Author: Amy

Stylish Blogger Award

Posted on by Amy


This week I was given the Stylish Blogger award by Melissa, whose blog is Happy Mom of Two. When named a Stylish Blogger, there are four things you are asked to do.

1. Send a thank you and link back to the person/persons who awarded you this award.
Thanks to Melissa at Happy Mom of Two!

2. Share 7 things about yourself.

About 12 years ago I went skydiving a loved it.
I hate watching the news. Hate it. The sound of a newscaster’s voice (they all have the same tone and rhythm) grates on my nerves and I don’t like all the overdramatization of things. Plus I can’t stand how trivial things are sensationalized (Charlie Sheen? Who cares?).
I’ve never really had a major injury, except maybe for the time my brother accidentally hit me in the face with a baseball bat when I was four or five. I got four stitches under my right eye.
My favorite color is either yellow or green. Based on my wardrobe, probably green. Based on my home decor, it’s a toss up.

I don’t get into scrapbooking, but I have a baby book for each of my girls with lots of info and photos in each of them. People used to laugh at me when I was pregnant with Lass and would mention getting a baby book for her, saying that I might get the book but I’d never put anything in it. But I remember being kind of disappointed as a second child that there was almost nothing in my baby book, so I make sure to try to put as much in Lass’s as is in Miss’s.
I have a slight addiction to buying arts and craft supplies for my two-year-old. We have a box, cupboard, and countertop full of all sorts of crafting stuff, much of which we haven’t even used yet. But I’m still drawn to that aisle of the store and have to make myself walk away without buying something.

I can’t get going in the morning without my coffee. I really crave it, but it’s decaf.

3. Then award 15 blogs that you follow.

These blogs are stylish and fun to read, check them out:


Thanks again to Melissa of Happy Mom of Two!

I’m Getting Up Now

Posted on by Amy

When I started as a prison psychologist, I had to go to the same two-week training that the federal government makes all correctional workers go through. Among other things, I learned self defense, spent a lot of time on the firing range, had physical fitness tests, and learned lots about how to prevent and handle a “major disturbance,” which is prison staff lingo for a riot. I remember one instructor saying something like, “We have the control in our institutions because the inmates let us have control. There are way more of them than us, and they could take control at any time. We will always get it back, but don’t forget that they could take it.” I heard this idea several times in various trainings I went to over the years. I think the purpose of saying this was to stress to us that our control was fragile and we needed to exert it with respect, lest our residents decide they weren’t gonna take it anymore.

Fast forward seven-ish years to a day in the life of me, The Mom, the one with the “control,” and Miss, The Toddler, the one who generally goes along and lets me have control because life flows better that way. The one who decided yesterday that she wasn’t gonna take it anymore and went into all out riot mode. Yes folks. My 2’7″, 26-pound 2 year old brought me to my knees yesterday.
Remember my post from the other day when I said potty training was going so well? Remember how I said I firmly believe you can’t force a child to go to the bathroom? Well. My daughter firmly proved me right yesterday. And I never even tried to force her to go to the bathroom. I just tried to get her to not go on the floor. Or on her little chair in her room. Or on the couch. Yesterday was not my best day as Mommy, and Miss decided to seize control of things by controlling what she could – her bladder. Yes, potty training worked very well. Miss does know when she has to go and she is able to tell me. She had been doing this very well all week. One thing she had not been doing at all was napping. So after five days without a nap, we were both tired and a bit frayed. She had an accident yesterday because she did not tell me she had to go. Throughout the entire training process up to that point I had been super positive and upbeat, even with accidents. “Next time just make sure you tell Mommy when you have to go so we can keep those underwear dry, okay?” Well, yesterday I had a not-so-wonderful Mommy Moment and I scolded her for her accident. Nothing too awful, but I definitely used a stern voice and told her that she was supposed to tell me when she had to go and not pee-pee on the floor. I think I gave an exasperated sigh or two. I did manage to regroup fairly quickly and then in my more upbeat voice repeat the usual reminder to tell me when she has to go the next time. But apparently she was not all that forgiving of my moment of testiness. From that point forward, she was in control and letting me know it. She refused to go to the bathroom when I took her in to let her try. I never pushed the issue, but did try to get her to go a few times in an attempt to stop the madness that had begun. She wouldn’t even sit when I’d take her into the bathroom, but then would go moments later in a less favorable spot. She wasn’t giving an inch. Suffice it to say, she had many accidents throughout the afternoon. I was trying so hard not to get into a power struggle with her, which was ironic, given that I had absolutely no power with this issue at all.



