In the Trenches

I'm a mama of one little girl. I waited a long time to meet her, and I love her to pieces. But some days, I'd prefer if those pieces were taken away by Gypsies or the circus or something! This blog will have stories, not necessarily entered sequentially, and not necessarily 100% true. I will exaggerate and embellish for the sake of humor, or to make the story more interesting. I will use initials, nicknames or change names to protect the privacy of my friends and family, since my husband would probably not prefer to have a co-worker read a post and ask him detailed questions about, say, our sex life! In this blog, I will try and keep to the time since she's been walking, or her 'toddler years.'

People told me that when you sit there looking at your little baby blob, you long for them to roll over. And when they roll over, you want them to crawl. And once crawling, you are wistful about the easily controlled blob-phase, while eager for them to reach the next milestone: walking. Then once they walk, you wish all you had to worry about was them rolling over!

Well, not me! So far, I have enjoyed seeing each new development. I love the challenges that come with her growth, since each day I get to see just who this little person is becoming! So far, I haven't looked back fondly on her blob days. To be fair though, my kid is fairly well behaved, easy to tolerate, doesn't have a lot of discipline issues or health and/or behavioral problems, plus cute as a button and smart as a whip! And I love how she has helped me to grow up too.

I'm slightly ashamed at the amount of TV I let her watch, although it isn't strictly TV. She watches DVDs or the 'watch now' stuff on Netflix (like On Demand for some cable companies.) So at least she isn't getting her shows broken up by commercials. Thanks to Elmo, she can identify the letter Y ('Y is uh YAK!') and maybe a few random others and she can almost count to 20 (1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 16 17 18.) Despite evidence to the contrary, she steadfastly refuses to believe in the existence of the number 4. Thanks to Dora, she can say 'Ayudame' (help me,) 'Embujen' (push,) 'Abre' (open') and a few others, as well as count to 6 in Spanish. Thanks to me, she knows that my farts are 'pushin air out uh mommy'sh bah-mum.' (pushing the air out of mommy's bottom) and that the chocolate stash is reachable if she pushes her kitchen stool over to the counter!

I read somewhere that the word 'fart' is considered offensive to many adults when said by a child, so I'm teaching her to call it gas. But when SHE farts, I praise her for getting the air out of her tummy through her bottom. (We've had many restless gassy nights where she wakes up crying and/or screaming until we help her rock and massage the gas out. Now we just give her Simethicone drops at bedtime, just as I've been taking the adult version almost nightly for my gas.) So when I fart, thats the kind of thing she says to me. I joke that she inherited my husband's looks, and my bowels! At least she got my mom's long eyelashes too!