19Mar
These days, Gracie Girl is constantly on the go. Since she figured out how to crawl, I don’t think she’s stopped to rest for a single minute. She’s all over the living room, but really loves crawling around upstairs between her room and Bean’s room. Her favorite thing is when Bean gets down and crawls with her, chasing her all over. She just squeals the whole time like it’s the most fun in the whole world. More than crawling though, Gracie loves to cruise. She pulls up on anything that will hold her weight (and sometimes things that don’t…). She loves standing at the coffee table and then reaching for anything she can get her paws on. She’s into EVERYTHING, and we all are loving it!
These days, Gracie loves to boss us all around. She will sit in her high chair or stand at the coffee table and point at us and then point all around the room, babbling incoherent instructions. You can see her wanting us to all get up and move. And if none of us get up and actually DO anything, she starts to get really mad. She’ll cruise right on over to where we are sitting, point right at us, and start grunting and babbling her demands. What makes her really mad is if she’s sitting in her high chair, dictating the movements of the rest of the household and we all walk out of the kitchen in the middle of her reign. If we walk out while she’s “talking,” she sits there for just a second and then starts yelling, “HEY! HEY! HEY!” and tries to get us to come back in there. She’s a bossy girl. I can’t imagine where she gets it…
These days, Gracie is repeating everything we say. At first, I thought it was just coincidence that her babbling happened to sound like the last thing we said, but then it happened so often that I started to pay more attention to it. She really loves jewelry (that’s my girl!) and she’s always pointing to and pulling on my jewelry while babbling and cooing. Last week, she was pointing to my necklace and when I said, “Necklace,” she went, “Ne-ne.” I stopped for a minute and thought, “Did she really just say that?” and so I waited, and sure enough she pointed to my necklace a few more times while saying very distinctly, “Ne-ne.” She can also say “ball,” “bottle,” and “bibi” (which is binky). She’s said other things, but those are pretty constant in her vocabulary these days. I remember that from when Bean was little, too. They start to learn one letter sound at a time, and right now she is all over the “b” sound. My little chatter pants.
These days, Gracie is a pain in the tooshy at bedtime. She has learned our bedtime routine and so she knows right away when bedtime is coming. She loves her bath, whines a little while I put her in her PJ’s, squirms through two books, and then freaks out when I lay her in her crib. I’m sure it’s just something she’s having to adjust to because now she can tell when it’s coming, but it’s kind of annoying because it happens every. single. night. She girlfriend has a wicked set of pipes. She can yell and protest and cry with the best of ‘em. But we just hold steady with our nighttime routine, then tell her we love her, and close her door. Harsh, but it’s how we roll. She’ll eventually learn that no matter how much she protests, she isn’t going to be rescued. Until she learns that part of the routine, though, we’re investing in the family-size packs of ear plugs.
These days, Gracie is eating anything and everything and lots of it. She’s turning one this weekend, and so starting next week we’ll start weening her from formula and adding whole milk to her diet. (And all God’s children with checking accounts said, “AMEN!”) Judging from the way she has so far happily eaten anything we’ve given her, I’m not expecting too many problems with that transition. Right now, her favorite foods are blueberries (or “crackberries” as we call them), bananas, pancakes, spaghetti, green beans, vanilla yogurt, cheese, sweet potatoes, and carrots. She tried two bites of a brownie the other night and seemed like she could have taken it or left it. She ate a bite and then went back to her blueberries. Good girl!!!
These days, Gracie is showing us her fierce temper and lack of patience. (Again, I don’t know where she gets these things…) If you take something away from her, she will stop whatever she’s doing, hurl herself on the floor, and cry like you just broke her wittle heart. Big, pathetic, crocodile tears, I tell you. All because you took away the remote control. Even if you temporarily take something away, like…oh…say, you have to get her out of the car seat, but she’s holding on to a toy so you have to take the toy away for TWO SECONDS while you get her arms out of the car seat straps. She will fling her head back, open those lungs, and out come the crocodile tears, all in about 2.5 seconds. And it doesn’t matter if you try to give the toy back at that point. The damage is done. You’ve angered the mini beast. And YOU. SHALL. BE PUNISHED.
