My leg still sucks.

This week I finished lining up the flooring delivery, movers, and flooring installer so that they all arrived in the correct order and within a small amount of time. I’ll be out of town from December 2nd-6th, and so in that time we will have 2900 pounds of flooring and 13 rolls of underlayment delivered, have movers arrive to move all our furniture into the garage, have an installer come out and install aforementioned flooring, and then have the movers come back to put our furniture back into place. If all goes well, when I leave Wednesday morning we’ll have grody carpet and when I return, we’ll have beautiful wood floors. I’ll be taking J with me, so F will be on his own to wrangle cats and any issues that can’t be handled over the phone. It should be exciting. It will look like a new house! I’m so excited.

J continues to amaze me. She’s so thoughtful and empathetic. Whenever another child is crying, she always looks at me as if to say, “Look, she’s crying. What do I do?” When I show her that the child’s mommy or daddy is right there, helping, J still gets upset. For the last few nights, as I’ve been putting her to bed, she has been talking about crying on the turtle, crying for me, wanting mama on the turtle. Huh? Maybe they have a new turtle on the playground at school? It took me a long time to figure out that she’s talking about the foam turtles they sit on at the edge of the pool at swim lessons, while they wait their turn to swim! Once I figured that out, I was able to talk to her a little bit more about it. A couple weeks ago, Papa T. took J swimming without me. Apparently she had a tough go. It was the first time I hadn’t gone since she started almost 2 years ago! Anyway, once I figured out she was talking about swimming I was able to coax her through explaining that she missed me when she was swimming, and that she wishes I would get in the water with her and help her splash and swim like I used to. Now that she’s in a more advanced swimming class, I don’t get in the water with her. I guess she’s been missing that. I’ll need to find an indoor pool that I can take her to, because as soon as she talked about “spashing with YOU, mama! Kick kick! Big spashes!” I realized that I miss swimming with her, too.

She seems to be getting the hang of sharing, too. At mealtime, when one of us isn’t around, J will always set aside a couple bites of her favorite part to save for us. When I finish eating before she does, she tries to get me more food or offers me some of hers. When she’s eating a snack that she really likes, she’ll always say, “Mama want a bite?” and hold out a piece of it for me.

She’s also really beginning to express her opinions in ways that clearly shows she’s thinking about the world around her and what happens in it. Yesterday, F commented to her that she was growing into quite the young lady. Normally, she doesn’t really respond to this kind of comment. Sometimes she’ll nod, or look at you solemnly, but rarely does she say anything about it. Last night though, she thought for a moment and then said, very carefully and clearly, “I am.”

Also yesterday, F asked her what her name was. She used to respond, “Jojo!” and then moved up to, “Jo jeh peen!” but last night she took it even further and said, “Jo jeh peen TUH pee!” She’s also been saying our names are “Besh” and “Fannin” but when we asked her what our names are, she called us, “Tuhpee mama” and “Tuhpee Daddy.” So adorable!

She’s totally baby crazy. She adores going on walks with her baby and as we walk will talk about how her baby is crying because it misses mama or daddy, or how it’s laughing because it’s happy to be outside. When I picked her up the other day, she was rocking a wooden block with her picture on it and singing, “Wock a bye baby jo jeh peen, in nuh twee top! When nuh winn bows, uh uhh, cadle dopp!” and then she’d hug the block.

The biggest news from this week is that she drew a family portrait that is beginning to look like people! It was in her cubby with all the other art she makes like it was nothing. Last week, she colored inside lines and this week she’s drawing mommy and daddy?? OMG! I’m going to frame it!

So for a while there, I managed to lock myself out of the new server. It took a while to figure out what I’d done (note to self: always check /etc/hosts when DNS is weird).

On Labor Day (September 7th) I had a dizzy spell and fell on my shin, badly enough that I decided to go to the ER. The good news was, nothing broken. The bad news was, a terrible infection ensued. After 4 different antibiotics and a slew of visits to various doctors, we got the infection under control and I got a referral to “Wound Care.” Which is a thing I’m happy to say I never knew existed until now. And I sort of expected it to be more bandaids and gauze like I’d been using, but the technology is actually pretty advanced and well beyond the kind of stuff I could do at home. So I’ve got a big hole in my shin and I’ve been going to the hospital twice a week to have it pulse lavaged, debrided, and other things that sound just about exactly as fun as they are. Pro tip: if you don’t know what those things are, do not do an image search. And probably be careful on any webpage. It’s not pretty. In fact, try a text browser.  So that’s been exhausting and taking up a lot of my time and energy both. J has been very good about not touching my leg when I’m rewrapping it. She likes to look at my “owie” but knows better than to poke it. She has started asking to wear a “bannaid nike mama [bandaid like mama]” and so I’ve been taping a little piece of gauze to her leg to match. It’s pretty cute.

