Boring and crazy.

Life for me as of late has consisted mainly of mundane days that blend in to one another with such ease that it's hard for me to recall which day is which, or even what I had for breakfast this morning. Winter arrived in one fell swoop (a blizzard, that is), and with it came these freezing temperatures that make it so painstakingly difficult for me to muster up the energy to bundle up and go anywhere. 

I'm still riding this colossal wave of hormones following my miscarriage. Certain days go by where it feels like all I really managed to accomplish was to quell the nearly insatiable desire in my heart to set fire to the universe and flush myself down the toilet. Needless to say, I'm waiting rather impatiently for my body and my hormones to regulate - and in the meantime, I'm crying over Christmas music and yelling at the boots sitting in my front foyer. 

Margot is growing up. I know this isn't news to anybody - least of all to me - but I'm really noticing it lately. She's sweet, she's beautiful, she's funny, she's curious, and she's all sorts of maddening, but she's this incredible person with ideas and opinions all her own.

She's starting to wean from breastfeeding. This is something that I knew would come one day, and probably someday soon, and my plan all along was for her to lead the way; but now that she is - oh, my heart... I'm sad about it. Just this morning I tried offering to nurse her, but "No, thank you," she said. 

"Are you sure?" I replied, as I sat down with her in my lap.

But instead of latching on, she again said, "No thank you," and then proceeded to push and shove my boob out of her face, saying, "Put it away. Put it away." 

...Oh. Okay, hilarious human being. Did you just turn into an embarrassed teenager overnight? 

Speaking of overnight, she's sleeping through the night. With this statement comes a wild and exaggerated dance number that I bust out every time I say it. Because SHE'S SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT. You heard that, right? It only took almost two years... no biggie! 

I think in this picture you can see exactly how weary I am, how stupid-happy I am, and how in love with this girl I am. 

And the one thing you can't really see is the sweet little shiner I'm sporting on my right eye since Margot head-butted me last week. You know when something hurts so bad that you just instantly and uncontrollably burst into tears? That. My first black eye! 

Honesty is always the best policy

I know that generally speaking, silence is a bad thing when there's a toddler around. That is certainly no exception in this household. But as kids grow up, they're apt to avert punishment if they're doing something they know is wrong, usually by lying, skirting around the issue, or bending the story.

With Margot, though, I feel as though I'm stuck in this magically hilarious blip in time where yes, silence usually means she's up to no good, but she knows nothing yet about deceit - and to boot, she loves to talk.

So this morning, while I was toiling away at putting plastic up over our windows to keep the near-freezing outdoor temperatures from creeping into our house, there came a point where I realized I was too absorbed in what I was doing, and that Margot had disappeared. She'd been keeping me company up until that point, doing some doodling in Daryl's bedside notepad, using a little photograph as a telephone on which to call her Nana for a chat, trying on a pair of Daryl's underwear, sitting on her potty while perusing a copy of National Geographic ...that sort of thing... but then suddenly she was gone. I wasn't overly worried, as there were only so many things she could've been doing, but nonetheless I hollered out, "Margot? What are you doing?"

And thanks to this little blip we're living in wherein her great love for narrating everything she sees and does overrides any inclination to sidestep the issue at hand, she replied, "I'm eating lotion!"

And sure enough, I found her in her room, graciously returning the Aveeno bottle, little slobbery dispenser and all, back to its place on her change table.

Why, thank you so much for your honesty!

Chaos and wild greatness

Sometimes I forget to eat and sometimes a load of laundry takes three days to process and usually I'm suppressing cuss words while I'm cleaning up messes and generally speaking I'm getting really good at putting a jacket on a moving subject and tying shoes onto kicky feet and in the last 12 months I've swept the floor probably more times than all the other times in my life combined.

The things that come out of my mouth most often are, "please stop throwing food on the floor" and "how do you ask?" and "what did I just tell you?" and "do not touch the computer" and "you sit on your bum if you're going to be in that chair" and "put the mustard back in the fridge" and countless other new me-isms but nothing do I tell my girl more often than, "I love you" and "I love you" and "I love you."

The days are long and the nights are just not long enough and the months and the weeks pass by at varying rates of speed but all of it, as it turns out, is just exactly my definition of perfect.