The Mercurial Nature of Toddlers, Etc

I'm clearly out of the habit of blogging, and searching for some inspiration to kick start my motivation again. If you think of something, let me know.

In the meantime, back to my old stand by of unrelated/bulleted goings-on.

1. Lucy is equal parts adorable and infuriating lately. The adorable parts? She is opinionated - likes to provide commentary on any TV shows or whatever is on the radio. She is her mother's daughter, telling her father "I no YIKE dis" whenever he has a sports game on TV. She is the only person I know who actually requests commercials while we listen to the radio. I am sure this is just to annoy her brother, who is constantly asking for less talking from the radio on our car rides, and more actual music. She has also been using the potty on occasion lately, so that's cool.

In fact, she used it tonight right before bedtime, and the whole family happened to be in the bathroom when she did it. What, isn't your bathroom communal? Anyway, I think we shocked her with the vociferous-ness of our cheering and clapping. Finn was so excited he fell over. The excitement carried over into our bedtime singing, where I made up a song about how proud I was of her use of the potty. Lucy heard the first verse (pure poetry, I'm telling you), and insisted I create a second one that mentioned that she also flushed the toilet by herself. Like I said, adorable, no?

But the infuriating, oh, she can make my blood boil, too. She goes from happy to screaming in .5 seconds flat, over the tiniest little infractions that are impossible to predict. And SOMETIMES she might deign to eat a bit of dinner. MOST of the time, though, she'd prefer to just make a mess of it and herself, and spit out the few morsels she puts in her mouth.

The worst, though, is the hitting. The girl can be violent. You wouldn't expect it, because she walks right up to you, all smiling and cute, and then she boxes your ears with both hands. BOOM! And suddenly you realize you've been taken out by a 1-year-old. She thinks it's hysterical. And she also thinks that saying a sing-song "Sorry!" fixes everything. But lo, it does not. So we have been ramping up the time outs, made more difficult by the fact that she now refuses to stay IN time out, which we used to hold over on the stairway in the living room. Now we need to haul her kicking and squirming body all the way up to her bedroom and dump her in to her crib for approximately 1 minute and 50 seconds. Give or take. Then haul her back down. Oh, the joys.

I said this would be bulleted, and here I am writing paragraphs and such. I can't even seem to get the hang of lazy blogging lately.

2. I signed up for my first race of the year, an 8K that is being held in less than 4 weeks. I was nervous about it at first, because I took quite a bit of time off from running around the holidays and the extended sick period that followed. By the time I started back up, I was having trouble slogging through 2 miles. I wanted to run a 5-mile-ish race, but I imagined that it would be a bit later in the year. However, opportunity knocked in the form of a co-worker/friend who convinced me that I'd be fine. As a result, I've been trying to run about 3 times a week the last couple of weeks, and I think it's true that I will be fine. It will be hard, no doubt, but do-able without feeling like I'm dying. In fact, I ran my fastest 5K time yet tonight - 33:38 - under an 11-minute mile. Granted, it was on a treadmill so there were no hills, but I'm feeling pretty good about it.

3. Tomorrow is yet another Picture Day at the kids' daycare. I'm 0 for 4 in getting decent shots of Lucy, so I'm not holding out much hope here. Did I mention that last time, Lucy's session went so badly that they didn't even bother printing out any proofs to show me? Yeah, that bad. So I didn't want to go all out in the hopes that this picture day will go any better. But I did buy them coordinating shirts just in case the sibling photo happens to involve a sufficiently small amount of screaming and crying as to allow a photo to be taken. Nothing outrageous, as Finn and Lucy will undoubtedly wear these shirts many times in the future. And no head-to-toe new outfits, they will be wearing jeans on the bottom. I'm slowly learning my lesson here.

4. The kids have started taking swimming lessons again. I was hoping to get Lucy in to a class where I didn't have to get in the water with her, but alas, such a class is not offered on the weekends (dratted schedules designed for SAH parents!). So in to the pool with her I go. And it has become apparent that I was a crazy tool to even think that Lucy was ready for a swimming class where she is expected to sit on the side of the pool with three other kids, wait for her turn, and then listen to an instructor who would also touch her and hold her and make her do swimming-type things.

Because swimming-type things? They are apparently torture, didn't you know? The way Lucy carries on during this class! The crying every time I try to tip her onto her back in the water. Even though her head is right. on. my. shoulder. With all the struggling and attempts to flip herself over, she may actually end up drowning herself in the process of trying to avoid drowning.

I don't really know what to do. I'm paying $68 a month to torture my child. And yet she really, really likes swimming. At the very end of class, all the kids get inserted into teeny-tiny white inner tubes, and they spend some time doing "free swim" (if by "free swim" you mean "Mommy is hovering nearby and constantly putting a hand out to right the tippy child but at the same time trying to instill independence"). Lucy LOVES free swim. Laughs delightedly the entire time. And I fear that when we are back at the neighborhood pool this summer, she is going to do what she did last year, and pretend like she really does know how to swim. Marching confidently if wobbily into the water and falling down every 3.2 seconds. And then requiring assistance to get up again. But crying if you dare try to put her into some kind of flotation device. And given M. and I heart attacks constantly. It would be nice if she had a little more KNOWLEDGE of swimming-related things, is all I'm saying.

Finn, by the way, is doing great. He's already gotten two ribbons for floating on his back, and is getting more confident. I think it will be a good summer for swimming with him. Not that he'll actually swim by himself, per se, but I think we'll have to spend less of it actually holding him in the water.

I have more to say, but feel like I've blathered on enough for now. Gee, look at that, I haven't felt like I've had much to blog about, but get me started and I don't know when to stop. Hopefully I will hang on to my trailing thoughts and shape them into more, and more regular, blog posts for your consumption. And pictures. Hopefully I'll get some of those up here soon, too.