Fears about the future and more insecurities about motherood

Ever since we pulled K out of preschool right before Christmas, I anticipated that there would be more K and mommy time. To the contrary, there's been less. Much less. When K was in preschool, I had a chance to miss her. And when I went to pick her up (granted a mere two hours since we had parted), I was all butterflies in the stomach to reunite with her and shower her with attention and affection. Now that K is at home around the clock, inevitably the quality of our interactions has decreased. After breakfast (which involves nonstop bargaining and nagging and outright threatening to get something nutritious into the girls) and after I put S down for her morning nap, I shower, come downstairs, and feel entitled to mentally veg. So K will either be watching the end tail of sesame street or coloring. Then once S wakes, we'll all go out for lunch w/ J. Where more nagging and threatening about eating takes place. Afterwards, the girls will nap (rarely at the same time - they instinctively know to wake once the other falls asleep) and then I am faced with the onslaught of indecision and anxiety (will the girls eat it????) in making preparations for dinner. By the time it occurs to me that I haven't read/crafted/played/made eye contact with K all day, it's time to eat dinner, give S a bath and put her down for the night. By the time S is asleep, it is, to my dismay, 10 pm. K is still awake but I'm done for the day. In fact, I completely shut down after this time and repeatedly tell her that mommy has to go savor her glass of wine now and agonize over my existence (perhaps not in those exact words).

If you were K, wouldn't you hate me and rebel at the first chance you had? I sure as hell would. Thus my fear at the wrath of adolescence to come...

me, here: trying to be a good mom...don't anyone be fooled...

Hopes for the new year...

I am 25 days late in keeping my 2010 resolution to blog every day. And that's because for 25 days I sat down, logged in, saw that I had 8 months of blogging to catch up on, felt the air around me thinning and finding it progressively more difficult to breathe, i fled. I mean, where can I start? How about with today. Let's just start with today. After all, this blog is for my two girls (2 girls!!! Who would have thought it was possible. Or right. I don't deserve them. But that's for another blog post) and I need to capture as much of their childhood as possible in pictures and words and impressions before another day lapses...

So today it occurred to me that I just might have lucked out in marrying J (ha, j/k J - I've felt lucky every day! Or I should have anyway). He is, without exaggeration, an AMAZING dad to our two girls. He dances, sings, kisses, hugs, dramatizes, reads, engages in all kinds of silliness - there is simply no limit to what he will do K and S. He even lasts longer than I ever could at the Disney store and knows every princess tale by heart for K's benefit. When S recently developed a mild rash due to her ingestion of peanuts, he drove all of us to the local ER and we circled around for 2 hours in case she went into anaphylactic shock (at 9pm, Sunday, approximately 20 degrees outside). He will hold S when she wakes up crying from her naps, sometimes for over an hour, so that she'll go back to sleep. He will stay with K in her sunday school class for 2 hours and not care that he's always the only parent there.

Costo shopping with daddy (sorry, totally random pic but so cute how he used a burp cloth to protect S from scary Costco shopping cart germs)

Finally mobile!

In the walker

And the beginnings of some sort of crawling motion

Yay, onward and upward S!

Let's go fly a kite

Kite flying is such an essential part of childhood, no? Once K's kite really got stuck in a tree! Thought that only happened in comic strips.

Friday night feast: Paninis and Antipasti

All recipes can be found in this inspiring and scrumptious book - http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Italian-Sandwiches-Americas-Favorite/dp/006059974X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246068135&sr=8-1

Mmmm, roasted garlic, carmelized onions, pesto, grilled ciabatta - could eat like this every night and never tire of it. J, on the other hand, was in sore want of a slab of steak.

The beginnings of a spring wardrobe...

I finally got around to sewing clothes for the girls. First up, an appliqued onesie and "capri" pants for S. K's summer dress in in the works. Considering what pitifully little time I actually have to sew because both girls have to be down for their nap at the same time, I project the dress will be

finished sometime around Thanksgiving 2010.

Links on the sidebar

I've started adding links to my favorite online stores, resources and blogs on blog sidebar, as a reference for myself and others (yes, you, the two people that follow my blog besides my husband, and even he only checks in quarterly I think). This sidebar will grow exponentially once I get into the rhthym of posting all the links to things I think you might find helpful and interesting - they are all jumbled in my head at the moment.

I've also started this book and am a mere 286 pages away from becoming the perfect parent: http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/0380811960/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241581718&sr=8-1. I laughed out loud when I realized, upon brief perusal, that the advice in this book would probably do more our marriage than for our parenting. Ha! Read it and ye shall understand.

This is terrible in all its randomness but I had to post this picture - I painted my kitchen backsplash a few weeks with a zero VOC paint from Yolo colourhouse. If you can believe it, it had nearly no odor, no harmful chemicals and no solvents (so no headaches for the wee ones, yay). Yolo has some great color palettes; the kitchen wall was painted in Sprout 01, which is a nontoxic washable paint created with concern for children in mind. This was my first time painting anything beside my nails so I'm stunned that it wasn't a complete disaster.



Is my Orla Kiely a la Target consumption too much to stomach??? This is not even a small fraction of it. The rest of it is stashed away in the pantry closet and scattered throughout the house so J doesn't realize I have a problem and make me return it all.