example probably speaks more to my general laziness regarding food preparation than anything.) Fortunately for my hypothetical fellow potlucking friends, my husband doesn't subscribe to this theory, and will usually go overboard to provide something fitting.

That's obviously a silly example. More important is the one-on-one time with my spouse. Getting to know him, building common memories, doing a few grown-up things before the decades of kid things descended. Even just one grown-up vacation together, perhaps? A bit of money spent on ourselves, not kids or kid care?

The time spent just feathering the nest would've been nice, too. And planning things slowly, one step at a time ... There are so many projects I would love to dive into -- wedding photo album, say -- that languishes undone in favor of laundry or some child-related need.

I don't really wish I could go back and do many things over again. I truly acknowledge the wisdom that says that I learned from my mistakes. I do feel that I have. But the one thing I wish I could give my spouse that I never really fully will be able to prove to his satisfaction is the gift of knowing that I really, truly 100 percent choose to be with him because ... well, because I want to be with him. And again, thinking back on how things went down, who could blame him for always doubting that? He would have to be stupid to NOT doubt that. Though, by the time we got married (and still), I would not have been with anyone else for all the world.

Marriage just by necessity takes a back seat to the children's concerns. And we've got a loooong road to walk before we're done chasing after children's concerns. Sometimes I wish we'd had a little 'us' time first.

And then my more cynical, sensible self says, perhaps if I hadn't gotten pregnant, I never would have gotten married at all. I know myself. I know the levels of perfection and idealism I put on certain things. Would I ever have actually chosen to marry someone? I'm betting I wouldn't have.
When I think about it that way -- not to mention what a sweet, cool, fun, talented, deeply interesting and conversational guy I ended up with -- how things went down isn't so bad.

I wouldn't for one second say that, in general, a life lived without husband and/or children is a life not fully lived. But I would say for me, I would've felt a deep lack. And regret.
I often truly believe my deepest motivator is the avoidance of regret. I don't know how sound that sort of logic is, but it seems to be the way I operate.

All that said ... I'll be happy with what I have, and try to ignore the little what-ifs that occasionally creep in.

random shots

Here are some photos, taken within the past three weeks. Just for funsies.


The girls! (on Valentine's Day)



Matt and his (little) girls.



Lizzy and her nearly head-sized meatball from one of our favorite restaurants, Buca di Beppo (where we ate a family Valentine's Day dinner)



Matt and his favorite dessert ("without a doubt!" he says.) (and, yes, he shared.)



Maddie, being her cute and happy self.



A hip -n- hilarious food pattern (prunes, of all things!) that I couldn't resist snapping a photo of.


The view out our front door, last Monday.



A picturesque fire Matt made that day. (note snow still on logs!)

what a great day!