These days, you can see Gracie’s personality just bursting out of her. She’s sassy and funny and spirited and demanding and all the things I’d want my daughter to be. (Though I’d be cool with her taking the temper thing down a notch or twelve…) These days, she makes me happy from deep inside my heart and that happiness just bursts out through my ears. These days, when she’s not driving me absolutely crazy, I’m wildly crazy about her.
There’s just something about those baby girls…
18Mar
This post is more of a scheduling pep talk for myself than anything else. In the next week, there are so many major events happening that I can hardly keep myself straight. I get tired whenever I think about it, and then I just want to take a nap until April. But I can’t because I have too much to do. So, I thought I’d make peace with the next couple days by blogging about it to help calm my nerves. Plus, if I’m blogging then I don’t have to deal with the other things. It’s a win-win!
1. On Tuesday I have my formal evaluation at school, which means my principal and vice principal will be in my classroom for an entire period evaluation my teaching. I’ve got a great lesson planned and I feel good about it, but the lesson requires a lot of prep work (including a sample of an art project that I have to make – oy!). And besides the prep work, it’s just very nerve-wracking to know you’re being observed, no matter how prepared you are. I have my pre-conference with my principal and vice principal tomorrow, so cross your fingers that that goes well.
2. On Saturday, my agent is coming to town from New York. She’s here as a guest lecturer at the University of Florida for a couple of days, and so I am going up to meet her for drinks on Saturday. It’ll be nice to see her, but the real reason for the visit is so that I can hand deliver her my final draft of my book proposal. I haven’t blogged about my book in over a year, and, to be honest, I doubt I’ll be blogging about it very much in the next few months. But know that I am working so very, very hard on it. I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard on anything professionally in my whole life. I am in the third year of the process and am, hopefully, in the homestretch now. In the next few months, my agent will be sending my book proposal out to publishers to see if we can get a book deal. I try not to think about how much I want that, so that I don’t get disappointed if it doesn’t happen. But I really want this. I’ll be light on the blogging this week as I finish my draft up in the evenings, so bear with me and think happy thoughts for me while I’m gone.
3. GRACIE TURNS ONE NEXT SUNDAY! I can’t believe it is finally here! Gracie Girl is turning the big O-N-E next weekend, and we’re having a small family get-together to celebrate. My mom came down this weekend and we went shopping for decorations and menu items, so I feel much more prepared for her party than I did last week, but there’s still so much to do! I have Friday off of school, so I’m hoping to finish up her party plans then. We’re having her party on Sunday afternoon, which should be fun for me because my book proposal will be done and delivered, so I will definitely feel like celebrating. Sometime before now and then, I have to get her birthday video together, too. I made one for each of Bean’s birthdays so far and I’ve already started compiling Gracie’s. I’ll post it on the blog on Friday. I can’t wait for you all to see it!
4. Chris and I leave for Costa Rica the Monday after Gracie’s birthday. We are both looking forward to some time away, but neither of us have had a chance to really get anything ready. I’m hoping Sunday night after the party we’ll be able to pack…which is about 9 hours before our flight. Nothing like a little last minute suitcase stuffing! I’m hoping to be able to blog from Costa Rica, so definitely check in next week for blog posts about what we’re up to. I know there will be zip lining, surfing, and hanging bridges on the menu. (What, pray tell, does one wear while crossing a hanging bridge over a ravine in the rainforest????) I’ll be posting to Twitter and Instagram (my user name is MarriageConfessions) all week from my phone, so be sure you’re following along! Costa Rica is going to be so wonderful for us! Our travel coordinator sent us our itinerary and we were just blown away! It will truly be a Gift of Happiness. On that note, I have been contacted by two different blog readers in the past month or so who said they also won a trip! How exciting! And what a fun thing for the country of Costa Rica to be doing!
