Spring-ish.

Today it was. BEAUTIFUL out.

I can't decide if a gorgeous day in mid-February is a gift or a cruel joke. I know that we still have potentially months of wintry weather, but day-yam today felt like spring. This afternoon the girls and I went for a walk, and we brought out sidewalk chalk, and we took the bikes out for a spin...

Then I realized that this warmth? This delicious warmth that had the neighbor walking her dog in shorts and a t-shirt? It was like 35 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny. The neighbor was a bit optimistic, I think. We were out in our spring jackets and no gloves but still had on hats. But it was so so so nice.

"Look, my shadow is dancing!"

Before we came outside, Violet made sure everyone was wearing their "cool dudes".

We drew a "hopscotcher".

Drawing with sidewalk chalk.

Read more...

Mother of the Year, obviously.

Today we had a busy day. We had a doctor appointment for Fiona, I decided that since the office is only like 1.5 miles from our house, I would skip my run this morning and just do a destination run to the doctor's office, and then after that over to playgroup at the rec centre, where we would play and then lunch, then head to the library to return my very overdue, non-renewable items, then back home for naptime. THAT was the plan.

First problem: Stayed in bed too long. Not a problem normally, normally that kind of morning is STELLAR. But on this particular morn, I probably should have gotten out of bed because it threw my whole morning late, which resulted in me leaving only 15 minutes to run the 1.5 miles. Which I can allllmost do, but not so much while pushing a double jogger on a windy day, especially when faced with

Second problem: It's actually like 2 miles to the doctor's office, and not the mere 1.5 that I had guessimated. Thus, we arrived about 10 minutes late. And then she couldn't find us in the appointment book, because apparently

Third problem: Today's doctor appointment wasn't actually today. It was NEXT Thursday at 9:45. Damn. We got in anyways, but as a walk-in, which meant we had to wait like 45 minutes.

So, doctor appt completed, just a bit behind schedule. Run the second leg, get to playgroup, meet a couple new people, sit down for lunch. Discover, while pulling lunchbox from basket under stroller, that

Fourth problem: Left my freaking library stuff on the counter in the kitchen. They're going to revoke my library privileges, I just know it. Eh, whatever. Guess we can go back onto the massive indoor playground for some extra after-lunch playtime.

The girls were thrilled with this turn of events. They love that place. Fiona was running all over everywhere and climbing and sliding and etc etc and so forth. Violet and I were sitting in the bottom part of the play structure, in the designated toddler area. I was sitting there reading an article on my iPhone doing something important that doesn't make me sound like a horribly neglectful parent. Suddenly I realize that

Fifth problem: Violet is no longer sitting there at my feet. Trying to look totally in control, I walk over to where Fiona is playing with a cozy coupe, chat with her a minute, ask her if she knows where her little sister is. I'm not super worried, the playground is completely enclosed, with like 4 levels of buzzer-activated doors to get in and out, I know she is SOMEWHERE IN THIS GENERAL VICINITY, so I casually start glancing around, all "It's cool, but WHERE THE SHIT IS MY BABY?!?!?!?" She's nowhere on the ground. That leaves one option. She climbed up into the big kid play structure that is "designed for children ages 4-10". No, she wouldn't... would she?

click to enlarge, suckahs.

I dive into the structure, around and around and around the spiral staircase at it's center, heart beating a bit faster the higher up I get, until... I hear a giggle. I turn a corner. I see the BIGGEST shit-eating grin.
So darn pleased with her little self. So since I am such a midget a petite woman, and can fully stand up in this structure designed for children one-third of my age, we stayed up there to play for a little while.



Annnd, that's pretty much the day. We did have quite a time once we started on the final leg of the run home, Fiona sort of lost it and sobbed "but Mama, I don't want to go home yet! I want to go to my-kea!" but that's just your garden variety long day/late nap type stuff.

Even with all the problems, I'd say that overall, today was massively successful. If that tells you anything about my "normal".

Read more...

One Year.