I just have to blab a bit about what a great day we had.
To start with, I got on the new bike we bought for me a few weeks ago FOUR TIMES. Four times! Matt wasn't even home for a good chunk of today, yet I took four (okay, of varying distances, but still) bike rides!!
The 70-degree weather didn't hurt a bit. I told a couple of people that, to me, this would probably be remembered as the best weekend of the year, weather-wise. Still too early for almost all of the bugs (but they're comin'), nice and warm, but NOT TOO HOT. Really, that's all it takes.
I meant to rave about how great it feels to have a bike again back when we bought it -- three weeks ago now -- but just haven't gotten the chance. I last had a bike five years ago. It was a yellow mountain bike with front shocks that I thought were spiffy. I bought it in Germany, at one of the military bases there. As my dad pointed out, it was probably a bit too big for me. My neck got sore sometimes from riding it -- I had to lean over too far, and tilted my head too much. But I rode it a lot in Germany. There was a back route through spargel fields to the next wee town. Then I'd ride back along a bike path next to the street. How I love Germany for its bike paths. And spargel fields! Sometimes, I could hear a cuckoo who must've lived in a nearby tree when I'd pedal past. A cuckoo! How cool is that.
Anyway, I put a lot of miles on that bike, and liked it quite a lot, whether or not it fit quite right. And then, someone stole it. From my apartment building in Rosslyn. Shortly after I'd decided that, now that I had a baby (and a bunch of baby stuff), it would no longer fit in the smallish one-bedroom apartment I had there. So I put it in the basement, but unfortunately all of the good spots to lash it to were taken by other bikers. (railings, etc.) So I just wound a chain through the frame and wheels, and took the seat off. But that wasn't enough of a deterrent, turns out.
Matt believes he even saw the guy who took it. That's a funny story in and of itself, but it's a bit too un-PC to tell here. Ask me sometime.
Anyway ... I've been mourning that bike ever since. Not the bike, actually; but I've been bummed, and rather bitter (as it was stolen -- stealing is one thing that REALLY CHAPS MY HIDE), not to have a bike for this amount of time. I do invest in a certain amount of self-pity since I've been a mom. Hello -- not much is mine anymore. My body still isn't yet all mine from this last go-round. I don't have much money, even less time, etc. etc. ... okay, enough about that. But I certainly didn't have a bike. And exercise opportunities are painfully hard to come by.
So this tax season, Matt decided that the one splurge we would make would be bicycles, and enough kiddo stuff to make them usable. This took the form of a decent bike from a bike shop for me, and a lesser, but (we hope) still serviceable bike from Target for him. We gave Craigslist a shot for a bike trailer (Maddie) and one of those copilot thingies where it makes the grown-up's bike a tandem of sorts, with a kid seat on the back (Lizzy), but we kept getting beaten out, so we said, you know, okay. We'll just buy them. Ugh. So, we did.

This is the first weekend that we've had all the pieces in place. Out we went! Since Matt had a music practice to get to, Lizzy opted to squeeze into the bike trailer with Maddie, and amazingly enough, it worked. First time out, we went a fair distance, and when we forgot to bring a pacifier and Maddie started squawking (she was tired), Lizzy sang her to sleep. Sweet big sister!
The downside to biking today was, we've still had so much snow on the ground until yesterday (or, in some cases, today) that the ground was still quite wet and squishy and, in some places, muddy. I don't have a mudflap on my back tire, so at one point, I looked back into the trailer to see a big mud splotch on Maddie's cheek. Whoops!
Mighty fine day, I tell you. Tomorrow looks fairly promising, too!

girls and self-esteem

Man, this stuff starts early.
Lizzy recently got a writing board from IKEA -- it's a nice little addition to the living room, and she finds fun things to do with it. Write messages for visitors, draw pictures and have us guess what they are, etc.
The most recent thing on the board is a line down the middle, and two categories: "Likes Lizzy" on the left side, and "Dosent like Lizzy" on the other side.
When I first saw the sign, the score was 1 to 1. Maddie and I have since voted, making the score 3 to 1. (Maddie told me how she wanted me to vote on her behalf.)
"Who said 'doesn't like Lizzy'?" Matt asked when he saw the board. "She did, of course," I said.
She wouldn't tell Matt why she voted that way. I tried later that night, at bedtime.
"I don't want to tell you," she said. "I won't tell anyone. Some things, I don't want anyone to know."
Also recently, she's been really insistent that we respect the privacy of her bedroom. Which is fine with me, though I do reserve the right to peek in there occasionally for such purposes as to see if she's still taking a (rare) nap, etc. But I try to respect her privacy, for the most part. She can really get mad if I barge in without announcing myself.
I mean, really. She's not even six and a half yet! Where does she GET this stuff??
I've been struggling lately with the balance between correcting my child and boosting her self-esteem. And trying (far too often, unsuccessfully) to model respect for her. But she's been doing a lot of shouting at us lately, and attempting to order us around, and lots and LOTS of interrupting.
What on earth? Is it a stage? Have we already gone horribly wrong as parents? Have we applied too much discipline? Not enough? Sometimes I think one, sometimes the other. Did we wait too long to have child No. 2?
This parenting gig is not for the faint of heart.

note to self

I never realized how good spicy food feels on a scratchy throat. Seriously! Kind of like a fancy treatment of some kind.
Thank you, tofu curry from the food court!