Everybody sing Jamaica!

Sorry, whenever I think of the word "Jamaica", this song pops into my head.

Will and I took a quick (4 nights) trip to Jamaica last week. We used to go to the Caribbean all the time back when we were young, childless newlyweds, but having kiddoes curtailed that pretty quick. I have taken a couple trips without Emily since she was born, but I've never left Charlotte for longer than 1 night and I've never left the country since having kids so this was a big hairy deal for me. We decided on Jamaica because #1 We'd never been before and #2 We could get a direct flight from Baltimore. If I was leaving my kids, I didn't want to make the trip any longer with layovers!

I was kind of a wreck when I left...Emily is old enough now to realize what is going on and she was a bit sad I was leaving, especially since she asks me practically daily if she can fly in an airplane or go to the beach and here we were doing both without her. I cried as we drove away, and was feeling pretty sick to my stomach as we headed to the airport. Partially because I haven't traveled (especially internationally) in so long, and partially because I was going to be so far away from my kids and difficult to reach.

But I finally chilled out a bit when we got to Jamaica, and we ended up having a great time. I appreciate being able to relax and do whatever *I* want to do so much more now that I have kids. Whenever I'd miss the girls (for example when a family with a 4 year old girl and a 1 year old girl wearing pink tiaras sat down at the table next to us at breakfast) I'd avert my gaze to a kid acting bratty (there were usually a couple of those close by too) and feel glad that I wasn't currently trying to control my kids in a restaurant. We spent our time wandering, laying on the beach and hanging out in the pool getting drunk in the middle of the day on our own schedule, instead of standing by the playground trying to convince our kids it was time to go eat or go back to the room for a nap.

We even went for massages, which is not unique for me, but is very out of the ordinary for Will. His last massage was on our honeymoon 7.5 years ago, and he hated it. He enjoyed this massage, although he had to tell his masseuse to go easier on him a couple times. Apparently Jamaican masseuses are beasts, because I finally met my match in a masseuse as well. I usually like a hard massage...my sister and I used to "work out the knots" in each other's backs growing up, which was basically just taking out our pent-up aggressions on each other, so I'm accustomed to pain during a massage and I even welcome it because I know that I will feel better and looser the next day if the masseuse really goes at it. But this woman was nuts. I ALMOST made it through the massage, but at one point I was in so much pain that when I opened my eyes my vision slid sideways a bit so I decided that rather than passing out I would tell her to ease up, something that was not easy for me to do because I had never had to do it before! I felt defeated until a couple hours later, when I noticed my back looked like this:

Not normal. It looks like something tried to claw its way through my skin, but really she managed to make those marks with her elbow. Yeouch! I couldn't stand anyone touching my back for 3 days afterward.

Luckily, the massage was the most stressful part of my trip (kind of backwards, isn't it?) and now that I've done my first international jaunt away from the girls I think future trips will be easier.

Pacified

As newborns, both of my daughters would take a pacifier now and then, but once the first couple of weeks of their lives had passed and they actually became aware of what was going on they didn't really care for them. After I had determined that Charlotte was not going to be a pacifier girl I lamented the fact that it was now 100% on me and my boobs to satisfy her constant need to suck, but I also breathed a sigh of relief that I would never have to break one of my children of a pacifier habit. I boiled all my pacifiers and handed them off to my friend Carolyn whose baby daughter, it seemed, WAS a pacifier girl. It turned out though that she had discriminating taste and only liked soothie pacifiers, so Carolyn recently returned the rest. I tossed the bag into my box of outgrown sippy cups and baby food making paraphanalia and forgot about it.

Emily and Charlotte would periodically dig the bag of pacifiers out of the box, suck on them, giggle, scatter them everywhere and then move on. I'd dutifully wash them all, put them back in the bag, and put the bag back in the box. I should perhaps move the box, but the rest of my house is so jam-packed with outgrown baby stuff waiting to be passed down to my sisters or sisters-in-law when they start procreating (please get on that girls! Emily and Charlotte need cousins!) that there's not really anywhere else to put it that is safe from stinkbugs (i.e. not my garage or attic or back porch).

