Molly at 2

Considering all of the deadly seismic activity going on, I was particularly grateful to wake up after a full nights sleep (3rd in a row) and go in to Molly's room with Jonny and sing "Happy Birthday" to her little smiling face. I hope that everyone affected by this, can find peace and safety in the coming weeks.

I thought I should take some pictures of Molly on her big day, just to show what she's up to. Here she is doing some of her favorite things. Reading her favorite book, while watching TV. Life's simple when you're two.

Like I said, Molly slept through the night the past 3 nights. I don't know if shortened naps are helping with that or not, but they're definitely helping in her falling asleep. If we skip a nap altogether, the result is amazing. Sometimes the whole process (including story) only takes like 15 minutes. If she takes an abbreviated nap, we'll still come in at under an hour, which is nice. I have to say it's really hard for me to wake her up. At one time, doing something like that would have been considered an act of treason in our house, punishable by death and everything. It's sort of funny how completely out she is. I go in, shake the crib, yell, sing, stomp around, all that sort of stuff. Then she sort of begrudgingly wakes up and remains pretty drowsy looking for at least 20 minutes. I do sort of miss having the afternoon to myself, but it's worth the reduction of bedtime induced stress.

I forgot to share a funny story from the other day. Margaret and Glen were in town visiting so we had a few lunches out. When Molly goes out to eat, when she sees all of the lemons in every one's teas and waters, she about loses her mind until she gets one. On our second lunch out, as the waiter was taking our drink order, Molly looks right at the waiter and says "I be having lemon". Quite a sentence, and in the correct context and everything! I suppose if you really really need something though, you have to find a way.

Fancy Car

Last weekend was Midnight at the Oasis, so papa was driving his corvette around. We told Molly it was his "fancy car" and she loved that. She became obsessed with playing in the fancy car. You would think that she had forgotten it, moved on to some new game and then BAM! She starts whining about wanting to play in the fancy car again. I guess she just knew that she looked good in it.

She loved checking her look in the mirrors

Tomorrow is the big day! We don't have anything planned for tomorrow but there will be a rip roaring party this weekend. I'm of course completely disorganized and I'm not really sure how it's going to fall together, but oh-well, party planning just isn't my thing. I do have the cake planned and that's all anyone cares about anyhow, right? I'll admit it's a large part of what I care about when I go to parties.

In new baby news, I was supposed to have my ultrasound tomorrow, but they called and re-scheduled, so now I have to wait until Monday. Initially I really didn't care since I wasn't planning on finding out the sex, but I'm really tempted to find out this time around. I know how Ramsey feels about that...my loves surprises friend. I also know how Michaela feels about it...my hates surprises friend. I don't know whose going to win out in the end: the Ramsey angel or the Michaela devil sitting on my shoulders. I also don't know why Michaela ended up being the devil in this, I'll blame Rams for referring to finding out early as "the dark side" when I told her I might be too tempted to wait. Sorry Michaela.

No Naps

The other day Molly just didn't want to take a nap. I put her in her crib, and left like I always do and after about an hour of her playing happily in her crib, she was still going strong. So I decided not to worry about it too much. It did kind of suck not having all that time to myself to get things done, but what else could I do? My Dad has been saying I should try this out in the hopes of her sleeping better at night, so here was the opportunity. It hasn't made her sleep though the night any more consistently, but it has made bedtime a breeze. Usually we can spend up to 2 hours in attempt to get her to sleep. We would start at 8 and wouldn't be done until 9:30 or 10. Feel free to judge away if you must. I know lots of people would say that we should have sleep trained and that we've screwed her up, but crying it out is not for us. Anyhow, no napping definitely speeds up bedtime. 20 min. (including story) seems to do the trick and once she didn't even make it through her favorite book, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. On days when she seems like she just has to take one, I make a point to not let her sleep more than 1 1/2 hours and that seems to still have the desired effect. Thankfully no napping doesn't seem to have ill effects on her mood, she still seems pretty happy to me.

The other parenting task that I'm doing all wrong is potty training! When she wants to use it, she loves it, but when I've tried to do the whole schedule, taking her in every 15 min. she resists. Today she initiated the whole process herself in the morning. After showering, she was running around before I got her dressed, and she went in and took care of business and then she even went in and picked out a pair of underwear to wear. I thought "this is a sign". I had no where to go today so I figured I'd see how we'd do. At first I thought 30 min. would be enough of an interval, but it wasn't, so I switched to 15 min. She would go in and sit down, not go, and then go on the floor somewhere 2 min. later. I gave up after the 4th "accident" of the day.
For another day I suppose.

