It used to be so straightforward: feed baby, bounce baby, change diaper, change cloths, clean spit up, swaddle baby, put baby to bed, pray for sleep, feed baby... and so it went.

Easier these days? In many ways, absolutely. All 4 of us are sleeping a lot more than we did the first year of Lola and Jackson's life. The kids are on a fairly regular nap schedule which, obviously, I'm pretty happy about. And while Jackson does go through spells when he wakes up several times per night (nightmares I think), rarely does he fuss long enough for me to get out of bed. Having a working sleeping routine makes things so much easier.

Lola and Jack are also getting much better at communicating their needs. This new skill serves us all well. Jackson will walk in to the room, wait for me to look him right in the eye and then say "ball" and point back to their room. Easy enough to decipher; he wants my help to get the ball. Lola is great at letting me know when it's meal or snack time. And she's even getting good at telling me what she wants to eat. I can run down the list of options and trust that she understands her choices as she answers yes to grapes and no to ham. This makes meal time so much easier.

But there is one element of motherhood that isn't getting easier at all. Quite the opposite; it get more difficult every day. I guess that element for me is best encapsulated by what I think of as "parenting": exerting my influence and assistance when necessary, withholding it when it's important to do so. I spent the first year nurturing, loving and snuggling, hoping to build a strong bond between me and my kids. I felt like it was my responsibility to keep them in situations where they would be happy and safe and could explore their world without consequence. But that's changing as they grow into toddlers. They're learning to assert their independence and I'm learning, well trying to learn really, when to snuggle them tight and when to allow them to fall.

My little fashionista

Some instincts are just inherently female, I would say :)

My parents were recently here visiting from CO. Couldn't resist posting this little gem:

Where have we been?

The pressure I feel to try and catch up after a long hiatus ends up paralyzing me and only prolonging my silence. I wait for a large block of time to open up in my schedule so I can write a big post and then inevitably something comes up and my blog gets put on the back burner. So then a month goes by and still no post.

So rather than wait any longer I'm going to post whatever I can get done before the kids wake up from this nap. I'm just going to dive in with no particular inspiration so when I sit down to write my next post I will consider myself caught up and I can get on to more interesting, inspired writing.

So, Jackson:
A second dislocated elbow, a big open cut on his chin, and a broken glass French door. That pretty much sums up his recent exploits. And all that happened last week. Is this going to be what life is like with Jackson? Are Aaron and I going to have to start a separate "Jackson emergency medical bills and replacement of broken objects" fund? I tried to convince Aaron that we should use money from Jackson's college fund to replace the glass door ($400!) but he wasn't buying it. Ever the pragmatist.

I am happy to report that, true to form, Jackson is far less upset about his personal injuries and his destruction than I am, which is good. No use crying over a little blood or broken glass, right?Lola is again fighting a cold, her second this months. About a month ago both babies, err... toddlers, fought off colds and ear infections and now Lola's cold is back. She had her ears checked today and they were both clear of fluid, YEAH! Although these colds don't tend to slow her down much, they do keep us pretty much house-bound and so let's all hope that she'll be snot free soon!

4 years later...

Everyone around here has a Katrina story, and we have told ours many many times. We tell it to our friends who weren't here for the storm and to our relatives from out of town. We told it to the people we met in Nebraska, explaining over and over that we were indeed planning on moving back to our home. We tell it to each other sometimes, partly for therapy and partly in attempt to archive it, I think. Funny, the people we don't tell it to are the friends who "lost everything" like us. With them it's more of a nod of recognition or a quick reference to something I "used to have."

One day Aaron and I will tell our kids about "the storm." We will say how we are still living in the very spot we were when our house was destroyed. We will show them where the old front door was and where their room would have been in "Milne 1," as we've taken to calling it. We'll show them how high the water was and where the mold reached up to the ceiling. And we will show them pictures.

We'll show them pictures of the hundreds of books covering our spare bedroom floor that came down when the bookshelves collapsed and floated out of the bins that held up our desk. We'll show them pictures of the bedroom and explain how it's possible that the top of the bed and everything on it is dry even though it sits 2 feet below the water line on the wall. We'll show them the contents of our cabinets strewn all over the kitechen floor, thousands of dollars worth of wedding presents covered in dirt and mold like an apocalyptic Williams Sonoma add.

What we won't be showing them are pictures of Aaron and I at our Junior and Senior Prom, pictures of Aaron carrying me across the threshold of the house on the Westbank we rented together after high school, or pictures of our Greenwood apartment we moved in to when we got married. Like so many other people around here, our pre-Katrina stories will be accompanied only by the pictures in our memory, pictures we can't show our children. I won't be handing Lola a box of old pictures like my mom handed me when I asked about her life before kids. Instead, I will show her a picture of a bin sitting amid the rubble in our spare bedroom closet. A box full to the brim with pictures of our life before "the storm." Pictures that once showed Aaron and I in Halloween costumes and in front of Mardi Gras floats, dancing in bars and studying in the living room made into indistinguishable swirls of color like a child's first fingerpainting project.

People around here still talk about what they "lost in the storm," especially around the end of August. Funny, it never occured to me to think about what Lola and Jackson lost. Until now.

A pic of the kids standing beneath our Katrina Water Line marker:

Preemie Diapers

I was cleaning out the kids' closet the other day and came across an old pack of preemie diapers. Couple this accident with all the babies happening amongst our friends and it's no surprise a little sentimentality ensued.

Preemie diaper v. current #3 diaper:
It's hard to believe that those tiny preemie diapers used to be so big on the kids.
Just for kicks, I put one of those preemie diapers on Lola. It doesn't look too funny from behind,
but look at it from the front!

What a difference 17 months makes!

Copycats

It doesn't take much to get Lola or Jackson to mimic you. Lola's go-to dance (and she really LOVES to dance) was taught to her by one of her BFF's a while ago and now she does it every time she hears music. One of Jackson's favorite buddies was over the other day and had Jackson saying "Dude!!!" within the hour. It seems like they are learning something new almost every day. Some things they don't retain. They may say/do it once or twice and then if it's not reinforced, they either forget it or file it in the back of their brain for later use. Let's hope Jackson's new word is one of the things that doesn't get reinforced and is immediately forgotten.

A couple of days ago Jackson tipped over my coffee cup. I was more startled than mad and guess what was the first word out of my mouth. "S**t!"And it wasn't quiet either. It came out full force. And guess what was the very next word out of his mouth. Yep, that's right. Baby's first curse word.

I knew this day would come. I knew one day I would have to sensor everything that came out of my mouth. It's not like I can't do it. All those years I taught gymnastics I never even once yelled "s**t" when a kids fell off the balance beam. It's just a matter of getting used to it again. And I guess I'm a little disappointed that it's happening. Sometimes there's really nothing more fitting than a good PG-13 rated curse word (ok, maybe occasionally even an R rated one). Oh well. Guess I'm gonna have to put the G rated filter back on.