grateful

there are parent bloggers everywhere explaining how to be more present, how not to yell, how to make just about anything awesome. i'm not trying to be awesome, but i am on the lookout for ways to make my life a little better, more enjoyable, fun for everyone at home, etc. i'm working on being grateful for everyday-type stuff, not just the big stuff.

i'm grateful for having a flexible employer. school for ani and nissa both starts up in a few weeks and there are a ton of things to keep me from work and i'm glad i can pull it off. so far, so good, at least. it's going to be interesting, for sure.

i'm grateful to see technology being used in helpful ways all around me. i heard on the radio that some college campuses are employing a phone app to loop students in with campus security. when i was in college, a cell phone was a distant concept, something i really didn't need. it wasn't until after graduation and i was travelling for work that i got one. ha. adam still had a pager when we first started dating. the rumor is i might get a smart phone soon, but i'm not holding my breath. my regular-ol' call-making, text-sending, photo-taking phone is doing an acceptable job for now. i like that it's small and relatively inexpensive. we'll see.

i'm grateful for being able to take time to be with adam, just the two of us. we got to go out for a show last weekend and it was great! dinner, music, seeing old friends, drinks, trying new fabulous tacos, sleeping in, just chatting without interruption. i'm glad he was able to take the next day off work to really make the time enjoyable and i'm very grateful grandma and grandpa a could help facilitate that. like a good friendship, we don't need to be connected at the hip, we just need a solid re-connection once in a while to keep everything in working order.


i'm grateful for a potty trained 2.5 year old! i don't remember exact details, but it was a relatively smooth transition. of course, there were bumps in the road:

but all in all, a good and relatively clean experience. the diapers have been officially retired to the attic. whoop!
ani is now able to stay in undies for naps and bedtime, though sometimes she'll insist on sleeping undies, which i'm trying to get away from (since we only have 3 pair and they are elusive). she had an accident just tuesday, but it was highly unusual and apparently nissa was supposed to tell adam. i'm working on getting her to be more take-charge about potty time; she tends to be clingy when she needs to go and not confident that she can do it all herself (even though i've seen her do it!!).


i'm grateful for being able to work in the yard. every weekend, the girls have let me mow, pull weeds and otherwise tend to the garden to keep it in good shape. since i've been able to keep up, it isn't a terrible weekend every week, and i don't have to do all of it every time. and now, i get compliments on the yard and have a small harvest almost every day. it does look good and the girls have a great time playing in it. sure, gibson gets the short end of the stick, but we try to play with him a little too. the secret? the girls being able to occupy themselves. they can dig in the dirt, make mud, play in the pool, run around the yard, blow bubbles, draw with chalk. the benefit? a daily supply of cherry tomatoes, cukes on demand, a decent supply of kale, zucchini that are embarrassingly huge, and a decent selection of herbs. go us!

bye, dipes

oh, and did i mention i packed away diapers over the weekend? yep. fab. she's been consistent day time for months now, though i still feel most comfortable bringing her potty seat with us. she has her father's bladder and can hold it for ages. naptime was hit or miss, really miss that one time early on with the wall painting incident. sigh. bedtime was always good, she could go all night pretty consistently. visit requests after lights out were suspicious, but usually productive. she started being dry regularly at naptime, even with long naps, and now we are good. now all we need to do is to get her to be a bit more self-reliant in the bathroom and i'll consider our efforts successful. though the lack of urine clean up is a really great place to be.

breastfeeding wisdom, sorta

for moms having a hard time in the beginning: think back to riding a bike - assuming you learned when you were a kid? it was terribly hard and frustrating, but once you got it, it was fabulous and freeing? breastfeeding is a lot like that. and much like how some kids learn faster than others, so is it with getting breastfeeding down- sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's harder; but always worth the effort in the long run. on a different note: it made me smile the other day when nissa recognized neil degrasse tyson in my facebook stream. yay! ani is getting so smart, it's crazy. though we do have to get a video of her running and her saying stethoscope. we were playing hide and seek a few weeks ago and when it was her turn to seek, she counted up to 6 on her own (not a lot of time to hide, by the way!) she recognizes a handful of letters, but we are working on that by playing gappy on the ipad with nissa. she loves to just sit and look at books, but not let you read them to her. she loves to explore with nissa, especially playing in the mud. she has a good memory and is ridiculously good at using "please" and "thank you."