Every once in a while

For the most part, whenever we work in the yard, we are cursing the previous owners and their grand landscape design. But every once in a while, we're thankful. Like when our low-maintenance roses grace us with their presence.

A few other various things we're thankful for these days:

Pigtails! They were short-lived, though, since she yanked them out the second she got in her carseat. Cute while they lasted, though.

Living in a city with lots to do with our children is really, really nice. We spent a few hours at the Children's Museum Saturday morning and both of them loved every single second of it. We also visited the Natural History Museum for the first time and it was another hit. If you're ever in Cincinnati, and especially if you have kids, visit the Museum Center. (As an aside, the building used to be the train station and it's really impressive. It's huge, but I guess that shouldn't be surprising, as it houses three separate museums.)

And here is Laura and her leopard raincoat. I had to take a picture of it because I think she's really, really close to outgrowing it (which should come as no surprise since I think it's a size 12 months!). We stopped at Kroger after her music class this morning and she honked the horn of the car buggy nearly incessantly, waving at passersby all the while. It's really hard to be in a bad mood with her around.

Today's big project is reorganizing my closet. Are you jealous?

Seriously?

What the hell is wrong with people? I know you've probably already seen this woman (who, incidentally, believes her critics are "fat," among other things) already, but I alternate between thinking that she can't possibly look like this and feeling sorry for her. But then she called me fat, so I'm over her.

I don't want to write about Tanning Bed Mom too much, though. It's just too depressing.

What really made me take notice of this gem of a photo (besides the obvious) is that I'm pretty sure she's wearing Laura's hairbow. The way this woman has her hair fixed is the exact same hairstyle that my two-year-old wears. And Laura does seem to be mysteriously missing a fair amount of her hairbows.

In other totally unrelated news, I really did myself in at the gym this morning. I have discovered the stair climber. Not the lame one with the little pedals that I think I could do for hours without breaking a sweat, but the one that simulates actually climbing stairs. If these crazy things sit mostly unused at your gym, there is a reason. It's taken me a full nine months of regularly busting my arse at the gym to work up the courage to climb on one but I can say that, after I finish (and catch my breath and change my sweat-soaked clothes and take a long, restorative nap), I'm really kind of embarrassingly proud of myself. There was an older man on the one next to me yesterday and we got off at about the same time. We crossed paths on our way to the disinfecting wipes and gave each other knowing looks, like we were part of some sort of secret club of people who like mercilessly torturing themselves. Then I realized that he was probably a good 40 years older than myself, so maybe it was just pity on his part. 

I also realized that making myself go through this misery (actually, it's not that miserable--I like it--is that weird?) is my own sort of validation. I don't have a job wherein I'm regularly evaluated for my effectiveness at anything, so this is my own way of setting up my own challenges and either meeting them or failing. And things may be chaotic at home, our house may be falling apart and the laundry may be taking over, the yard may look awful and the car may be filthy, but I'll be damned if I'm not finishing my allotted time on the stairclimber. (I think, now that I read back over that, that there may actually be something wrong with me.)

What? Did you not want to read about the boring details of my gym routine? I really had no intention of writing about the gym when I started with the photo of Tanning Bed Lady but then I started to shift my legs about and remembered that they were sore and this is what you get. So.

Stay away from the tanning bed and have a good weekend!

It's May!

It's already May and that means that we're officially only four school weeks away from summer vacation. I thought last school year went by quickly but this one has surpassed that for fleeting-ness.

Laura and I go to her music class on Tuesday mornings. We have time to kill both before class after dropping Will off at school and after class before picking Will up. So we usually go to the park to "fwing," one of Laura's very favorite activities. But today, our second park stop involved more wandering around the flowers and hanging out at the fountain.

This particular park is so nice. I could have walked around for a lot longer than we had time for. It made me wish our yard looked like this. And then that thought made me laugh.

She takes my breath away. I love her so. We thought about sending her to school next year a few days a week but I want to keep my best girl home with me another year (or forever, maybe). I love having her with me, going places together, testing out every nearby "fwing" that we can find. I still can't believe we got so lucky. 

Will and I are in a heated game of Rivers, Roads, and Rails right now. He's (not surprisingly) much more skilled at this game than his mother, as I'm just not very spatially-inclined. My firstborn, however, counts the ability to solve puzzles and such among his skills that come most easily to him, which is always novel to me, as I tend to think that my children are merely carbon copies of their parents, namely me. (However, I should note that  Jamison is far better with puzzles and numbers and the like. I guess the other half of the DNA is equally important after all.)