Well, my little lady's first birthday has come and nearly gone. I'm still kind of in shock that she's so big, and now I've got a 2-yr-old and a 1-yr-old. We had a lovely time at her birthday party on Sunday, and at her birthday playdate this morning. She gave me a wonderful birthday gift last night, too. She SLEPT THROUGH THE NIGHT!!!! I think the last time I slept through the night was the night before her actual day of birth. So I woke up this morning feeling like a million bucks.

I got nothing else but some pics from the last couple days. I was stressin' about the birthday decorations, but I ended up really happy with what we pulled together.

Fishies, Cheerios, animal crackers, and raisins. A one-year-old snack buffet!

Getting some candle-blowing "help" from big sissy.

Cake.

One.

Fam.

All the kiddos. We definitely promised them jelly beans to get them all on there.


Done.

Storytime with Daddy before bed.

Found this book about a kitty named Violet. I think our Violet is here to stay, too.

Read more...

Just not shiny enough.

Violet's birthday is next Monday. Since her party is in two days, I figured now is as good a time as any to start planning it...

Argh. As a good 21st century mama, I immediately googled "first birthday party" and then became increasingly despondent that I do not have the craftiness or planniness or prettiness required to pull off one of those ridiculously gorgeous parties you see floating around tha blawgz.

Thank goodness I then came across this article, and in particular, this bit of advice:

"theme:
You're tired and busy, but you want to celebrate your baby's first birthday, dammit! Don't go overboard with anything, just make foods you love and invite your favourite people over for a beautiful brunch.

invites:
Nothing elaborate, just get on the horn and ask. Or, even easier, send an email. You don't even have to punctuate it."

Ok. The internet has officially given me permission to get a bunch of balloons, order some pizzas, buy some beers, hang the same HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner we've used the past two years (though this time we'll have to take it down at some point, instead of leaving it up on the wall for Fiona/Mama/Daddy/Jesus' birthdays), and call it a day. Happy birthday, Violet. I really do love you lots. It's just... I don't have the wherewithall to plan an entire Cheerio-themed party, as MUCH as I would love to. I should just embrace my balloons-and-cupcakes self.

It will be great. And you'll turn one either way. Also, walking? My lovey! You're such a big girl!

Read more...

Oh Canada.

The other day the girls and I went for a run. Or, I went for a run and they went for a ride. In a double stroller. Which I pushed. While running. In the wind. For 5.5 miles. See, I can make running crazy even when it's actually quite beautiful outside.

While on our run, I came upon several different people rollerblading. ROLLERBLADING?!?!? They still let you do that? I was pretty sure it wasn't allowed outside of like... 1995. Like, I'm serious. I hadn't seen anyone on rollerblades in quite some time. And there were several different people! And I saw one yesterday, too! Apparently it's still done here.

Me, winning a nerd award, back when rollerblading was cool.*

*Cool is relative. Cause I thought I was the shiz, with my white shorts and my rose-print vest and my friendship bracelet on my ankle? HELLZ yeah.

But hey, more power to 'em. Me, I'll stick with running.

So yesterday evening Violet said her first word! Or, what we're counting as her first word. She's done a few that we're like "did she just say Dada? Was that a Mama?" but this was like, an unmistakeable, repeated, unprompted (Well, the first one was unprompted. Then we made her do it like 83 more times for the camera) word! And what was this word, you ask? It was cheese. Guess I take a few pictures of these kids.



And with that, the monsters are awake. Got to dash.

Remember to stay hydrated, y'all.*

*I'm obviously WAY cooler than I was in 6th grade.**

**NOT.

Read more...

As promised.

On Friday I got as far as titling this entry. Today I've started on the actual writing, so we are heading in the right direction.

I've got two girlies sleeping simultaneously today (huzzah!), which does not happen very often. In fact, they have been doing this back-and-forth napping thing that has kept us pretty much housebound for the past few weeks. I'm hoping all that ends soon. Today was actually a great day, sleep-timing wise. It doesn't hurt that Violet slept for SIX STRAIGHT HOURS for the past two nights in a row! Last night she only woke up TWICE between 8:30 and 8:30! Which is ohmyGAH so amazing!

