Golden Baby Days

The postpartum haze is gone now, and I am really settling into enjoying Norah now. It is hard to explain what that grey funky haze does to me -- it's not like I wasn't enjoying her before, but it was as if I was too busy trying to keep my mind together to really pay attention to how fun she is. Or something. Maybe other moms know what I mean.

Now she is 10 months old, cruising around the living room holding onto the furniture, babbling a *lot* and saying "dada," "mama," "baba" (brother), and "clap, clap, clap!" which sounds sort of like "bap, bap, bap!" but is accompanied by clapping so I feel pretty confident that it is what she is saying.

She eats SO MUCH FOOD. She eats breakfast for an hour -- I put her in her high chair and she eats fruit and cereal, then cheerios, then yogurt, then back again, then rice crackers, until she starts refusing the food. She eats so much. And she growing to match -- C sleeps in a diaper still and the two of them wear the same diaper size.

I am really enjoying this phase, because she is still a baby -- she really looks like a baby when she is drifting off to sleep in my arms, her little feathery lashes resting on her chunky chubby cheeks :) But her personality is showing itself more and more, she sleeps through the night, and she is testing out her independence in tiny ways here and there. She is so sweet, too -- there is nothing sweeter than a baby girl!

Chris is growing and getting smarter every day, too. He cursed the other night while we were watching a movie. It isn't funny, but Ben and I were choking trying to hide our laughter. The thing that is so funny about it is that he used the word in the exact right context. They learn a little too well sometimes ;D So my mouth is on lockdown right now. I am trying really hard. I have a tendency to let my frustration come out in a string of muttered curses, but I just have to cut it out and find something else to do with my frustration. Maybe I will become a marathon runner ;D

Around the house I am on my ever present quest to find balance and simplify things, and I have managed to relegate my teaching to the early morning and late night so that it doesn't intrude on my daily responsibilities like hanging out with the kids and trying to keep order in the house.

I have found out a couple of useful things: first, if I proactively feed the kids -- feed them as soon as they wake up for the morning and from nap -- then they are in a much better mood afterwards. And they eat better, too. I was having a lot of trouble getting Chris to eat enough, but these days when I offer him food right when he gets up, he eats more. He also really is getting to like fresh fruit and veggies, which is a great thing. It makes me proud although I didn't really have a hand in it.

My Rubbermaid Reveal mop is just as exciting as the day I bought it -- the floors are much cleaner than they used to be, although I do wish it had a scrub brush on it for the really tough stuff. I feel like I spend a lot of time prying things up off the vinyl with an old butter knife. How does food turn to cement sooooo quickly?

It looks like I am not going to make my birthday weight loss goal :( I have only a month left and twenty pounds until the goal, because I lost all the progress I made in January, somehow. It makes me sad but I am trying not to wallow in it, but just to keep on with forward progress. Exercise is a big challenge, because I get tired and hungry when I exercise, so I don't do it much because I don't want to overeat or fall asleep after. Allegedly it will get easier over time but I haven't really gotten to that point yet. So I am just trying to keep moving. I bought a little pedometer at Target to track my steps and aim for 10,000 a day, but then the second day I had it, I lost it. I have no idea where the fracking thing is. I changed from jeans to shorts and forgot to switch it over, and then later I remembered and went back to the jeans to get the pedometer off of them and click it onto the shorts, but it wasn't on the jeans, either. :p Stuff like that tries to derail me all the time. I think to myself, other people can keep up with their things. Other people do not spend 50% of their day looking for stuff they just set down that has now disappeared.

Also, I have had to give up coffee. I started having mini panic attacks and not being able to sleep -- oops! It's all from the caffeine. Somehow caffeine from coffee is worse than caffeine from other sources. So for now I am drinking a lot of green tea and popping Tylenol to deal with the withdrawal headaches. I am a pretty big caffeine addict :p It's hard not to be, though!

Overall it's going well. I can smell Spring in the air. Norah is going to start walking any day now. Maybe that will be the secret to my weight loss ;D