About a week ago, Charlotte dug out some pacifiers as usual, only this time she remained interested in them. She chose one and kept it in her mouth as she went about her business. When bedtime rolled around, she still had her pacifier with her, and for the past week she has had one in her mouth almost constantly.




I believe I have mentioned before that Charlotte has been a pretty tough baby. Tougher than Emily anyway, and those are the only two babies I have experience raising. Charlotte also seems to have inherited my sister's "JPL" (just plain loud) gene, and is capable of keeping up an almost constant series of earsplitting shouts and moans if you are not doing exactly what she wants you to do, ESPECIALLY in the car.

But since bonding with her pacifier? She will happily play in her crib for a bit at night, then fall asleep without a peep instead of screaming for 10 minutes after I leave the room like she does EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. She calmly sat on my mom's lap at Will's graduation for about 45 minutes, which is completely unprecedented. She is SO.MUCH.QUIETER. She is more patient on shopping trips. She'll occupy herself while I do some dishes. The list goes on and on.

It has really been like a miracle. It's like all the toughest parts of Charlotte's personality are gone, and I'm left to enjoy the (many) wonderful parts!

Of course, being a mom, my first reactions have been guilt and worry. Will she become dependant on the pacifier to the point where I WILL have to break her of it at some point? Will it mess up her teeth or delay further speech development? Am I being a pushover letting her have it all the time just to make my life easier? I do miss being able to see her mouth. And how weird is it for a 16 month old who never cared about pacifiers before to all of a sudden become obsessed with them?

Then again, she has ALWAYS loved to suck...maybe she is just naturally anxious and having something to suck on is relieving those feelings of anxiety? And if I have found a fairly commonly used and harmless way to make my day to day life go SO much more smoothly, well, don't I deserve a break from all the pawing and screaming and whining and biting?

For now I'm allowing it. There may come a time when it seems to be an issue, but for now I've decided to enjoy myself and enjoy my daughter. We'll let tomorrow take care of itself.

Zhyoonicorn party

On Saturday we had Emily's 4th birthday party. It was technically a unicorn-themed party, but she still has some funny little speech hangups and pronounces it as "zhyoonicorn". I will be sad when that little quirk goes away.

We had gorgeous weather, much to my relief.
Emily wanted to have her party at the park where she had it last year, and it's always very nerve-wracking at that instant that you finally commit and send out invitations for something that might very well get rained out at the last minute. Maybe that's why I didn't actually send the invitations until about a week before the party. Oops. Except that I kind of do that every year.

As usual, I freaked out about how many people I was going to invite. Practically all of our family lives in the area, all the way up to Emily's Great Great Grandmother, which is wonderful, but it makes parties difficult because as soon as I've invited all the family members I already have a guest list of 50 people. Preschool added a new element to consider, because with each preschool friend I invited there was a possibility of 2 parents and 1-2 siblings coming along as well, which adds up REALLY fast. Emily has not been invited to any of her preschool friends' birthday parties, and I got all indignant about it and was perhaps even heard to declare that I was going to invite EVERYONE in Emily's class to make them feel bad for not inviting her (why yes I am very mature) but I've been forced to eat some humble pie because when it came time to actually sit down and plan everything out I realized wow. That's a lot of kids. So I slowly, painfully paired our guest list down, and this time several core family members couldn't make it anyway, so we ended up with a very manageable party and all of my worry and lamenting that drove everyone around me nuts was for naught*

The cake got finished in time, and people actually ate it even though it was whole wheat. It probably helped that the frosting was not a bit healthy. I have yet to figure out how to healthify frosting and still end up with something that you can decorate with.
My wonderful family, as usual, helped me set up and clean up, sometimes at great personal risk
Even though I couldn't find the candles for her cake, it was a nice party.







