Life....

Above: This is what I can make my life look like in pictures sometimes.
Below:  A story about what life is ACTUALLY like most times.

I was talking on the phone with Katie the other evening.  I was explaining that Grace was going through a challenging phase. Then I got off the phone, and a few minutes later had to call Katie back to explain to her exactly what “challenging” had just looked like.  This is basically what I told her.

I had taken Grace to the bathroom every 20 minutes for the last hour.  She did not once use the toilet.  We went outside.  I was on the phone.  A few minutes later, I see that while she is sitting outside under the neighbors front steps, she has mud all over her upper lip.  How strange.  Then I watched her pick up a plastic orange cup filled with dirt, bring it to her mouth and back down to her lap, and then begin chewing on something.

“Grace! Are you eating dirt?!?!”

“No, I’m drinking it.  And watching TV.  It’s my water.”

And sure enough, she was ingesting soil.  I grabbed her out of the dirt because what is cute at 9 months is not cute at 32.  On the way out of the dirt, I noticed she was also sitting in mud and had a bum covered in mud, but only in the spot where she would have just wet her pants.

Pee mud.   

Awesome.

So, Katie, that’s what I mean when I say challenging.

The Littlest of My Littles

Lillian

·         Lillian is a chatty little thing

·         Lillian will share a huge, open-mouth smile with just about anyone who pays her attention

·         If she is crying she wants one of 5 things

o   Bottle

o   Nap

o   Pacifier

o   Swaddle

o   Cuddle

·         Quickest way to dry Lil’s tears is to swaddle her and pop in her bink

·         Lillian has a flat spot on the back-left side of her head

·         I can finally get her to sleep on other parts of her head so that maybe it’s not quite so flat forever

·         Her hair is straight, brown, and two inches long on the top of her head

·         It’s only ½ long on the sides

·          Her eyes are dark blue

·         She has deliciously chunky rolls all over her legs and arms

·         Lillian likes to sing

·         Lillian likes to be read to

·         She found her fists this week

·         She learned how to play with toys this week

·         Her favorite way to fall asleep is swaddled, bink-ied, and laying on the floor watching mom and Grace play

·         Lil likes raspberries and tickles on her neck

·         She is 25 inches long

·         Lillian is absolutely the most happy when she is in the bath

·         Lillian has already had 3 colds

·         Her preferred nick names are Lil (mom), Lil-lil(Grace), Lilly(Dad), and Chunka-Monka Bay-bey (Mom)

·         When Lil is sad, she rubs her feet together

·         Mostly, Lil is happy

Remember...

My Gracie-girl

Life only looks picturesque

Know how I know that?

Cuz in that precious picture up there, I know that Grace has completely soiled undies.

But I wanted that picture anyway, cuz I love my girl

Accidents and all

Things I love—or at the very least should remember—about Grace:

·         When she feels a little self-conscious or silly, she talks with her bottom lip pulled over her bottom teeth

·         She likes to read the picture version of the Book of Mormon

·         Her prayers are NEVER more than four sentences long

o   Dear Heavenly Father

o   Thank you for the day

o   Thank you for Jesus (or everybody or Lillian or Addy)

o   In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen

·         She’s figured out that if she tells you that you skipped a part of her lullaby, you’ll re-sing that part

·         Bribing only works sometimes

·         She loves Lillian

·         She falls off of furniture all the time

·         If that child does not get an afternoon snack, her sugar drops and she is a MESS

·         She’ll only try new food if a Disney princess also eats it

·         She always wants to know who gave her each of her things

·         She snuck into the fridge and ate about 30 olives yesterday

·         She calls bobby pins “barbie pins”

·         She gets a dinosaur vitamin every morning as long as she lets me do her hair

·         She loves Dora toothpaste

·         She loves when I have “Someping Fecial” (Something Special) to tell her or show her