OK. Time to get a beatdown at the hands of a five year old. Sad but true.

In case you missed it

Just in case you've yet to see this gem, I give you a portrait of simultaneous sheer joy and utter terror:

Laura faked us out this time, though, as she was SO excited while we were waiting in line, shouting "Bunny!" to everyone within earshot. When we were next in line, though, she started with the clutch and turn away maneuver. But she recovered very quickly, and even carried around her own personal copy of this, showing it to anyone and everyone who would look at it. She's such funny girl, that one.

Will is spending some time in WV this week so Laura and I have been getting some much-appreciated girl time while he's been there. We've lived it up, going out to eat (a rarity with both of them), a leisurely trip to Barnes and Noble just to browse, and she's just happy as can be to be out and about with us.

(Tangent:  Someone inevitably comments on how well-behaved and pleasant Laura is while we're out at any number of places. And she is. I usually smile and nod and say something about how she's been this way for most of her life, that we got really lucky with her temperament, that it's nothing that we've done as parents, etc. And then a shockingly high percentage of these same people say something like, "Well, just wait till she's a teenager"or something along those lines. I know that at some point, Laura will really bust out and disappoint us, but really? Can't you let me enjoy my moment here? Especially seeing as I'm all too familiar with the other side of the coin. I'm not exactly worried about what she's going to be like as a teenager. I'm more concerned with enjoying her at this relatively simple part of her life, not with what may or may not happen 10 or so years from now. Tangent over.)

(Or actually not. Tangent two:  I was waiting in line at Starbucks the other day behind a couple of older women who started talking to a young family sitting at a nearby table.They had a boy who was three [the older women asked how old he was] and twin boys who looked to be about nine or 10 months old or so. The women chatted with them pleasantly about how busy their lives were with the three young boys and then one of them just asked, as though this were the most normal thing in the world, "So are you going to try for a girl?" And, despite the fact that I have both a boy and a girl, I was irritated for these people, even though the parents were perfectly gracious and laughed it off. First of all, is it really anyone else's concern? And secondly, to ask that question is to suggest that they are somehow deficient, lacking as a family since they only have boys. I know the woman probably didn't mean anything by her question, but I'm not certain that my response would have been quite as polite as theirs had I been asked the same. What is it with people and their nosy questions? Or with people who feel that it's perfectly acceptable to loudly and insistently talk about the forbidden subjects [religion and politics, namely] in very public places as if their own opinions are the only possible ones? I'm talking to you, old man at the gym who rails about the "liberal media" ad nauseum to anyone and everyone within earshot and beyond. Tangent really over this time.)

Happy Thursday!

Our other baby is five

Five years ago at this very moment, on a sunny day very similar to today, I was in a different hospital bed, in a state approximately 12 hours from our families. To this day, I feel guilty about my reaction to the news of Will's imminent arrival. At two days shy of five weeks early, I was pretty much scared out of my mind. Rationally, of course, I knew that babies born at this point have a very, very high likelihood of being just fine but a woman in labor is nothing if not irrational. I felt, somehow, like I was watching someone else have a baby.

But before I really knew what was happening, he was there, screaming from the first second they got him out. All 6 pounds and 7 ounces of him, alert and perfectly fine. He seemed to be perfectly at ease with life outside the womb from his very first breaths. He seemed to know what he was doing. So I started to follow his lead, confident that this crazy boy was going to be fine.

I should have known at that point that all that was really required of me was to sit down and hang on for dear life, because that's exactly what parenting Will is like. I chuckle to myself when people describe their kids as "spunky" or "spirited" or "strong-willed." Will is those things taken to their logical (and oftentimes illogical) extreme. He does not deal in the gray areas of life, preferring to see only black and white. He's persistent (oh my god, is he persistent) and argumentative and so incredibly perceptive and observant that sometimes it's frightening. He doesn't think like other kids. He never has and most likely never will. He knows exactly who he is and what he likes and what he wants. Really, we should all be so lucky.

And while this may sound like complaining, I am so very proud of this incredibly complex little being we're raising. Whereas Baby Sister makes parenting easy, Big Brother makes us work for it. Hard. Every single day. He's completely changed the way we think about parenting, the way we see others as parents, how judgmental (or non-judgmental, rather) we are toward other parents and families.