After the party, we went to get Emily her present from Mommy and Daddy, which was her first bike. I was all for heading to Toys R Us and buying a $30 bike to present to her during present-opening time, but Will was adamant that we needed to take her with us to a REAL bike store and make an event out of it. It was a nice idea, but what really happened was that after the party was over we laid around until about 5:45 recovering, then realized that the bike place closes at 6 on Saturdays and had to throw everyone into the car and make a mad dash to the store. They only had one bike that was her size anyway, and predictably both girls were wailing within minutes of entering the store, so Will ran out the door with a screaming flailing girl under each arm while I remained behind to pay for her bike...which we brought home and Emily refused to ride, instead prefering her scooter she got for her 3rd birthday.


She'll learn to ride her bike someday, I'm sure. But for now no one has enough energy to teach her how.

*As an aside, I will mention that I have realized and hope to address the fact that it is about 90% disorganization that makes me freak out about everything so much (the rest is most likely neuroses). I want to be the mom who makes awesome cupcakes for her daughter to take to school on her birthday and throws well-planned birthday parties and does thoughtful things for people, and while I am just barely managing to do these things, it it stressful for me. Since I am so disorganized I feel like I am always living my life with everything on the verge of disaster, so doing anything above and beyond the norm is extremely stressful because while I am focusing on a project, everything around me DOES then end up falling into disaster. It would also help if I weren't totally lazy. I think some scheduling and menu planning would be extremely helpful, so I am going to try to implement both of those things as a start. I have to start somewhere, because "Do everything better" and "Be organized" aren't very helpful things to put on my to-do list. I would love to entertain more and look forward to events and engagements with excitement instead of the feeling of "OH MY GOD I still have so much work to do for this!!!!" I've always been awesome at procrastination, so this will take a lot of work, but I really do want to try to improve in this area.

4 Years

2007
2008

2009

2010
Yesterday


A very happy 4th birthday to my beautiful little evil genius! We love you more than words can say.

A post about Easter, only about 3 weeks late

On Easter morning, we awoke to the sound of Emily running around downstairs. This is seriously THE FIRST day in this child's life that she hasn't purposely awakened us before going downstairs. Maybe the Easter Bunny should come every night!

By the time I got downstairs, she had already found quite a few eggs, discovered the chocolate covered raisins (grain-sweetened, of course) inside, and cracked into a hard-boiled egg.
Look Mommy! The Easter Bunny came!


This all happened with flagrant disregard for our The Way We Do Things On Holidays In This Family SOP, which is usually:

1. Make sure everyone is awake, wearing pants, and looking semi-presentable
2. Take pictures on the stairs
3. Come downstairs slowly while being simultaneously videotaped and photographed (so help me God there WILL be videotapes and photographs of these Very Special Memories)
4. Discover Easter baskets on table, react with suitable delight which is of course captured for posterity in ongoing videotape and photographs
5. Spend time joyously digging through Easter basket
6. THEN start hunting eggs

I re-hid most of the eggs, and then allowed the girls to hunt them.
I'm not sure I understand what is happening here

Then we dug through our baskets, which for the girls contained plastic snakes because the Easter Bunny decided we already have way too many stuffed rabbits and chicks that never get played with and the girls both love to play with snake toys when we hang out at Borders. Will has decided that Easter Snakes should be a permanent part of the Easter basket haul each year.
The girls on the couch
Hey, get your hands off my Easter snake! Easter joy abounds and an uneasy Easter Snake truce is declared

For comparison, a picture of the girls from last year, featuring a way-too-small hat on poor Charlotte because I had quite a bit on my plate at the time had to jam her into a newborn-sized outfit since I forgot to buy her an Easter dress:

Enjoying the hottest Easter morning I can ever remember
Hunting eggs at Gemmy and Dibby's house
Also hunting eggs at my Mom's church
After 3 egg hunts, I think Charlotte has the hang of it

Day at the museum

We've been wanting to take Emily to the Natural History Museum in DC so she could "meet" the dinosaurs for quite awhile now. I wanted to go on a non-weekend day though so that we didn't have to fight crowds and Will wanted to come too, so it took us awhile to decide on a day when everyone was free and not sick and it wasn't snowing. So yesterday we set off! I tend to be kind of fatalistic about embarking on anything more impressive than a trip to the grocery store with the kids, but I decided to be calm and happy because I don't want my anticipation of annoyance to keep us from doing fun things. It turned out to be a great trip, the drive was easy, we found free (FREE!) parking a couple blocks from the museum, we had the perfect amount of time there and then we came home. We should do this more often!