I've started running again. Back at the end of December I found out that my sister has been liek stepping up the fitness thing HARDCORE and it made me feel all lazy schlumpy so I registered for a 10k and downloaded a training program to my iPhone. Bam, done, now I'm a dedicated runner too, HAH. And then I promptly did no running whatsoever for about a month. Then one nice warm (almost up to freezing!) day I allowed Nate to shove me out the door and it was so freaking amazing. Cold air in my lungs, warm sun on my face, snow crunching under my feet. I'm back, baby. Running(ish). I'm actually doing the Couch2 10k program, which eases you into running over a period of a few months by alternating running intervals with walking. So for now I'm still at half running/half walking. BUT it feels awesome. Today I was really looking forward to my run but when I woke up at 7:30 the dude on the radio said that with the windchill factor it was -30°c and that's just way too cold, even for me.

Sooo, what else is new. Babycakes is working on another tooth! This makes five, and she seems to be taking this one like a champ, only one evening of fussiness and today she is happy as can be, so hopefully we're over the worst of that one. She's still crawling around like crazy, pulls herself up to stand ALL OVER THE PLACE. And she's even getting good at sitting herself back down, which is great. OH and she can clap! With a big old grin on her face! So stinkin' cute.

Fiona is starting to really get into pretending. Right now one of her favorites is to be the doctor. She gets a notepad and a pen, writes notes on a chart, takes dolly's "temp-chur"; the other day dolly was sick and had to have lunch to get better. Doctor's orders. She also is getting very into reading stories to me (and to "sisser"), which is awesomely cute. She knows some of the pages by heart, others she makes up a story about the picture on the page. Good times, right there.

Life is going on pretty much the same as before, except we are like a jillion miles away from everyone. We do a lot of "bideochapping", as Fiona calls it. Keeping in touch via webcam. It works, but we do miss everybody from back home. Facebook helps. I don't think I would have been able to make this move in a pre-facebook world. Oh, internet. I loves ya.

My window of opportunity (haha, Colleen) is closing quickly here, and I'd love to go grab another cup of coffee before the ruffians wake up, so I'll end with a little something I was musing over the other day. I can't seem to get it into the entry seamlessly, but I wanted to share my thoughts concerning the evolution (or degeneration?) of motherhood.

When my firstborn was a baby and she pooped in the tub, we FREAKED OUT. Picked her up, wiped her down with a wet wipe, emptied and scrubbed the tub, and then re-bathed her.

The other night when my second born pooped in the tub, I scooped the turds out with my hand, chucked them into the toilet, and then turned around and said "Okay guys, let's get hairwashing started."

Such is my life. Scoop out the turds and move on.

Read more...

Too busy for this.

So I actually don't have time to write up a blog post right now, due to the whole moving to Canada thing... but I'm sitting here watching Violet scoot all over the room, in that "not quite crawling but more than just rolling over" way she has, and realizing that I HAVE to take the time to do at least short posts to track that sort of thing. I just went back and read through a few old posts from when Fiona was that age, and guess what? If I had no written down record of it, I WOULD HAVE NO CLUE when she did things like crawl, or cut teeth (which Violet is also doing right now, actually), or walk, or talk... I really have to be better at keeping track.

So.

Violet is just shy of 6 months old. Fiona just turned two. They had doctor visits last week, they are both TEENSY TINY little girls, Violet is actually smaller than Fiona was at that age, if you can believe that.

Fiona is getting so big, picking out her own outfits (currently she's wearing "cowboots" and jammies with my fashion scarf around her neck, and of course don't forget the "pitty" eye makeup she's got on) and drawing pictures and asking for chicken "nuckets" every day for lunch and dancing and playing (she just yesterday started doing somersaults and the "fips" (splits)) and grabbing her baby sister in a big hug and saying CHEEEEEESE every time she sees a camera, and in general "showing her personality", (which as all the parents know, is code for TANTRUMS GALORE) and she's just so terribly, wonderfully, completely TWO.