Will is never going to be the most well-behaved kid, nor will he ever be completely compliant and accepting. He has to find things out for himself, regardless of how many times he hears something from us. He probably won't win any awards for his self-control or his patience, but he can most certainly ask you questions and formulate his own answers well enough that it makes your head spin. Honestly, it can be a little unsettling to try to parent a five-year-old who's very often right.

Whatever Will does and however he arrives at doing it, I'm just glad to be along for the ride. I'm reminded every day of some of the more difficult kids I taught. Because those kids? The ones who drove me crazy and made me  question my decision to become a teacher every single day? They're the ones I'm being proudest of now, because every single achievement and accomplishment was so hard-fought.

I know, in my very bones, that Will is going to do something great with his life. He will change the world somehow, if even in a small way, just like he's changed our world. Because that's just how he rolls.

Happy 5th birthday, crazy boy! We love you!

Our baby is two

Two years ago, I was hanging out in the hospital, happily drugged and awaiting the same little girl who's snoozing in her crib now. Two years ago, I didn't know who Laura was or what she looked like or what her personality would be. Now, 730 days hence, it seems unimaginable that there was ever one single second that I didn't know her, didn't know what her hair feels like or how it curls under, except for the back right side, which has a mind of its own and flips whichever way it pleases at that given moment. Or that I didn't know what her tiny little finger looks like curled around mine or how her funny little naked body looks running around post-bath.

Also unimaginable is the fact that I worried way, way too much about how having her would disrupt our life, a relatively easy one (even with Big Brother's definitely-not-easy temperament) with only one extra mouth to feed, one little bum to clothe, one person to exert our influence on and hopefully steer in the right direction. I worried about raising a girl and all the potential minefields out there that we'd one day have to pick our clumsy way through. I worried about teaching two kids to get along and, with any luck, actually like each other.

But at 10:57, late in the evening on March 28, my doctor laid her tiny, slippery little self on my chest and I stopped worrying. None of that stuff mattered. It still doesn't. It was, and still is, the most profoundly peaceful moment of my whole life. From her very first breath, I knew her. I knew that everything good and pure and right in the world was distilled in all her 6 pounds and one ounce. I knew that she would change us in the best possible way. And she has. I wasn't "me" and we weren't "we" until she was here.

It is such a privilege to raise her. She's still pure goodness in one little body. When I try to talk about her and what she is to us, words inevitably fail me. They always will. I am, now more than ever, keenly aware of just how fortunate we are to call these babies of ours our own. 

Two years later, I still can't believe our good fortune. She's ours. And we couldn't possibly love her more.

Happy 2nd birthday, Sis! We love you, sweet girl!

Dispatches from yet another playground

I'm writing this while Laura is STILL sleeping (at nearly 10 am!). This is, from my Early Bird Special from birth, highly unusual but she's a bit under the weather. And, like her Daddy, she is very pitiful and dramatic about it. Will and I are more in the minimal-complaining-just-deal-with-it camp but the other half of the family fully embraces the the-more-I-make-sad-faces-and/or-moan-the-better-I-will-feel philosophy. Oh, well. To each his or her own, right?

We've had really nice weather this past week and we've been to various parks and playgrounds to celebrate Jamison not having to go to Vegas this week.

She looks so old in this picture. How did this happen?

Will is learning how to propel himself on the swings. This is a surprisingly hard process, apparently.

Will is showing Laura some ants. Laura will pretty much look at anything her big brother wants to show her.

Just for some perspective, when I said that Laura looks older, it's not because she's tall or anything. This outfit is a size 6-9 months. I was digging through her "outside" clothes looking for something short-sleeved since it's apparently mid-June around here and this is what I came up with. It's kind of tight, but it still fit her. It's hard to believe she could squeeze into something so small just a week shy of turning two.

We're not planning on squeezing her into all of last year's clothes, though. We got her some new clothes this past weekend.

The kids love watching the garbage trucks. Simple pleasures.

Laura loves going into her closet and putting on whatever she can get to. All she needs here is a mismatched legwarmer or two.

I'll leave you with a small glimpse of my pitiful girl.

This doesn't quite capture her level of pitiful-ness accurately but it was also taken yesterday before she started feeling really out of sorts. And right now, she's crying in her bed saying "Sad" every few seconds just to reinforce her condition. Even when she's sick she's a funny girl.

I realize that I've kind of been lazy writing-wise, since pictures and commentary don't really take any thought. Maybe I'll try something a little more thoughtful here soon. Deep Thoughts with Sara or something equally serious.