Speech therapy is exploding! She’s continuing to amaze everyone with her progress. She’s coming up with new and complex sentences every day, and getting more understandable to not-me. (I can usually understand her pretty well). When we’re looking for something she’ll often say things like, “It pobby in nuh den” or “Might be in Daddy car! I sheck! [check] Mama come sheck too?” The other day she was trying to figure something out and she said, “I dink it out. Hmm!” and put her hand on her cheek like she was thinking. She’ll say she doesn’t know the name of things, and she’s excited to learn that Papa T. and I have names too. As part of her language skills, she’s started telling me a lot more about the experiences she has. She had a sitter the other day and when I got home, J declared, “Ms. Ashee take my baby shoe away!” Indeed, Ashley had taken her doll’s shoe because she wouldn’t stop putting it in her mouth.

She’s also figured out that mom and dad sometimes give different answers, and if we’re in different rooms and one of us says no to something, she’ll run and ask the other one! Now that we’re on to her, we’ll work out a system, but she definitely got a few extra treats for a few days in there.

We had a plumbing leak in August. For a while, because of my leg, we were stalled out on dealing with it. We had the leak fixed and insurance sent some people out to tear out some carpet and dry our our walls, but we stopped there and had a 3’x3′ square cut out of the carpet in the den. Well, once I got the ball rolling on it again, our insurance company said they’d pay to replace all contiguous carpet with same-quality flooring. That’s the den, the hall, and the front room, and leaves only the bedrooms with their original flooring. Well, we hate the carpet, and Papa T. in particular hates ALL carpet. So, for a little bit extra, we’re having all the carpet in the house replaced. Adding 3 bedrooms didn’t add much to the cost, and I found a great deal on some really nice laminate hardwood that we’re going to use. It’s been pretty stressful to add that to all the other things we’re doing, but it will be worth it in the end.

We’ve decided that it’s okay for J to have an iPad in the car. She plays games and watches Peep and the Big Wide World or Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. It keeps her from screaming the whole way, and it’s still well below the recommended 2 hours of screen time per day. And it’s not like we are replacing much interaction, since when driving we can’t do much with her in the back seat. It’s a win for everyone except that part of me that wants to feel guilty for not being perfect. So the other day she was watching an episode of Peep that involves Peep being chased by a cat. And she kept saying, “Nonono! Bad! No cat!” as the cat chased Peep around. So cute!

And speaking of cats, she’s recently started helping us feed the cats, who have all lost a lot (too much) of weight. We’ve switched them all to wet food in hopes that it will help them gain some weight back. She loves to put the bowl down on the ground and watch them lick it up. The other day she accidentally dropped the bowl and it shattered, and she was very upset. She was really sad that she broke the bowl, poor kid. I told her it was okay, we all have accidents, and Daddy and I would never be mad at her for an accident. She seemed to take it to heart and happily helped clean up the mess and then put down a new (plastic!) bowl of food for the cats.

She’s back on the Miralax :(. It’s been a rough couple of weeks, and she kept sitting on the potty and straining, and nothing would come out. At school, she had a very very painful poop, and complained of pain and not wanting to go potty after it. So we’ve put her back on miralax in hopes that it will help. It’s already helped a little, I think. The other day she went and started to cry, but stopped while she was going. It seemed to me like she was expecting it to hurt more than it actually did. She wouldn’t let me wipe her because it hurts, but she was going into the bath so I was okay with a pretty cursory swipe. The good news is, she’s old enough to drink (and enjoy) a couple ounces of apple juice! So we’re just mixing it into that daily, and explaining to her that it’s medicine to help make going potty not hurt. She seems on board with the whole thing.

I am starting to get a little frustrated with her teacher. She will frequently say when I pick her up that she’s hungry and that they ran out of whatever lunch was when she asked for more. She’s obviously not starving, but I worry. About all the things. Because motherhood. The teacher will also always says she’s had a good day, even when there are days I am pretty sure she had a rough go of things.  Yesterday when I picked her up, she was so upset about a doll she wanted (that wasn’t hers) that I basically swooped her out to the car and sat with her for a while and snuggled with her to help her calm down. It was weird, because there was no build up at all. I’m guessing that all the build up happened earlier in the day, and she hadn’t actually resolved her feelings about not being able to have the doll, only set them aside until I picked her up. I remember being young and crying so hard that I couldn’t even breathe. It was so awful to watch her go through it! But, she felt better after looking at a couple pictures of similar dolls on the internet. She looked at them on my phone as I drove home, and by the time we got home she was ready to give me my phone and move on.

Yesterday was also the first time Dad and I went out on a weeknight date. Ani DiFranco was in town, and for his birthday I got him tickets. We had a sitter from 6-12, although we didn’t leave until 7 and got home at about 11:15. Apparently, J was determined to wait up for us. She wasn’t rambunctious or difficult, she just insisted on waiting for mama and daddy. When we got home, she’d only JUST fallen asleep. Sweet girl!

Okay, I think that about covers the last 6 weeks. Whew!