Pottying in Style

One thing I think I do right, is feeding her. I'm not perfect by any means but I do get her to eat her veggies and she's still crazy for fruit. I'm also really good at limiting the junk she eats. I figure that at this point I still have control, so why go a ruin that by introducing her to all of the junk I love? A perfect example is cookies. I am terrible when it comes to cookies, I love them to the point I could probably make myself physically sick from them. I'll make cookies (I don't buy them) and after they're gone I'll tell myself, like a drunk might, that I will never bake cookies again. Then, a month later I'll be at the store and I'll talk myself into getting a bag of chocolate chips. I won't make them right away, I can hold myself off for a little while, but eventually I'll cave and there will be a whole batch of something sitting in the kitchen and I won't even know how it got there. Yet, even with this horrible addiction, Molly has never had more than 1/4 cookie in one sitting. I know you shouldn't judge, but the other day at the Dr's office I saw a kid probably a little younger than Molly with a baby bottle of chocolate milk. C'mon! I'm not opposed to chocolate milk, I love it, Molly's had it before, but make him drink it from a cup at least.

In other household news Molly's birthday is coming up. I have desperately wanted a nice outdoor area for her to play in, so I'm hoping that for her birthday we will at least be on our way to that goal. My dad is working on putting up a nice sturdy iron fence around a little portion of our backyard, and we have a contractor who is going to do some concrete work for us. For her birthday, we bought her a little slide and a sandbox. I think they're going to be a big hit with her. Sometime down the road I want to build her a playhouse (and by "I" I mean Jonny and my dad), but that's also for another day.

Work gloves on and ready to go!

Well it's likely that when writing my next post I'll be the proud parent of a 2 year old! Can't believe it's almost time to print off volume 2 of the blog book.

Mardi Gras Molly

Of course that isn't for a couple weeks, but Jonny was in New Orleans this past week and so he came home with lots of fun "pretty necklaces" for Molly to play with. In case you were wondering, he got them all the hard way...that is of course if you understand that to mean that they gave them out at the meetings that he had to sit through all week.

The game for the night was put them on, take them off.

Even Dink and Riley got in on the fun.

I'm relieved that Jonny is now home for at least a month before he has another trip for work. He says his schedule is about the same and maybe it was just the three consecutive weeks that have thrown me off, but I swear he's going to be traveling more than usual this year. Hopefully after August he'll be able to keep close to home for awhile.

The other day Molly insisted that she have her bear with her for her snack.

Some for me,

some for you.

She's really into pretending with her animals and babies, it's really kind of cute. I just hope she doesn't think she can treat her new sibling like she treats them. She's been known to put her baby in the microwave.

She actually let me put pigtails in her hair and she even left them in for a few hours. they were so cute. Hopefully she'll get into them soon.

Today it's raining, so we bought Molly some rain boots and I chased her around while she went puddle crazy. In the end, we were both really wet and pretty muddy. It's of course already sunny out.

Probably won't get much use out of those boots.

I realized I haven't written about one of my favorite "Mollyspeaks". It's one of those things that's so inventive and cute, we haven't bothered to teach her the real words to use. When eating, she loves dipping her food in any sort of sauce, condiment, yogurt, whatever is handy. When asking for it, she asks for "near". It started because she would point out places on her plate where she wanted the stuff while exclaiming "near!" (here). She's been doing this for several months now, but I do think that she's starting to outgrow it since she asked for ketchup the other day by name. She did however point out the places she wanted it on her plate. I suppose it's for the best that she doesn't talk like a two year old forever.

Bubbles

Since we've been staying close to home the past week or so I've had to try and come up with things for us to do around here. Of course she loves being outside and I do too, but I get tired of chasing her around our hazardous areas trying to prevent injuries. She likes sidewalk chalk (In case you didn't already know, Crayola is far superior to Rose Art) but the other day I remembered we had a bubble gun. She LOVED it. She loves for us to blow bubbles while she's in the bathtub so I don't know why I forgot we had such an awesome toy. I will say that trying to take her picture while operating the bubble gun was a little difficult. I gave up trying to get her with her eyes open since the bubbles popping all around her were making her blink so much.

Keeping with the bubble theme, backstroke in her bubble bath.

