So it’s been a long time since the last post. Between holidays and other things I just wasn’t inspired to write a damn thing.
A New Year’s Resolution to get back to blogging was made and broken within about 48 hours.
And then potty training started happening, and early on I promised not to go into excruciating TMI about *that* whole ordeal and all the bodily functions associated with it. We are still in the midst of the “Battle for Dry Undies”, and for the most part I won’t go into it much.
But Soapfi did say something too funny the other day to not share… even though it probably doesn’t even flirt with the TMI line but stomps the hell all over it.
So poor Soapfi has been having chronic problems with ear infections (we head to the ENT next week to discuss the possibility/necessity of tubes in her ears), which means she is on Penicillin a lot, which leads to a pH imbalance, which leads to the dreaded yeast beast, which as anyone who has had that particular infection knows – urinating is damn uncomfortable and can sting like the dickens.
At this point we’re just trying to get Soapfi to start telling us she *needs* to use the potty as opposed to just informing us the event has transpired (so far we’re striking out in that department) but the other day we made a slight improvement – she at least told us *while* it was happening by shouting across the room:
It’s happening tonight, hopefully with very little fanfare, after all she hasn’t used it in over two weeks – which means tonight at dinner nostalgia will kick in and she’ll scream bloody murder to use it.
But we will put our collective feet down, perhaps I will have Daddy distract her with a trip to the park, and when she returns it will just be gone, never to be mentioned again.
Perhaps our luck will hold and she won’t even miss it… who am I kidding, the kidlet’s got a memory like a steel trap.
It doesn’t matter, the decision is made, it is getting a new home in the garage. Thanks for the memories, oh beloved $2.00 high chair we found at a yard sale, you served us well!
Yesterday was practically Christmas in April. My Grinch heart grew three sizes and bloop, bloop, blooped it’s way to moosh. Soapfi has always been an affectionate kidlet, she adores the giving and receiving of hugs and kisses, and wants nothing more than to sit in your lap and cuddle. We know she loves us, because her face lights up, she squeals in delight, and runs full tilt into our legs when we pick her up from playschool. She wants nothing more than to just be around us, and since actions speak louder than words, we though we were content with how she expressed her love.
And then last night happened – for the first time ever Soapfi plopped herself into my lap, gave me a hug, and said clear as a bell “I love you Mommy”. Then she jumped down ran over and climbed into Daddy’s lap, gave him a hug, and said “I love you Daddy”.
Actions are good, but those words made every other crazy ass thing going on in our lives seem small and insignificant. Then Mommy and Daddy simply turned into a puddle of mush and caved in when she asked for chocolate later that night, most likely her long term plan the entire time!
We have made a concerted effort to start early with teaching Soapfi some common courtesy and basic hygiene. We are trying to minimize the inevitable teenage “rude and smelly” phase that we know will be here sooner than we ever imagined.
So far we are going strong in the manners/courtesy department. Soapfi doles out “Please”, “Thank You, Welcome” (she tends to run these together as if she doesn’t trust you to properly respond with “You’re Welcome”), and “No, Please” (her version of no thank you) with regularity, minor prompting is needed around strangers, but that is just her shyness kicking in.
We are hit and miss with baths and/or showers. Some nights it’s all about taking a bath or shower, other times it’s more along the lines of “NO LIKE IT” and thirty seconds into the slippery struggle are the exclamations of “ALL DONE”.
The two things she loves above all else are “Wash Hands” and “Brush Teeth”. She would spend hours on her step stool at the sink just running her hands under the water and playing with the soap if we let her. Even remotely dirty hands lead to exclamations of “wash hands, wash hands!” She loves to squish the bar of soap out of her hands and squeal “Slippery” over and over. And then she’ll start softly singing to herself “Rub, scrub, rub, scrub, at sink or in tub” from The Good Night Show on Sprout. But it becomes a litany of “No Mommy” if I try to finish out the rest of the song, because I do sing *that* badly!!!
We do still have minor struggles with the tooth brushing, in that she loves to “brush” her teeth, but her version of brushing her teeth mostly involves sucking the water out of the toothbrush! So now we take turns, she gets to brush, then mommy or daddy helps her actually brush, then she gets to brush again. However, by her second turn she mostly wants to brush our teeth and we spend a good 5 minutes attempting to avoid having a child sized toothbrush impaled in our soft palate!
I figure if we start her out with good habits now, that means fewer cavities later, even though I have a feeling there is still some serious orthodontia in our future!