Things did improve somewhat right before bed, but by that time I was a wreck. I was berating myself for being the most horrible mother ever, and thinking I had ruined all the hard work we had done on the potty training by scolding her and that I had perhaps scarred her for life as all sorts of Freudian theories came to mind. And yes, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Just ask my mom, who I called near tears while chugging a glass of wine within minutes of putting Miss to bed. Or my husband who wasn’t able to get home until late last night and came in to find me grumpy and tearful and asking him to go get me ice cream (he did).
Of course, at the end of the day, when your toddler takes you down, you just have to get back up. By the time I went to bed, with the help of my husband, my mom, some wine, and some ice cream, I was feeling much better. I went to bed hopeful that yesterday would just be a bump in the road and that today would be a huge improvement. And of course it was. Miss had only one accident. She was happy to go on her potty and glowed at the praise she received. I was going to leave her with our babysitter so I could go grocery shopping this afternoon. I desperately needed to get some groceries and had wanted to go yesterday after her non-nap, but she refused to go to the bathroom, and I wasn’t willing to take her out in public with a full bladder with the way things were going yesterday. So today I thought I’d just avoid any problems and let her stay with our babysitter, whom she loves. But as I was getting ready to go she said, “I want to go store too. Pwease Mommy. I not get my pants all wet.” Well, that just melted my heart and so of course I let her come along. We had a great time. And when we got back, wonder of wonders, Miss finally took a nap! Oh halle-freaking-lujiah!!! All the world looks so much brighter on this side of a nap.



There are days when being a Mom just kicks the crap out of you. I really believe that there isn’t any more important job. Therefore, when things don’t go right, when I screw up, my feelings of inadequacy and guilt are greatly magnified. I question myself and feel like a failure. No one can make a mother of a two-year-old feel more impotent than that two-year-old. But amazingly, even when she is being a stinker and I’m at the end of my rope, the girl is sweet and loving and brightens my world. Just when I feel like I want to go crawl under my covers and stay there, she will say something like this comment from yesterday, “Lass so sweet, Lass so cute,” and then when I ask her if she’s cute say, “No, I not cute. I pwetty.” My girls make me laugh. They make me smile. They make my heart swell until it feels like it’s going to burst. Sometimes they make me want to pull my hair out. Always they make me want to be a better Mom. Even yesterday. Hell, especially yesterday! I’m not perfect, and sometimes I totally suck at this Mom thing, but in the words of that instructor, I “always get it back.” I guess that’s just what moms do. We do our best for our kids and sometimes we totally lose it. But we always get it back.

Taco Seasoning Recipe

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In my efforts over the past few years to eat more whole foods, buy more locally and avoid packaged/processed foods, I started a while ago seasoning my taco/burrito meat with spices from my spice rack rather than buying taco seasoning packets from the store. This not only allows me to know and be able to pronounce exactly what’s in the seasoning, but it’s much cheaper than the packets and has better flavor too! I typically don’t measure what I put in the mix and it never comes out quite the same. But in an effort to come up with a recipe for the seasoning, even if I never use this exact amount and combination again, I decided to try measuring what I put into the mix to come up with perfectly seasoned meat. It took a couple of tries, but here’s what I mixed up yesterday that my hubby and I thought was especially yummy:

Start with one pound of ground meat (we use venison, but beef would be fine of course) and add the following:
1.5 Tbsp Ground cumin
1 Tbsp Chile powder
1-2 tsp Garlic salt
Just a bit of Cayenne pepper (or more if you like it spicy hot)
Add in 1/2 to 3/4 cup of water, stir and let simmer for a few minutes. Serve with tortillas and your favorite fixins. Mine are cheddar cheese, sour cream, spinach, tomatoes, cilantro, and guacamole (recipe here). Voila!