5. While Chris and I are both so excited about our vacation, we are both a little anxious about leaving the wee ones for so long. Chris’s mom will be keeping them half of the week and my parents will have them the last part. We’re trying to keep it as routine as possible for the kids, so they’ll be in daycare all week. Hopefully, that will help them adjust to us not being there a little easier. I’m actually alright about being gone. I know I’ll miss them, but I’m really looking forward to some alone time with Chris. This will be like a second honeymoon for us! And it’s free! But Chris is a different story. Two or three times he has said to me out of the blue, “Maybe we should just stay home…” or “This isn’t a great time for us to be away. Maybe we should cancel.” Each time I told him if he wanted to stay home, that’d be fine but Sarah and I would be going instead. (How’s that for sympathetic?) The closer we get to leaving, though, the more I think about not being with the kids. I know they’ll be fine, but we’re just going to miss the little goobers!
So, there you have it. The next week for us is going to be chaotic, but so exciting! It’s been a long time since we had so many GOOD things happen to us at once!!! I’m trying to enjoy them all one at a time and to appreciate how important each adventure really is, but sitting here on Sunday afternoon looking at the week laid out before me, all I can think is, “How will we ever make it to April?!?!”
15Mar
I’ve blogged about this before, but it is so bizarre that I feel the need to blog about it again.
The summer after Chris and I were first married, I came down with a terrible summer cold. We had just moved to Connecticut, and I think it was a combination of allergies, exhaustion from the move, and dealing with a new environment. Whatever it was, it wiped me out. I sent Chris an email from work telling him that I didn’t feel good and that it was his first opportunity to act as my caretaker in our marriage, and was he up for it? He replied, “Absolutely!”
Little did I know he was actually planning on trying to kill me.
I made it through the work week okay, but by Saturday, I was feeling really bad and was looking forward to a weekend in bed. Like a normal sick person. But, my caretaker had different plans. Saturday morning, Chris literally kicked me out of bed.
“What are you doing?” I moaned. “I just want to sleep!”
“You can sleep,” he insisted, guiding me into the living room. “But you need a sick bed.”
Apparently, when Chris was growing up and became sick, his mom made him a bed on the couch so that he could lay in there during the day instead of sleeping in his bed. “It keeps you from feeling gross at night,” he said. And I understood that. Kind of. But I didn’t care if I felt gross. I wanted my own bed. But we were newlyweds and I thought it was sweet that he was taking care of me (no offense, but newlyweds can sometimes be stupid…) and so I went where he sent me.
But as I’m laying on the sick bed, he walks back into the living room with a sweatshirt and a pair of wool camping socks.
“Here,” he said. “Put these on.”
“Why?” I asked, skeptically.
“Because you need to sweat it out.”
I was already running a fever. The last thing I wanted to do was put on a sweatshirt or wool anything. But, again, I tried to play along for the sake of my sweet husband. So, I wrapped myself up and prepared to “sweat it out”… whatever that was.
Fifteen minutes later, I was a hot mess. I was so feverish that I thought I was going to start hallucinating. I could have sworn that I saw angels hovering near a very bright light. But I can’t be sure. Might just have been Lucy sitting near a window. Anyway, I was not happy. I ended up ripping all my clothes off and climbing into bed.
Come to think of it, perhaps that was part of Chris’s newlywedded plans all along…
Still today, when Chris gets sick, he puts on as many layers as he can handle and “sweats it out” on a sick bed in the living room. Though, he has long since stopped trying to make me participate.
Chris is sick this week. He has the cold that I had a couple weeks ago and is trying to fight it off. He even said he might stay home tomorrow from work. I can count on one hand the number of times he has missed a day of work in the entire twelve years we’ve been together. Seriously. So, I think he might be dying.
Tonight, he was complaining about being so cold and just not being able to get warm enough. So, I did the only thing I could think of. I snuggled up to him real good, and smothered him until he couldn’t breathe.
“Thanks for taking care of me,” he managed to grunt.
“Sure thing,” I said. “You know, when you have a buddy, this sick bed isn’t so bad after all.”