Being in the age of digital photography is great on many levels. No waiting to see if a picture turned out, the ability to instantly try again, only spending money to print out pictures you really want, apps like instagram, and being able to take a halfway decent picture from your phone. However, it can have it’s downsides!
Since I’m not concerned about wasting money developing film that may yield unwanted surprises, I’m much more lax about leaving the camera in reach of Soapfi, as a result I now have about 100 pictures that look exactly like this:
(Part of me really wishes I was better at photoshop, because it just screams out for Storm Troopers or any other photoshop meme of your choice.)
Since digital makes it easy to try repeatedly for a good photo, I find that I don’t even make the effort to stage a good photo, I just expect it to eventually happen if I take enough pictures. Of course I tend to forget to even *take* pictures to begin with, it’s like I go on these photo rampages where I take fifty photos in two days, and then do nothing for three weeks, no matter how cute she is acting. My lazyness of not wanting to walk two feet to the Sarlacc Pit to retrieve the camera (since it’s most likely still hooked up to the computer from downloading the last photo rampage) is embarrassing, even for my fat azz.
I’m over due for making a photo album for the GP’s back east, and as I was going through my pictures trying to figure out where the last album had ended, I realized I didn’t have nearly enough decent pictures from the past six months to make a less than anemic album. Maybe if I put one picture per page, use a lot of text and embellishments… compared to the albums I made that first year it will be completely pathetic! What I did have was plenty of bad pictures… I mean really, I still have all 100+ of the pictures of the chair, do I really need them? Hell no…. so why can’t I bear to part with them? Because digital storage is cheap, doesn’t take up any more space that the computer already does, and if Soapfi becomes a famous photographer some day won’t I want all her early works?????
One thing we did manage to do before we got lazy about taking pictures, was take a picture every week of Soapfi with Turtle (being science geeks we insisted on a reference subject) for her first year. After her first birthday we managed to do one every month for about five more months, then it became a combination of Soapfi not putting up with it and us getting lazy about remembering.
So as Soapfi’s second birthday approaches, I give you her first 52 weeks:
Hopefully the copyright gods will be kind since I credited the music I used and YouTube didn’t completely pitch a fit after the upload…. this kind of stuff makes me paranoid that men in riot gear will break down my door at 1am and drag me out of the house like my own personal “V for Vendetta”.
The almighty “everyone” strikes again, everyone says to enjoy it while it lasts, they are only young once, blah blah blah. I am enjoying things, amazed at how much she is growing and changing day by day, and still impatient for her to reach certain ages and milestones, because I perceive them to be times when we’ll have even more fun.
I can’t *wait* until she can do more with yarn than just wrap herself up in it and run around. I hope that she will take interest in all that crafty stuff that I love – I want to take her to Michaels when she truly comprehends the *FUN* of all the available “stuff” and what we could make together. Right now it mostly involves her being impatient with having to stay in the cart, because she certainly gets the “oh, shiny” aspect of being in there and won’t hesitate to grab any and everything! (We came home with one stem of fake roses (bent beyond repair) and one box of crayons (tips all broken off because she dropped them) in addition to the planned St. Paddy’s Day related purchases, all because I couldn’t mitigate the rapid destruction of said items when the cart drifted a wee bit too close to the shelves. I am a firm believer in “you break it, you buy it” because it’s just *NOT COOL* to pretend your child’s swath of destruction did not happen.)
I look forward to the day when we can sit down and truly read a story together. She loves books, loves identifying things in pictures, but what she loves most is turning the pages…. rapidly!! I love reading and I’m a completest, nothing frustrates me more than trying to read The Hungry Little Caterpillar and skipping all the fun counting/eating bits in the middle even if I know it all by heart and have already “read” it a dozen times that day.
All that being said about my rush towards her future, there are things that I’m starting to miss. One of those happened last night when I realized how *complete* her sentences have become. Granted it’s still “I do it.” and “I no like it.” She hasn’t mastered contractions or all her verb tenses yet, but she is beginning to fill out her sentences with “a” and “the”, and starting to pronounce things better. Last night at dinner she declared to the world that “I like the milk.” Even though “I like milk.” is a perfectly appropriate sentence, to me, putting in the “the” made it seem so much more grown up.
The one that got me the most though, was realizing that she was now properly saying “Peek A Boo” when we were playing. I admit it, I miss “Peek Boo”.
Soapfi, and Other Stuff 