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January 30, 2003
January 30, 2003
Thanks for the nice welcome on the Mom’s Today Board. I love being here and I look forward to writing more of our stories. There is always something going on even though some days life seems really boring and routine.
It’s Thursday and that means tomorrow is Friday. Yeah, the weekend!!!! But will it really be a good weekend? For about a month now we’ve been living in our home and it hasn’t felt like our home. Various things all seemed to come together during December that prompted us to put our house on the market and now we’re on pins and needles about selling it as soon as possible. It is so stressful. The house has to constantly be clean for the many showings a week so we basically come home, have dinner, tidy up again and go to bed. I’ve been feeling like baking cookies but I haven’t because it seems like such an effort to do the extra dishes. I’ve needed to finish a baby quilt for a friend who just had her baby but that takes time and creates a mess and I don’t usually like to put my project away until it’s all done so the quilt top has been folded up in the linen closet, patiently waiting for me to pull it out again. Poor baby Elizabeth…….. she doesn’t have a quilt to play on yet!!! Every Sunday we’ve had an Open House so we spend Saturday (between the usual weekend showings) getting everything just perfect and then we take off on Sunday and don’t come back until evening. One weekend I packed up my laundry and took it over to Mom’s house to get at least our underwear washed. Now I’m smarter and I wash, dry and fold one load of laundry every night during the week so that by the weekend there isn’t much left to do. Mind you, I really shouldn’t be whining. We’ve made an offer on a beautiful new home. This home is 10 minutes away from my office (I now commute, in rush hour traffic, a minimum of 45 minutes, many days almost an hour or sometimes longer), is about double the size of our current townhouse, has 4 bedrooms compared to our 2 bedrooms that we now have and it has a front and backyard (not a big yard but enough to have a BBQ, a patio chair and tables, a swing set and some flowers). There will be an elementary school opening up across the street the year before Erika starts Kindergarten and there’s lots of green space and parks where Erika can go play. All in all, it seems like the perfect place for us. We have made an offer that’s been accepted. It is subject to sale of our existing house and we have until March 11th to sell our house. I guess that’s where the big stress comes in. When the phone rings we jump because we think it might be our realtor with some good news, especially on days when we know that people have come through to take a look. I’m so obsessive at this point that I check our voicemail on the phone at home multiple times an hour just in case someone has left us an important message. And all we can do is wait and keep our house neat and tidy. It’s totally out of our control and I guess that’s what I have the difficulties with. I like being in control. Keep your fingers crossed. Maybe in my next entry I’ll have some good news.
No more whining. Fun things about Erika……….. I loved Megan’s story about the table dancer. Can we talk about Erika the climber??? Erika has a rocking bear (it’s really cute and little – just her size) and she loves rocking on it but she only rocks for a bit sitting down and then she tries to be Ms. Rodeo Queen and stands up and rocks. We’ve been trying to be firm about teaching her to sit on her bum while playing with the bear. It seems that we haven’t been too successful with that as of yet. Yesterday, I was in the living room with her and I was sitting right in front of her. I couldn’t quite see what she was doing but I knew she was on her bear which was pushed up against the couch (it sits next to the couch during the day so that the living room looks neat and tidy and not cluttered with toys). Little did I think of what else Erika could do on her little bear. The next time I turn around, she’s on the couch………. So she climbed on her bear, stood up on it’s back and used that as a jumping board to climb over the sides of our couch. And once she figured that out, she had to try it over and over until I moved the bear into the middle of the room. I could see the wheels turning though and it won’t be long before she moves the bear to the side of the couch to have a repeat climbing performance.
Right now books are her absolute favourite thing in the world. Her favourite books are her I Spy series of board books, a board book called “As big as a Pig”, a board book all about a little kitten and her “lift-the-flap Bible”. But any book will do. She hasn’t developed much patience yet to let us read the story to her. Oh yes, and I can’t forget her book of “Baby’s first words” – that’s got to be her absolute favourite. She is so consumed by turning her own pages and pointing to all the objects she recognizes. For animal sounds we now have Woof Woof and me-owwww down pat. A duck is “du –du – du” often mistaken with the general “da da da” sound that is still a very common used word to address everything in the house. We’re identifying nose, hands, ear and eyes and my little girl has a major shoe fetish. Where she gets that from I don’t know – I only own the basic black pair of dress shoes (very flat, very plain), a black, blue and cream pair of pumps (that I never wear because I detest nylons and skirts) and my runners. So one of her first words was “soosz”. There are many more words Erika is picking up and she learns more day after day. It’s so cool to watch her figure it all out.