Roses are Red Dye #40, Violets are Blue Dye #1

I have a problem with people feeding my kids junky food. I don't like giving them sugar or anything that isn't 100% whole grain, but I especially try to avoid nitrate, dye and chemical-laden processed yuck. I know that makes me a pain in the ass. But my kids haven't seen enough of the world yet to really realize that we eat differently than most other Americans, so why not give them healthy food, especially when they're young and don't even know what they're "missing"?

Preschool has been a challenge. On the first day of school the snack was Froot Loops, and ever since then, when I ask Emily what she had for snack at Preschool the answer is usually "cookies" or "colorful cereal". This is the point where it gets difficult. I can control the food she eats at home, but when it comes to the outside world how much should I interfere, if at all? I have never fooled myself that we'd be able to keep junk out of her diet forever, and there's a point where you just have to control what you can of your child's diet and be happy with the fact that MOST of what they eat is healthy because this is unfortunately the world we live in. I think it's very wrong that junk food is the norm out in the real world, but that's the truth. Once she's in kindergarten I'll be able to send her a packed lunch, but for now we're in the middle of 2 years of preschool where snack is provided by the school.

I don't want to send her a separate snack, I feel like that will only single her out and give her bad emotional associations with food. I am not a very confrontational person, so even talking to the director about the food they provide seems scary to me. I guess sooner or later I need to stop sitting here simmering about it and actually say something if it bothers me so much. I've thought about offering to donate snacks now and then, things like 100% whole wheat pretzels instead of the kind they usually buy, or the 100% whole wheat juice-sweetened fig newtons I get occasionally. But that would get expensive, and besides, I'm already paying for her snacks through tuition and it's not really fair for me to single-handedly fund ALL the kids' snacks. I could mount a campaign to try to get the parents to add a couple dollars more per month to their tuition payments so we can upgrade the kids' food, but they all seem pretty happy feeding their kids junk and again, the whole confrontational aspect of it frightens me and I don't want to be THAT mom.

So when it comes time for the classroom parties and I CAN have a little control over the food, I jump at the chance to give them healthy things. At the Thanksgiving party I made a melon turkey with fruit skewers for tailfeathers, thinking at least this way they will have some fruit and it will be presented in a fun way that will make them want to eat it. For the Valentine's Day party, I realized that I should be doing the opposite...there WILL be junk there, so I might as well volunteer to bring the junk so I can make it my way and let the other parents bring the fruit since that is inherently healthy. Luckily, at the planning meeting when the head mom suggested doing a buffet of sweets one of the other moms did the confrontation part for me and said that there should probably be SOME healthy food. That gave me a great opportunity to suggest having a selection of foods that are naturally red, and it seemed to go over well. So it seems all I need to do is enlist a like-minded confrontational person to be my sidekick, then I can really get things done!

We ended up with a menu of apples, strawberries, raspberries, red peppers, babybel cheese wheels (in the RED wax!), red juice boxes, and I made 100% whole wheat cutout cookies with juice-sweetened jam. The kids seemed to enjoy it but not many of them cleaned their plates. I was disappointed at first, until I remembered that not many of them cleaned their plates at the Thanksgiving party either, even though the menu was much more junky then. It amazes me how little kids will eat unless encouraged when there is interesting stuff going on around them. My own daughter ate the cheese, strawberries and raspberries eventually, hoovered the jelly out of her cookie (even though she will eat the whole thing at home), and thoughtfully returned her unwanted apple slices to the communal bowl. Eew.

It was nice however to know as they tore around like demons afterward that the insanity was being powered by 100% kid energy and not by piles of sugar and dye.

Musical Hearts

The music stopped!

Charlotte playing with the big kids (in the tutu SHE picked out to wear today!)

Hopefully, with practice, I will get less timid about trying to effect change. Maybe eventually I can be ok with being THAT mom. Because I like my sweet, preservative-free kids just as they are!