Violet is somehow nearly six months old, which is just amazing to me. She is mobile, this one. Creeping all over the room, finding the one little scrap of paper and shoving it in her mouth. Speaking of her mouth, she's got one little tooth poking through her gums (you can't see it, but trust my boob- IT'S THERE. And it's SHARP.), and unfortunately we can't use those teething tablets we used with her big sister because they've been freaking recalled like 97 thousand other things recently. But she's been really happy anyways, she is such a happy baby the majority oof the time. She nearly slept through the night one. time. A nice 7-hour stretch. But that only happened once and now we are back to that waking up about every hour and a half to two hours. Which is fairly exhausting, but at least all she wants is a quick snack and then she's back out. During the day she is smiley, and likes exploring, and talks with her big sis, and has even been behaving better in the car.

The two of them together are just too much. Fiona still holds on to baby sister's carseat when we drive anywhere. Violet cheers up when Fiona sings to her. They even share a room now, which was kind of middle of the night, spur of the moment thing that really took. I was worried that Violet would wake Fiona up and vice versa, but it's been really good for both of them. At 8:00 every night we all go upstairs and change into jammies and brush teeth and read stories and say prayers, and then Violet nurses and both girls get tucked in; we turn on the lullabies and the nightlight and then they both happily fall asleep. When Violet wakes up to eat again a few hours later, Fiona wakes up only enough to feel reassured that we are here and that she can safely stay sleeping in her bed.

Usually by the end of the night I get tired of sitting up to nurse and Violet gets pulled into bed with me, which means that by about 7am there is another little somebody standing next to my bed saying "Hi!". Nate and I are suckers, which means that we normally end up pulling her into bed with us as well. The other day we suggested that she go back to her own bed, but she just cuddled down into the covers and said "No! Suggle!" and really. Are you going to refuse that?

It's going so fast. I can't NOT take time to write things down.

Picking out pumpkins on Fiona's 2nd birthday

Read more...

It isn't all sunshine and rainbows... except when it is.

I'm up way too late, as usual. And Nate is out of town for a few days, so there isn't anyone here to tell me to "go to sleep already, this is the reason you're so tired all the time".But I'm sitting here on the couch, just hanging out with a sleeping baby snuggled up on my chest. She really is an amazingly good baby. As most of you know, I am NOT a baby person in general. But this little kiddo... She only cries when she is hungry or needs a diaper change (Or when she get smacked in head with a travel coffee mug. My bad on that one.) and even then she settles down pretty easily.

Normally when she falls asleep in the evening I put her in the swing and do whatever, have my on-my-own time. Tonight though, I'm just holding her. She's so snuggly. And her little cheeks are just so kissable.

Miss Violet just chillin' on a hideously awesome couch while vacationing in Virginia Beach.

In conclusion, I need to get some sleep. I just wanted to make sure people don't get the wrong impression, with all the complaining I normally do on this here blog. I do love these kids to bits.

Read more...

Guess what!

As you may have deduced from the recent lack of "ugh, I'm still pregnant" type posts... I had the baby!

And she is a girl! And pretty flippin sweet!

May I present...

Violet Lousie LaMartina
born May 16th, 2010 at 4:55pm
weighing 8lb, 5oz
20.5 inches long

I am working on getting the birth story all written up, I probably won't post it up publicly here cause you know, tmi and all that, but if you're actually interested in hearing all the gory details, just let me know and I am totally cool with sharing it privately. But I will give the basic gist of how things went down.

