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.

Sprouting little wings

If I haven't said it before, I'll say it now: not a day goes by that I don't acknowledge how grateful I am that Daryl and I have never had to send Margot off to daycare; how blessed we are that our employers give us enough freedom to stretch and bend our work schedules in order that she can spend her days at home with us instead of at a daycare facility. Our schedules are arranged in such a way that when one of us is at work, the other one is home with her; and in spite of how maddeningly frustrating it can be to operate this way when it means never having a day in the week where we're all together, it is, above all, a gift.

Cutting and pasting our work schedules, though, was obviously a direct result of bringing Margot into our lives; before she was born, my schedule was standard Monday-Friday, 9-5. So making all of this work meant putting my work hours on the chopping block - which, in turn, did the same thing to my paycheck. This isn't to say that we aren't making ends meet, but only to say that we've had to make adjustments where we can. And this past summer, after realizing our financial situation was altogether too uncomfortable (it's hard to say no to Chipotle) I decided to pick up an extra day at work. Well, this meant we were short on childcare one day a week; but by stroke of luck / divine blessing, everything worked out perfectly when Daryl's mom offered to come to our house every Wednesday to look after Margot. And as far as Margot is concerned, her Nana is one of the most magically wonderful people on the planet.

I digress, though. Nana works in the school system, so when the summer came to an end, so did our outsourced childcare services. Enter Marcia: one of my nearest and dearest and most beautifully talented and lovely friends (seriously, you guys: she's the mastermind behind t i b b e n l i t t l e s. You'll fall in love.) Marcia swooped in and offered to watch Margot when we needed her.  And yesterday just happened to be the first day that we had to bring Margot over there.

I was nervous. Not because Marce didn't have every ounce of my faith and adoration, but because I didn't put enough stock in my own little girl. My mind kept reeling, thinking surely we'd drop her off and say goodbye, wrenching ourselves out of her little arms, while tears poured down her face and she begged us to stay, calling out our names in despair.

It sounds dramatic. I know. But it's where my mind went. I know if you're a parent, yours has probably gone there, too.

I spent a lot of Tuesday evening telling her and re-telling her what the next day was going to look like; that Dada was going to drop her off over there, where she'd get to play aaaallll daaaayyyy loooonnnngggg with her favorite friend Wendy. I told her she'd get to play games, ride on Wendy's rocking horse, maybe go to the park, and anything else I could think of that'd help her (me) feel pumped up about dropping her off at someone else's house and leaving for the day. This was totally new territory for me.

And as it turns out, obviously, Margot was fine. Better than fine! Daryl told me that she was more interested in Wendy's feet than she was in saying goodbye to him.

"Wendy feet! Bye-bye, Dada. Wendy feet!" (Poke, poke.)

I've had Margot's independence on my brain so much lately. When hanging out with our next-door neighbors last week as we sat around a fire in their backyard, they talked about how big and scary the world has started to feel now that their son is five and they've had to start teaching him how to operate in the world without them. They've had to teach him how to navigate getting home on the school bus, how to watch out for cars on the street, and make sure he knows his address and his parents' contact information, and a plethora of other such considerations that just don't exist while our kids are young enough to constantly remain under our care. It's all just so much. I drive past kids waiting for the bus before school on my way to work every morning and my brain instantly zaps to their parents, thinking about how each and every one of them managed to come to terms with sending their kids off into the world on their own. How much trust they've all mustered up and put into their kids - not because they want to, but because they have to. Because kids grow up. Because we can't cradle them in our arms forever.

But it's terrifying. It's overwhelming. And it just boggled my brain yesterday when, after we were all home and went for a walk to the park down the street, I was asking Daryl and Margot each about their days. Realizing how odd it was that the three of us had days and experiences independent from one another.

Because...what? When did Margot get so big? Did I not just give birth to her last week? How has she gotten old enough to have her own experiences outside of our house and outside of our care? It doesn't make sense to me. It's amazing and beautiful and completely bewildering watching her grow so quickly.

And so last night, there was no bigger sigh of relief than while I was giving her a bath, and asking her about her day, and she just kept yelling, "Wendy house! SO FUN!"

My girl, when did you become your own person with your own little ideas?

Love thyself.

It's hard to love yourself every day of the week. I know.

It's hard to accept that you're good enough, or present enough, or that you're lovely even if your jeans don't fit anymore. It's a tall order to consider that you're radiant no matter what your hair looks like or whether your sweater has spit-up on it and holes forming at the sleeves.

Growing up, I spent so long ripping pieces of myself apart. I think - I fear, I lament - that I only did this because I'm a girl being raised in the world, amidst warped ideas of beauty and skewed body image, in spite of the solid teaching I was given at home. I invested too much time thinking that my skin was too pale; that my arms were too hairy; that my thighs made me look like a hippopotamus; that I had man-hands and a boy's voice (I don't).

But tearing oneself down is exhausting. The energy that we can expend dreaming up and focusing on different faults or reasons why we're not good enough is just so tiring. It's gratuitous. It needs to stop.

I'm not saying that loving yourself comes easy, or that strong self-confidence is something inherent. It takes work. But more importantly, it takes a consideration that those people in your life who love you are onto something. It takes an intentional effort to hear what you're being told, and take it to heart.

The confidence that I have, which started from this tiny seed at the bottom of my heart and sprouted up and out and all over my body, exists because I've been taught well to love myself. I took the example of the handful of people who raised me up and held my hand and walked alongside me and reminded me time and again that I am wonderful.

I feel blessed in my life that I've had certain people love me so deeply, with such care and such intention that they instilled within me this tiny seed that grew up, up and away. They taught me, over a long string of years, that my pale skin is beautiful. That who gives two shits about your arm hair? That my thighs are beautiful and perfect just as they are. And that my hands are lovely and my voice is just my voice. My girl voice. And they taught me so much more than this - that I am loved in spite of any and every single flaw that I possess.
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When I started this blog some months ago, I did it as a means to reach out to other mothers. Women like me who are experiencing the gamut of emotions, being stretched in every which direction, nearly broken but still hanging on, and who might find themselves feeling isolated or alone.

And a couple months ago, I stripped off all my clothes and stood with my naked baby girl for the 4th Trimester Bodies Project as a way of taking a small step forward - or a big step, really - shouting from the rooftops, in my loudest voice, that we as mothers are strong, we are beautiful, and we are brave. It was the first step in a series of motions I took to liberate myself from my own cage. And to have sloughed off my clothes and those bars feels like the most freeing thing I've ever done.

I want Margot to learn to love herself. And I know that this starts right here. I want to love her all through her days and to lead by example and show her exactly how powerful she is. I want her to have a realistic understanding that beauty is everywhere, that beauty does not revolve around body size or shape, and that she can do whatever she wants to do and be whoever she chooses to be.

I want her to understand that her value is not determined by her beauty, but that regardless of what she looks like, or what changes her body goes through, that she's perfect just as she is.

What do you love about yourself? Are they the same things that I love about you? Do you take selfies on your phone when your kids are napping? I do too.