This is my life

So in case you ever wondered, my hand is finally returning to normal from when I smashed it in the van door. For the longest time, I couldn’t bend my thumb or index finger very far - and I had no feeling around the base of my finger, where it like ‘connects’ to my hand. It was really strange and worried me that my hand would never work 'properly' again. But obviously I had damaged some nerves and then I guess your nerves do grow back.. because now I am able to bend my finger and thumb almost completely again - the only strange thing is that I have a lump right where I had the stitches in my finger. I wondered if it could be scar tissue or something, but it's a very solid lump - I mean, hard like a bone, so that can't be it. I really think my bones at the bottom of my finger got dislocated and now that's just how my finger is going to be. It also looks funny - when you hold it next to the finger on the other hand, instead of it being a normal looking, rounded finger, it is clearly flat and just smashed looking on one side.. It’s sorta' hard to describe, but perhaps it’s just always going to look this way now.

Anyway, in other news… there are some things I’ve forgotten to share… Like, last week, Chloe had a 1/2 day where she wore big girl panties - Wow! - And she even went on the little potty all by herself and told me after the fact! I was cooking dinner and I heard “Mommy! Potty!” and she had already sat down, pottied, and was going to pick up the little cup and dump it in the big toilet. Wow! She then wore her big girl panties all evening long without any accidents (we even walked down to great-grandma’s house & played!) so that was super exciting. But of course she has wanted to wear a diaper every day since then. argh. And I was so excited and ready for this big day to finally be here! But, nope. What’s funny is that Maya will sit down on the little potty (with her diaper & pants on, of course) and pretend to potty, push the little knob on the side which makes a pretend flushing sound, and then pick up the cup and want to throw the whole cup in the big toilet! haha. She's ready if no one else is! So now I’m betting the girls will be potty trained at the same time. It seems with children that a new skill is more easily attained when they see someone else doing it constantly. This would be why Maya has done everything at a much earlier age than Chloe - walking, talking, climbing, you name it, because she has someone as little as her doing it all the time and setting an example, which she quickly picks up on! So maybe both girls will be out of diapers within a few months of each other - wouldn’t that be something else? :)

In other milestone news - we took the crib apart recently since Maya never sleeps in it anyway. hah. So yeah, though I don't like to tell anyone, we do the 'family bed' thing at our house - even though I swore I would do things differently with my second child, Maya still ended up in our bed and there she continues to sleep. We put Chloe in a big girl bed (not even a toddler, but twin size) at the young age of 17 months… and it worked out just fine - she has a nice little railing on the side and she has never fallen out - and she had a little step stool to help her climb in it. (I’m quite glad we got pregnant with Maya when we did, cuz it forced us to transition Chloe out of the family bed sooner than we probably would have!) So now it’s Maya’s turn to be transitioned into her own bed. We tried putting her in the crib, but since she has never slept in it, she was not a happy camper and I can understand why - she had all the freedom in the world sleeping in our big bed and then suddenly she’s placed in this tiny little bed with rails on each side - which to her probably seemed like prison! So I figured if it wasn’t going to work to have her sleep in the crib, we should just take it apart and put her crib mattress on the floor, with a railing like Chloe’s on one side so she wouldn’t roll anywhere and try it that way. Now, I realize most parents keep their kids in their cribs till they’re like 2 years old or something, but everybody does things differently and if putting our kids in a big kid bed at an early age works, then that’s what we’re going to do. :) So I think, in sticking to the same schedule that seemed to work with Chloe, we’ll go ahead and buy Maya a twin size bed when she’s around 17 months or so and make that transition. And for now the transition we are slightly trying is just from the family bed to her little bed on the floor. And she’s been doing well with it for the most part. Any kind of major change like this doesn't happen overnight - but over a matter of weeks - and in baby steps. We’re also in the midst of moving from formula to regular milk with Maya. She has been taking bottles of regular milk mixed with rice milk just fine - so that is encouraging! The only problem is that she still wants to drink milk through the night - and that habit really needs to stop. I think if she ate more during the day she wouldn’t wake up hungry through the night. She just wakes up and will not go back to sleep unless you give her some milk. It’s ridiculous. For a while she was doing awesome, sleeping through the night but recently she has really digressed - which makes me a very tired Mom!

Anyway, as for Chloe, maybe I can chock up her bad attitude and crazy tantrums at times to her getting her 2 year molars..? I don’t know. I don’t even know if she has her 2 year molars yet - guess I should be a better Mom and look in her mouth & figure it out! So yeah, she’s been quite the handful lately. It’s her way or the highway. Every morning with her lately has been a struggle - we cry if we can’t get the pancakes out of the box on our own, or if Mommy cuts the pancakes wrong, or if one pancake has more syrup on it than another... ahhh! By 9 am you just want to pull your hair out, or send her to her bedroom! It’s crazy. I hope it’s just a phase.

Yesterday I put Chloe’s hair in a ponytail and was trying to show it to her in the mirror, but a 2 year old can’t see what’s in back of their head, so she insisted that I put her ponytail up “high” like a “mountain.” I laughed when she said that. hehe. You never what she is going to say. So the ponytail spurted out the top of her head - which was the cutest thing EVER and off we went to the grocery store like that. She looks like SUCH a big girl when her hair is all pulled up.. It’s a bummer she doesn’t let me do her hair like that more often!

So Chris has done some major work in our front & back gardens over the past few days - I am so glad! And I can’t believe Mother’s Day is this Sunday already, which is when I usually make my annual trip to a greenhouse to buy flats of flowers. I am excited, but I just feel like it came so quickly!

Well, it’s finally about time to leave work for the day (the clergy are out of town so I had a wonderfully quiet yet long day!) so I guess I’ll end it here. Sorry if it seems I wrote a book! :)