So I hope I don’t jinx it with writing this down but I have to write it down because I’m so pleased. Erika’s night time routine is so beautiful right now. A few weeks ago we were still having battles of will with her quite a few nights a week over going to sleep. We’ve never been big believers into letting her cry it out very much but we figured we had to let her cry a little. And the 5 minutes it usually took her to settle down and fall asleep seemed like hours to us but really, the longest she ever cried was 5 minutes. We would then either get her or more times than not, she would be asleep. Well, last week, all of a sudden, it seemed like things were very much falling into place. One night when I took her up, she started waving and saying bye-bye to her daddy and I picked up on that so we now stop to say good bye to Daddy (or Mommy if Daddy takes her to bed), we say good bye to the kitty cats, we say good bye to the grandparents (we look at our family picture and we point at everyone, identifying them with Oma, Opa, Nana and Papa), then we wave good bye to the toys and we go upstairs where we have a little hug and cuddle, we say a little prayer and then she goes in her crib. Poof. That’s usually the last thing we hear from her. It has been so beautiful and so peaceful this way. No stress over bed time and she is down at pretty much exactly the same time every night. It almost seems like she is thankful that we’re finally putting her down for the night. I hope this keeps up for a while.
Here is a cute kitty cat story. Erika loves our cats. They don’t like her quite so much but Spice (the little fluffy one) is more tolerant than Patches. The problem is that Erika gets so excited when she gets close to the cats that they get scared by her excitement. That excitement usually shows with really high pitched screams and giggles. It has become her mission to touch the cats whenever she can. Last night we closed the bedroom door to go to the bathroom and to change into casual clothes after work. Our bedroom is on the second floor and we don’t have a gate at the top of the stairs right now so I didn’t want her to fall and so I closed the door leaving Spice on the other side of the action ie. In the hall. Spice can’t stand being left out so she was sticking her paws through the open space between the carpet and the door. I showed those paws to Erika and she got such a kick out of it. She was crouching down and giggling at those little white paws and she was reaching out to touch them and giggling some more. It was so cute. We actually think that Spice and Erika will become buddies when Erika is a little older when Spice doesn’t have to fear being tugged at and hit by a little Toddler who doesn’t understand any better.
Daycare is going quite well right now. Erika is content and happy to be there and usually has really good days. Most mornings she doesn’t get very bothered when I leave as she just runs in to play with the toys and her friends. What I need is lunch and snack ideas. Her food choices are getting boring and although she’s a pretty good eater most of the time, at daycare she can be kind of picky. I feel like a bad parent for packing many of the same things day after day. I did get some toddler nutrition type books out of the library and they have some great ides. I just have to take the time to put some of those ideas into use. I’ll pass some of the recipes on if anyone is interested once I’ve tried some. I like some of the muffin snack ideas. They look healthy and seem to be a snack that Erika would enjoy.
This weekend we’ll be doing our usual clean up routine to get ready for another Open House on Sunday. This Sunday we’ll be meeting DH’s good buddy who has come for a visit. He’s staying with DH’s parents (they have more room than we do) and we’ll go hang out with him on Sunday afternoon. This sounds kind of pathetic but it’s not meant that way but I’m glad that DH will get to see one of his friends. It seems that his friends have all disappeared into thin air through various things such as a couple of divorces etc. This guy, who was our best man, is just one of those solid friends who calls every couple of weeks etc. DH doesn’t have many other friends that are “his” friends. All the other guys he knows are just husbands of friends of mine and they don’t associate unless us girls get together. We’ll probably go look at the new house again and do some stuff like that.
It feels like today I’ve written a long essay. I guess it shows that I’m not super interested in what I have to do today.
Hope you’re all having a good week.
Take care
Uli
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