·         She wears shoes as infrequently as possible

·         She puts on tutus and costume jewelry every single day

·         She is a sucker for a Princess Crown

·         Her favorite movie is “Punchback”  (Hunchback of Notre Dame)

·         She likes to put stickers on paper and then promptly rip them all back off

·         She loves to paint but only if it’s acrylic—crayola watercolor is cheap

·         She loves hamburgers and French fries and could eat them till she keeled over

·         Friends/cousins are her favorite part of life—and her uncles

·         She loves nursery and wears a “Princess Dress” every single week

·         She likes to put on makeup in the morning with Mom

·         Anytime she’s into something she shouldn’t be, she’ll explain that she was “Helping You” (i.e. cut her hair, pick up Lillian, open bottles at the store, put battery operated toys in the bath)

·         If it is “Far-ka-ly” (sparkly) she is probably going to love it

·         If it has a butterfly, she’s probably going to love it

·         She loves to do dishes

·         She always has to touch the food on other people’s plates

·         Telling her you want to hold her is the quickest way to stop her crying

·         She loves riding on your back like a horse

·         She wants to get married in the temple

·         She wants to marry Repunzel

·         She doesn’t really like to exercise with mom, but she’ll do it every time if it means she can have a sip of hot chocolate (protein drink)

·         She can’t keep hot chocolate and chocolate milk straight to save her life

·         She spends all her time climbing up and down the stuff at the park but avoids all the slides

·         She loves, loves, loves playing in dirt—in her tutu

Just a Thought

Sometimes this happens.  

Yes, that is the mattress and those are the couch cushions on top of every single toy we've ever owned on the floor.

Yesterday my mind was a torrential downpour of stuff:  Things to do, worries, stresses, expectations, new goals, plan changes, some gratitude, disappointments, befuddlements, and so on—though I am not sure about the “and so on” part.  I think that list caught everything.  So add the “and” before befuddlements and cross out the “and so ons.”  No need to be mellow-dramatic.

And as Paul and I kneeled to say our evening prayer, I could feel the insomnia setting in.  It’s a curse I share with lots of worriers and over-thinkers out there.  And it all just tumbled around in my brain, but not with the grace of damp clothes in a dryer, or even the jittery movements of ping-pong balls in a lottery game thingy, but with the frantic desperation of a kid in a money machine trying desperately to grasp at bills that have no sort of predictable movement.

So after we finished our couple prayer, I prayed my own prayer on paper.  “Dear Heavenly Father,”  I wrote.  “There’s a lot of stuff in here right now that I need to talk to you about.”  And then I made eight categories on my paper and every time a thought blew around in there I caught a glimpse of it, wrote some short hand version of it under its appropriate category, hoping that God would know the whole story behind the three word condensed version, and moved on to the next frantically flying dollar bill.

Can we just say that by the time I was done, if my thoughts really had been money, I’d be rich?

But the point is, I got it all out.  In my very own version of praying that I made up by my own self.

And then I slept like a rock.

Till the kids woke up.

We're bringing Tufty back...

Okay, a dear friend requested a special post on today's events...

So Jess, this is for you.

All others are welcome to read it but if you dare judge me for one second, my only response is that your time will come.

See these bangs?  12 hours ago they were a  perfectly shaped little line just above her eyebrows.

See those sprouts?  There are 5 other patches across the front of her head to match.  All in all, not the worst case, but I'm telling you, it still hurts a mother's heart.

So, here's my journal entry from today.

What a day… at least Paul is home for it all.

Grace cut her own bangs this morning.

Then while I was in the shower, she ate 1/3 of a bottle of chewable vitamins.  I still am not quite sure how she got past the child proof lid.  We might have a genius on our hands.  Or, at the very least, a wildly determined child.  I might add here that the only reason we had these particular vitamins is because she opened the bottle WHILE WE WERE IN THE STORE.  They are the Disney ones that are double the price of the generic.

