21 Months Old

I've been negligent in getting photos and updates here, but life has been crazy busy. Tomorrow is the first day of the quarter, and first day of my new full-time job at the college. It's actually a pay cut for me (for anyone out there thinking I'm moving up in the world); the only reason I took it is to (1) get away from the politics and annoying habits of my current job and (2) for the benefits. I'm teaching 6, yes SIX classes. 35 students per class. That's a lot of grading. On top of that, I'm going to maintain two days at my current job. I'm glad to have work, yes I am. Am I glad to be working as much as I will be? Not at all. It takes away from my time with Emma, while Joe still is unemployed -- starting month #5 now. No bites on any jobs.

But Emma is my sunshine. She talks in 3-4 word sentences. She knows the street, city and state where she lives. She knows the names of most of the children in her classroom at daycare. She's a daredevil and can slide down the highest slide at our nearby playground. She climbs the stairs on her own (without permission, sneaky girl!) and can come back down on her own (on her rear though). She jumps, she skips, and she loves to spin. She is doing pretend play with her toys. The other day she surprised us by counting to 10. And she wants me to point at each word when I'm reading her bedtime stories ("Goodnight Moon" and "The Snowy Day").

I love her hugs and kisses. She knows that kisses makes boo-boos all better. She's still not sleeping through the night, but she'll sleep from 8:30 - 1am, and then settles down quickly in our bed and sleeps until 5:30-6 usually. She never sleeps more than 10 hours at night, and usually gets about 2 hours at daycare. She seems happy and energetic. The girl EATS. Oh. My. Goodness. The other day I decided to make home-made donuts. She must have eaten 10 donut holes all at once. She loves to help me bake and she enjoys the mess. I enjoy the mess. :) Nothing like watching my little girl covered in flour and dough and giggling the whole time. We even made home-made play-doh the other day and delighted in making faces and then squishing them with our hands.

She's pushing the boundaries, but she's respectful and knows when she's hurt our feelings. We share and ask her to share, we're teaching her to be gentle and loving, but she's an energetic and passionate child. She's going to be challenging, but I'm trying to savor every moment. I don't know if we'll ever have another child, so I'm trying to memorize all these. It just sucks that I get so little time with her. I get from 5:30 - 8 every night and then the weekends. I won't get morning snuggles anymore because I'll need to be out of the house by 7am. But I'll take what I can get.

TTC#2 update

We lost another one. This is miscarriage #6. This one started with a heartbeat but was measuring behind. Nothing left today other than a yolk sac that was breaking down. OB is heartbroken, I'm heartbroken. I have to make a decision about how hard to try to keep going with this until I give up.