Three Day Potty Training – Day Two

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We are potty training this weekend. No pull-ups. Not even at night. Miss threw away her leftover diapers at the start of day 1. We’re using this 3-Day Potty Training Method and it’s working like a charm. I selected this method for several reasons. One is that I know several people who have used it successfully. Two is that it doesn’t drag out the process of potty training. Three is that is makes sense to me. I could go more into detail about why I like this method, but it is a pretty intense, focused potty training strategy that has left this momma pretty tired after two full days of hovering over my two-year old, saying over and over and over “Make sure you tell Mommy if you have to go pee-pee or poo-poo okay?” So I’m too tired to do a lengthy post tonight.
I’ll just say for now that we started with many accidents and mad dashes to the potty. But today we had no accidents except a little dribbling when Daddy didn’t quite get Miss to the potty in time. She even had a couple of times when she told me she had to go in time to keep her underwear totally dry. We have had dry underwear after naps on both days, and this child who has been such a heavy wetter at night and has never woken up with a dry diaper made it through the night with only slightly wet underwear this morning. I went in to check on her at about 3 am, fully expecting to have to change her jammies and sheets (or peel off the top layer of my two-waterproof-layer-sheet system),and she was dry then. So I’m happy with the strategy we’ve chosen to use. I’m thrilled with my girl who just gets it. Here is an amazing video of my amazing girl (in her big-girl underwear) dancing with her shadow. I couldn’t stop watching this.

Visit with Great-Grandma

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Somehow I forgot to post the photos from our brief visit to my husband’s grandmother last Friday. We drove out Thursday night, stayed in a hotel, and then were able to visit for a few hours Friday morning before driving home that evening. It was a short but very fulfilling trip. Miss was a bit shy to start, but got warmed up by greeting her Great-Grandma’s leprechaun statue-doll thing.


Lass met her Great-Grandma for the first time, and was such a lover.


Miss got comfortable and had some fun chatting and showing off the books she brought along.



It was such a nice visit with my husband’s lovely grandmother. I know I’ve written about this many times before, but it’s just so important to us for our girls to get to spend time with their family. Even if our girls won’t remember this short visit, my husband will. His grandmother will. I will. And we will have these photos and others always to show our girls before future trips and also whenever we tell the girls about who they came from. Before this trip and our recent trip to Florida, during which we visited my grandparents, I showed Miss photos from her previous visits with her great grandparents and told her about who we were going to see. She probably doesn’t remember her last visit with her Great-Grandma S, but when we woke up in the hotel on Friday morning and I asked her who we were going to see that day, she knew. Our girls’ roots are spread far and wide, but they are strong and deep and thoroughly nurturing, and I want them to always be secure in this fact. Ten hours in the car and few hours of sleep for one night is a small price to pay for strengthening my girls’ connections to their family tree.

Happy Home

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You can always tell when we’ve spent the day at home.


Miss got out tons of toys to make sure her sister had enough to play with.

We didn’t leave the house today. Staying in for more than one day starts to make me a bit crazy, but for today it was nice. We read lots of books and played games. Legwarmers were the stay-at-home style for today. Miss insisted on wearing some when she saw me put them on Lass.


Now that Lass is sitting up so well, she and Miss play together more and more. They spent lots of time working on sharing today. The big toys of the day were a ball, a chain of plastic beads and a squeaking giraffe. Miss liked to do a quick swap with Lass when she wanted something Lass had in her hand. Lass loved the big blue ball, so Miss would roll it up to her and then stealthily grab the beads and/or giraffe in exchange. Lass really enjoyed the ball, so she didn’t seem to care. Miss was very into the sharing/swap idea, as when I once handed her the giraffe, she said “Fanks. You wanna chew this?” and held out the slobbery beads to me (I think she’s getting more molars, as she is often chewing toys at the back of her mouth).









During Lass’s morning nap Miss and I got some quality time in the kitchen. Instead of our usual cookies or another baking project, we tried a no-bake St. Patrick’s Day treat today. We started with yogurt-covered pretzels. Naturally we had to try out a few of these before getting started.