She slapped me.  Yep.  I was already raving mad about the hair.  And then she slapped me.  Mad you ask?  At this picturesque / right of passage moment? Yep. Fuming.  Her hair was SO FREAKING CUTE.  And now…  It was all I could do not to slap her back.

Then, we barely caught her as she was inches from shoving a key into the electrical outlet.

Then she whipped said keys hanging from a lanyard at me like she was David-slaying-Goliath-with-a-sling-and-a-rock.  Again, I did not hit her, though the temptation was considerably stronger.

Then she colored all over her book with a pen.  10 minutes after apologizing to the librarian for ripping a book ON PURPOSE last week.  Will I ever learn?

She’s napping now.  We’ll see how this evening goes.

When we took her to the store this afternoon, we cinched her so tightly into the cart; there was no telling what she might have done otherwise.

She still got out.

So that was my day.  Nope.  No pearls of wisdom or perky conclusions.  Just a plain old rundown of some of the more colorful events of the day.

In all Seriousness...

Does life get better?
I submit that it does not.
Because this is what 8:45 looked like at our house today.

Just an Update of Sorts

I'm good.  I'm happy.  I'm also really tired and so I have nothing particularly clever to write, so I'm just posting some pics of our recent happiness.  And that's all.  And that's enough. 

 Mom's 50th Birthday Party.  It was my labor of love with help from lots of others. 

The banner says "Time to Start That Bucket List" which was our theme instead of "Over the Hill" or something like that.

 120 cupcakes.  Caramel Banana for the surf and Chocolate Peanut Butter for the sand. Get it?  Buckets... sand?  Oh, you do get it.  Good.  Dad engineered the stand.  He's the bomb.

 Mom and Alli made the 7-layer cookies, my personal favorite (I ate 12...or more.)

 The "display."  Mom helped cut the vinyl and I put it all together...I love how it turned out.

And there's the wonderful birthday lady and her handsome husband.

So that was one weekend, and this was the next...

 Happy 2nd Birthday, Love Girl!

You'll note the carryover from last weekend...we're on a budget here. 

 Sea turtles swim on a Caramel Chocolate cupcake.  Super-easy...if you can find all the right candy.  If you improvise on the fins, you might end up wanting to curse because this was supposed to be the EASY party.

 Left-over buckets make awesome party favors and candy collectors.  

Thanks mom for making them all personalized.  

 I work REALLY hard to not lose sight of the KID while I'm preping the KID'S party.  So all the baking was done one morning while Grace slept in, and the lobster banner was a super-fun project for me and Grace on the morning of party.  She kept saying, "It's so silly, Mommy!  So silly!"  while I painted her hands and feet.  And yes, the Love Angel speaks in complete sentences.  It still catches me off guard some days.  But there are DEFINITELY perks anytime communication is enhanced.

 The adorable little "fish!"  Thank you neighbors for use of your bomb pool stuff!

 That's me and my hott lover.  He looks awesome.  I look...tired.  It's like 90 degrees and not pictured is a 51/2 month pregnant belly.  I make no apologies for my tiredness.

 Wonderful family.

 Sweet cousins.

 Birthday wishes.  She has that candle thing down pat.

 And Paul and my favorite part...the pinata.  We made an octopus this year.

Grace calls it an "Ah-pah-tus."  That is THE reason we chose to make an octopus...just to here her say it 500 times.

 Candy grabbin'.

Present Opening 

Happiness.

And for the record, this is not the precedence for all future birthday parties.  Mom was worth EVERY SINGLE hour of labor for her 50th birthday and Grace was a lucky recipient of left-overs.  The rule for Grace's party was that I could do it if it was fun for me, meaningful to Grace, and with-in the budget. The only thing that got out of hand were those silly turtle fins.  For my momma this year, the rule was Nothing is too much as long as daddy was willing to pay for it and absolutely no procrastination; I will sleep EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.  And I did...but I am still so very tired.