Today I decided to try making her some play dough. For Christmas she got some of pre-packaged stuff, but when we were at the Morris' and she was first introduced to the stuff, she had a hard time remembering not to eat it. It probably isn't too bad, but even their commercials on T.V. have the disclaimer "fun to play with! not to eat!". Since I really don't want to call poison control for the 3rd time in her life (how many times before they take her away?) I found a recipe that was really similar to one I remember making when I was a kid. The only difference was the inclusion of Gelatin which I think made a huge difference in the consistency, from what I remember anyhow. I did see her sample it once, but the insane saltiness of it made her spit it out right away...perfect! Dink did the same thing when she tried sampling it too, serves her right! Here's the recipe I used.

play dough
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup water
1 tablespoon oil
2 teaspoons Cream of Tartar
3 1oz pkgs unflavored gelatin
Mix all ingredients together and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until consistency of mashed potatoes. Let cool and knead on heavily floured suface with floured hands until dry.
Then of course I kneaded it with different food colorings.

The spread.

She liked it when I made little ball for her...

So she could smash it. She's all about destruction.

Her masterpiece!

She looks so proud!

Other than that, not much is going on here. I'm glad that my parents made it home through all of the snow and ice almost completely unscathed and that we are half way through the 3 weeks that Jonny is gone this month.

Annette had mentioned that I should write about being pregnant while corralling a toddler and for me, it's just about the toddler right now. The 1st trimester was practically non-existent to me since I didn't even know about it and I really don't feel much different (although I have had to break out a few maternity clothes since nothing fits anymore). I suppose I'm a little more tired here and there but when you've been sleep deprived for 2 years, who notices anyhow? The real action for me is going to start in August. Yikes! I hope I'm ready.

Tennis!

I've been terrible at taking pictures lately, so I don't have much to post. Part of the problem is my camera battery. A pro and a con of my camera is that it take AA batteries. This can be really convenient if you're prone to forgetting to charge things (I am) but since I use my camera a lot (usually) I can blow through them pretty quickly. So I decided to try rechargeable batteries, which really blow. Ramsey told me that hers work pretty well and I read up on why mine suck and hers rock, so I have some on the way so I can be back in the picture taking business. God forbid we don't document every single little piddly thing that Molly does :-)

We've been hanging out with the Morris clan lately since she's still on maternity leave and we could both use the company. They generally play pretty nice together, but there is still the whole toddler element, so they have their fights which we have to break up occasionally. Of course it always revolves around what belongs to who. "MINE" I pretty sure it's impossible to go through childhood without going through that stage. Despite their problems, they still manage to have a good time together and are actually getting better at taking turns which is kind of cute. I also like that Molly is very concerned with Grayson's well being when he's upset or if he falls or something like that. She always says "Grayson are you okay!?!" Of course sometimes I sure that she is part of his problem.

Here's Molly at Grayson's the the other day she was having a good time with the tennis racket. Aunt Meredith is so proud!

I know that the whole language updates are probably getting old, but it continues to crack me up. As Annette wrote in her blog, Molly likes to talk about things being broken. Anything might be "broken". Crayons, an empty cup, her face (after bumping her head). She's also really concerned with "fixing" the broken things and then exclaiming after she's successfully fixed something that it's "much better". So say her hair is in her eyes (a frequent problem) she'll say "Oh-no! eyes broken!...I fix it...(rubs hair frantically)....oh! It's better! much better!"

Well, that's all I have! maybe I'll be better in the next few weeks, but for now I'm out of pictures and stories.

Pea in the Pod

Well there it is! The pea in the pod. On the left of the photo the little blob shaped like a woman's restroom symbol or possibly a corn husk doll. This time it was surprise for us, which honestly was kind of fun. I didn't know until the beginning of January and by the time I made it to see my midwife earlier this week, I was already 11 weeks in. The official date is August 10th, but of course we'll have to wait and see if that's really when he/she is ready. One thing is for sure, it will be too hot. It is slightly disturbing that this is all going to take place THIS YEAR! It just sounds so soon and I feel like I have so much to do to get ready.

You may have noticed I changed the name of the blog from "Molly Mac" to "Mac Attack", I decided that soon enough, not everything will be about Molly.

For now though, it still is for the most part.

Today Molly was helping Jonny out in the garden. She isn't so much a help as a destroyer, but we were able to keep the damage at a minimum.

The other day I attempted to get Molly into some practice panties. I gave up and did a load of laundry before nap time though. She has been known to let me know in time to get her to the potty, but not enough.

She does look pretty cute in them though.

Her new favorite activity is drawing. I really shouldn't say new because she's been into writing "Molly" as she says, for a long time. She has now expanded her pictures to include circles. I love how she gets into it and lays down on her belly.

Well that's all of the news from us, I'm sure in the coming months I'll have lots to post about!