Last Friday I was.. ugh. Feeling very ugh. Was supposed to go to this mom's night out thing, and totally ended up bailing cause I was so anti-social. Went to bed crazy early (like, seriously. I was in bed by like 8:45) and woke up Saturday feeling much better. We headed out to Warrenton for the day, for a friend's graduation party. And that was very very nice. It was just family, we all just chilled out for the entire day, it was great. Pregnancy-wise, there was a big ole NOTHING going on. No contractions or anything. Saturday night I decided to continue with the niceness of the day and not get all worked up about "argh when is the baby going to come" and stop browsing the inane STUPIDNESS of pregnancy message boards where people agonize over "is this a contraction?" and "how can I tell if I'm in labor?" and crap like that. Nate and I had a nice relaxing evening- ate some pizza and ice cream, caught up on some tivo'd shows, I even had a small glass of red wine. We went to bed as normal, at a decent hour, even, because we had to get up for church in the morning.
Sunday morning at around 5:15am I woke up to pee (for the fourth time). Noticed some cramping. Noticed that it was coming and going. Considered timing it on my handy dandy contraction timer app that I had downloaded to my phone, but quickly realized that this was most likely the real thing and that I should probably grab a little more sleep if I could. I dozed off and on until I heard Fiona waking up at around 7:30. I brought her into our bed for a little morning cuddle time, and I let Nate know that we were probably going to be seeing this new baby by tonight. We still planned on going to the 10:30 Mass though, cause the contractions, although they were coming at about every 3-4 minutes or so, were fairly mild still. By 8:00 Nate had Fiona downstairs in her highchair eating breakfast, the contractions had gotten a smidgen stronger, and I suggested that maybe we should try and hit the 9:00 Mass instead. So I jumped in the shower real quick. When I got out of the shower at 8:30 and started to get dressed, I decided that maaaaaaybe going to Mass was not in the cards for this morning. I started timing the contractions for real on my phone, and we made heads up calls to our baby/dog watching support team.
For the next two hours I timed contractions while we ate breakfast, started packing up what we needed for the hospital, gathered up Fiona's things, made t-shirts (seriously, I had designed these big sister/little sister/brother tshirts and I had never gotten around to printing them onto the transfer paper and ironing them on, and it became very important to me that I get this done before we leave.), fed the dog, etc. We called the doctor at around 10:30. At this point contractions were about 2-3 minutes apart, lasting 45-60 seconds each. Fiona was just playing with some toys during all this, but she was also interested in what I was doing, and definitely started copying me when I started concentrating and breathing through each contraction. Which was adorable.
We headed for the hospital at around 11:30. We dropped Fiona off with some friends of ours on the way over, and the minute we pulled away from their house I burst into tears because, "The next time I see her she'll be a big sister and she won't be my baaaaaaaaaby anymore..."

At the hospital, the abridged version:
Got to the hospital around noon, got all checked in, got situated in the room by 12:30, and then we did the whole labor/delivery thing for a few hours. Baby was born at 4:55.

Annnd it was great. When she came out, nobody did the whole "It's a girl!" announcement thing, they just sort of slapped her up onto my chest and I was trying to look and check if this child was a boy or a girl... and so I think I was the one that got to announce that it was indeed a girl. I then turned to Nate and said "Oh crap, we haven't agreed on a girl's name!"

As they cleaned her up, we all discussed possible name choices... we really didn't have that moment of "when you see her you'll just know what her name is". It took us maybe a half hour before we decided that she was, in fact, a Violet. And the middle name... well, that one took us two full days to think of and agree on.

On Monday Nate brought Fiona to the hospital to meet her baby sister, and there was some SERIOUS cuteness overload happening. Fiona kept wanting to hold and kiss the baby, and to snuggle with me in my bed, and then we all sat together on the bed and ate dinner from the caf and watched some tv and snuggled some more before Nate brought Fiona back home.

Things got a little tricky towards the end of our hospital stay, as Violet developed a bit of jaundice, which required some phototherapy and supplementing breastfeeding with some formula, all of which was very overwhelming and confusing but which turned out just fine. We had our second follow-up visit at the pediatrician's office yesterday and everything is looking great. She's still looking a tad yellowy, but the doc said that will it should clear up in time.

We are still settling in, Fiona has been super extra clingy for the past few days, and has had some trouble sleeping through the night. But its a big adjustment, learning to share Mama and Daddy with this new little thing that cries. I don't expect it to be easy.

Even with the lack of sleep and the craptasticness of recovery, things are really really great right now. So I'm gonna go enjoy my little girlies. Who would have thought that I, of all people, would have two girls. I was the tomboy, the one who took the babysitting jobs with the crazy boys, NOT the one who dealt with cute little outfits and pigtails and hairbows and all that nonsense. I don't even wear pink! And yet, here I am with two little girls, loving it. Life's funny.

Fiona taking her little sister Violet home from the hospital. She left her hand on the carseat like that the whole ride home. It was way too freaking adorable.

Read more...