14Mar
This past Sunday in church, we had a guest minister who gave a sermon about active prayer. She suggested that sometimes we need to do physical actions when we pray to remind us of the words we are saying. She even made the whole congregation stand up during her sermon and say the Lord’s Prayer using hand motions. It was pretty odd, but it did get me thinking.
Sometimes when I pray, I’m just too tired or distracted to really focus on the words that I am saying. More and more these days, my prayers are becoming me sitting there for a while and then finally saying, “Lord, you know me. Do I really have to tell you what’s going on in my life?” Sometimes those prayers are okay. We get busy and I do believe that God would rather us take a minute to just check in with an empty prayer than to not talk to him at all. But after the sermon this past Sunday, I started paying more attention to how often I was praying haphazardly. Honestly, there just sometimes aren’t enough hours in the day for me to stop and give a really great prayer up, you know?
That’s partly where music comes into play for me. I listen to praise and worship music in my car sometimes as a time for me to just praise God, especially on days when I’m too distracted to come up with my own prayers. So, when I started thinking more about how to pray intentionally, music came to mind. I can remember being in high school and going to my youth group on Sunday nights, spending an hour or more with my hands lifted in praise. There were no requests in those prayers. I wasn’t complaining or asking God for something. I just spent an hour praising him. And it was such a wonderful feeling. For the past few days, I’ve been thinking that maybe the key to more meaningful prayers is spending more time in worship.
But when the heck would that happen? Who has time? (Sorry, God…)
The only time I have during the day that is 100% mine is between 5:30 and 6:30 in the morning when I go for my run. Big Molly and I head out when it’s dark outside and we run all over our neighborhood, just the two of us. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. And I started to think maybe that was the perfect time for a little uninterrupted worship.
So, yesterday morning when I started my run, instead of using my running app with Jeff Galloway who talks to me while I run, walk, and die slowly on my neighbors lawns, I turned on Pandora and found a praise and worship music station. I spent almost an hour running around with some really great old school praise music blasting in my ears. And I worshipped. Sure, there were occasional prayers thrown in there.
“Lord, please don’t let me throw up in my neighbors birdbath…”
“God, please help me make it back home before I pass out…”
But for the most part, I just listened to praise music and thought things like, “Thank you God for giving me a body that is stronger than I think it is.”
About halfway through my run, I started singing. Out loud. One of my favorite praise songs came on and before I really knew what I was doing, I started singing it out loud as I ran. But since I was winded, it sounded more like I was panting in phrases.
“Here…I am…to…worship….(pant, pant, pant)… Here I am…to…bow…down… (pant, pant, pant)… Here I am to say…that…you’re…my…God… (pant, pant, pant)…”
Because I run when it’s dark, I usually go through our neighborhood and then out onto a major road that’s well lit. Since it is out on a major road and there aren’t any houses around, I really let myself go with the singing and before I knew it, I was singing REALLY, REALLY loudly. Even Big Molly kept looking up at me. But I didn’t care. It was early, no one was out, I wasn’t bothering anyone, and this was my worship time. So, I sang.
But, then I turned down my own street and was back around houses and neighbors again and because I had my headphones in and was busy singing at the top of my lungs, I completely didn’t pay attention to where I was. As I started down my street, I noticed a neighbor who had come out to get his paper. He must have heard me singing because he kind of stopped and stood there, staring at me. And still, I didn’t realize I was continuing to sing. So, I go jogging by this neighbor, panting, close to passing out, sweating, dragging my embarrassed, fat black lab, and panting/puffing/singing, “Amazing Grace” at the top of my lungs. It was only when I got about two houses past this guy that I realized that I was still singing so loudly. By then, I was back in my own yard and I quickly ran inside so I could die of embarrassment in the privacy of my own home.
Maybe that’s what that guest minister was trying to tell us. Maybe the point she was making about moving and taking action during our prayers was that when we become active in our prayers, they become so strong and present in our lives that we don’t even really have to think about them anymore. Maybe intentional prayers are the prayers of those who are just trying too hard. Maybe the best prayers are the ones we do without thinking about it. The ones that just flow out of us, that are unstoppable. Maybe it’s those prayers we can’t help but pray that really matter.