We got all our stuff together
and then melted some white chocolate chips in the microwave (of course we sampled these too).
Miss got a shamrock sticker so she would know what we were making. We shaped the pretzels into shamrocks and used the white chocolate to “glue” the pieces together.

Once they dried we used green frosting and white frosting with green sprinkles to really make them shamrocks (this idea came from the March issue of Family Fun magazine).
Miss dug in and enjoyed the sprinkles.

It was a happy day at home.

Spring is Coming!!!

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Spring is on the way. You might not know it, since we woke to this the other day. . .

and since it was overcast and windy and barely above freezing today. But, the snow is slowly melting and today we saw the robins. Lots of them. And also today, my hubby and Miss started our garden.
Indoors of course. But it is starting. And I can’t wait for fresh veggies and herbs from a garden. For pretty flowers and blooming trees.
Miss had fun helping her Daddy plant the seeds.

The planted radishes, arugula, broccoli, spinach, onions, and lots of others.
I can’t wait to see Miss experience the magic of planting seeds, caring for them, and watching them grow.
There’s no better experience than watching the growth of something you love and nurture.

Safety

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I am always looking for new items to make my life easier and keep my girls safe. I’ve mentioned some items here. Of course, I love my cloth diapers. I love my mommy gadgets. My husband calls me a Mommy Gear Head. Recently I’ve found a great new resource for items and information for child safety. It’s called My Precious Kid. It’s an online store. It’s a blog. And I get updates from their Facebook page with great safety and product information. It’s a great resource, so I wanted to share it.

I am currently in need of new carseats for my girls. Although she’s two, I keep Miss in a rear-facing carseat because it is safer in the event of an accident. I currently have her in a Britax Boulevard. A very well-rated seat both in terms of safety and from parents. Except that my husband and I hate this seat. It is so hard to pull the strap to get it tight enough, and it’s super cumbersome for my hubby to lug around in airports when we travel. Recently, the strap that comes up between Miss’s legs that we pull to get the shoulder harness tight enough has started to fray. I could have put up with an annoying seat, but now I don’t feel comfortable with the safety of this seat, so I am getting a new one. I’m thinking about getting a Sunshine Radian (not sure yet which model). My Precious Kid carries these here. The fold up, so they’re less cumbersome when traveling, and they also have great safety ratings. Anyone have one of these? I’d love to hear what folks think of them who have used them. Make sure you check out My Precious Kid for other great stuff and valuable info!

Tutus and Sleep

Posted on by Amy
I decided that I wanted some tutus for my girls, so I went to my favorite resource, Etsy, to find some. Except that I couldn’t quite find just what I was looking for. And while most of the tutus could have been custom ordered, I realized that I could make some cheaper than buying them. So, I made a trip to my beloved Hobby Lobby the other day. And I went nuts in the tulle section.

While we were selecting the tulle, I was telling Miss that I was going to make her some tutus, and she got quite excited. Then every time she saw the pile of tulle on the counter in my laundry room, she kept saying, “My tutu!!” I’m not sure that she really understood what a tutu is, and I had to keep explaining to her that Mommy has to make the tutus first. After a day or two I got my act together and looked around online and found a few good tutorials. The one I chose to try was this one. I pulled out my rotary cutter and cutting board and went to town cutting strips of tulle.
Knotted it around the elastic, and voila! The hardest part of the whole thing was taming the static electricity while cutting and knotting the tulle strips.
And now, an update on the sleep in our house. I blogged before about my efforts to get Lass sleeping through the night without waking up and needing to nurse to go back to sleep. I am happy to announce that after only about 3 nights, we managed to cut out middle-of-the-night feedings. Hooray!
For about a week she was still waking up a few times at night and fussing a bit, but always managed to get back to sleep on her own. We have now had one night of 7pm to 7am sleep without waking, so I’m hopeful that will be the norm now. What a good girl!!
As for Miss, the transition to the Big Girl Bed has gone pretty well. The first night, as I posted previously, she went to bed with no trouble. She has continued to do wonderfully at bedtime. Naptime, on the other hand, was a bit of a struggle for a few days. Part of the problems was that I hadn’t really thought through how I would handle it if she repeatedly got out of bed (recall my complete denial that this transition would be happening in this decade and my resultant lack of preparation for it). So day one of Big-Girl-Bed naptime found her getting out of bed to play, over and over, and me repeatedly going into her room and putting her back in her bed. There was a lot of crying (mostly from her) and frustration (mostly from me). Finally I heard her yell, “I have a big poop on my bonnom!!” So I went up to change her diaper and put her back in bed and just decided to stay in the room until she fell asleep. I sat by her door and she was out in two minutes. However, I didn’t really want sitting by her door that to become a habit. So, for day two, I decided to try something different.
Day two naptime I decided to just let her get out of bed, figuring it was fine as long as she played quietly in her room and that she would wear herself out eventually, get into bed, and go to sleep. Except that it didn’t work out that way. She played for at least an hour and then started screaming that she had a poopy diaper again. I suspected this was just her way of getting me to come in her room, but went to check her diaper anyway. Sure enough, there was no poop. I had a brief discussion with her about the importance of telling the truth, and then put her back in bed and decided to try sitting by her door again. This time she popped right up from lying down and said, “Hi Mommy, what you doing?” In spite of attempts to get her to lie back down and sleep, I finally realized it just wasn’t going to happen, so day two was a complete nap failure.
I needed to regroup. I needed a plan. I remembered hearing about something called “Sleep Rules” in passing before. So I Googled it. I found info about Dr. Weissbluth’s Sleep Rules strategy and poster. It says to try it with kids 2.5-3 years old. But I figured Miss could get it, so I went for it. Here’s the poster I made.
I changed the Sleep Rules a bit from the ones Dr. W recommends, but these seemed more reasonable for her. She likes to chatter while falling asleep and I don’t see any harm in that, so didn’t want to make “Stay very quiet” a rule. We review the Sleep Rules before every naptime. After each sleep (nap or bedtime) that she follows the Sleep Rules, she gets a cool puffy glitter sticker to put on the Sleep Rules poster, and when she fills all the boxes, she’ll get to watch movie. I’m talking this up like it’s the coolest thing ever, since she’s never really seen a movie, and I was worried this incentive would be a bit ineffective. But she also gets stamps on her hands, feet, legs, etc., and sometimes another sticker from one of our books.
And it’s working!!! The first few days I still had to go in once or twice and put her back into her bed. I just said, “Stay in your bed” and eventually she did. Now she generally doesn’t even get out anymore.
So. Tutus, cool. Sleep, fine. But wait! Now I will connect these seemingly unrelated ramblings into a coherent, logical blog post.
As I mentioned above, most days the reward for following the rules is a sticker and some stamps. But a couple days ago, I decided to let the tutu be the reward. As I was putting Miss down for her nap I told her that if she followed the Sleep Rules today she would get to play with her tutu. She seemed so into the whole tutu thing, and I was so excited to see how much she would love the tutu I made for her. Unfortunately she woke up from her nap (she did follow the rules!) a little crabby.
She just wasn’t really into the tutu. At first she didn’t want anything to do with it. So I just put it on the floor and she decided it might be okay to sit on it.

She liked the way it feels.

She finally decided to put it on.
She got about this far and changed her mind. “I no yike it tutu.”
We left the tutu for a while. Had a snack. Went to gymnastics. Came home and had dinner. And then we tried the tutu again. She liked it much more.

She even shook her booty in it a bit.
In general, she doesn’t really love it as much as I thought she would. I was kind of expecting that she would put it on and refuse to take it off. She likes to play with it but doesn’t put it on much. But she is just at the beginning of the loving-to-dress-up phase. So the tutu will go into the dress up box and I suspect it will be worn as the dress-up love grows. She may be a fairy. Or a princess. Or a ballerina. Or something completely unrelated to tutus. I could see her as a tutu-wearing dinosaur or something equally fun. I will make more tutus. I have to. I still have 3 lbs of tulle in my laundry room.