Our vacation, in a nutshell, in pictures….

From top left, clockwise: 

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   1. Craig & C. rocking the Baby Bjorn.
   2. What do you do when you forget to pack a bib?  Tie a napkin ’round her neck, of course.  Oh, and Blue Moon.  YUM. 
   3. He’s got a stroller loaded down with luggage, a duffel bag on his shoulder and a baby in his arms.  If nothing else makes him feel like a dad, this sure will. 
   4. When a dark, quiet hotel room is simply unacceptable for napping, try a stroller, on a hot day, in a shopping plaza, in the middle of the city. 

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   1. Dear Child, Someday, when you don’t have wrinkles to go the prom, you will be glad that we made you wear that hat. 
   2. Family photo  (Who does she look like?  I can’t tell.)
   3. My loves.  My life. 
   4. Dipping her toes in the ocean.  She LOVED the water and the sand.  Every time we took her outside she got all excited, kicking her feet and squealing with delight.  She waved at anyone who glanced her way and generaly charmed everyone at the Outer Banks.

Moments like these make my heart want to explode into itty bitty pieces. 

From the other room, I hear Craig start to read about a mouse and a cookie.  I listen for the pat-pat-pat of C crawling away or the crash of her pulling a stuffed animal out of the toy bin.  It’s quiet except for the sound of Craig’s voice and the tapping of her hand against the book. 

I grab the camera and go to watch my two favorite people cuddled up on the living room floor.  Surrounded by a hot mess of toys and books and tipped over stuffed animals that are bigger than she is. 

The moment doesn’t last long.  In a few minutes, she’s pushing away and scootching across the floor.  But not before he turns her to face him and makes kissy noises with his lips.  She grins at me and then leans into her daddy, opening her mouth just a little, accepting his kisses. 

“It’s her new trick,” he tells me.  

“Baby girl, show mommy.  Give Daddy a kiss. ”

She leans in again and he kisses her.  On demand. 

He beams and she grins.  And my heart explodes again into itty bitty pieces.

 - Just a reminder that I’m trying to crawl my way up on the Top Baby Blogs list.  If you can spare a moment, to click here, it would help me immensely and you may find other blogs to add to your list of good reads.  XOXO!   

I’ve mentioned before that I’m working my way through Babyproofing Your Marriage, right?  It’s a good read and I find myself nodding in agreement at least three times on every page. Except for one thing.  

The part where it says that the mother is the protective, gentle parent. 

Also.  Over the last few weeks I’ve read blog posts by other great mommas who talked about their protective nature, their response when the baby cries and their love of having the baby close.  I identify with them.  Sort of.  Erika talks about how she and her husband are so different when it comes to parenting.  Uh huh, totally with you.  And  Brandee talks about how she’s not the mother she thought she would be.  Yep, that, right there.   

I am not the mother I thought I would be. But in a different way.

I’m not the gentle parent.  I’m not the parent that jumps when my daughter cries.  I’m not the parent that hoovers over her like a helicopter to keep her from bumping her head. 

The week before I went back to work, I wanted to move C to her own room.  In all honesty, she was outgrowing the bassinet.  But also, I was afraid it would be a tough transition and wanted it to be over before I had to be in heels and a skirt at 8AM.  The first night of putting her to bed in her own room, it was Craig wholooked at me and said, “why do we have to do this again?” 

Now that she sleeps through the night, when she stirs at 3 or 4 in the morning, I wait it out.  Often times, I take the monitor out of the room and wait outside her door.  Because if he hears her, he’ll go to her.  And I know that if I wait, just five minutes, she’ll drift back to sleep.  But if we pick her up, she’ll be up for an hour. 

When I pictured Craig and I as parents, I pictured him tossing the baby in the air, while I cringed and chastised him to be careful and “don’t drop her.”  But now, in my living room, you’ll find me wrestling with baby, tickling her to hear the belly laughs and letting her test her boundaries and bump her head while I get the side eye and the “be CARE-ful”  from my husband. 

When I think about the mother I thought I would be and the mother I’ve become, I’m not sure whether to be proud or ashamed.  Some days I feel like it makes me cold and uncaring.  I worry that I will push her too much as she grows up. I worry that I will always be the one to tell her “no”.   Is he parent that makes her stick to a bedtime, lets her throw the tantrum and doesn’t give in, the same parent that doesn’t let her quit at soccer after the season starts or pushes her to take her SAT’s one more time? Is that the parent who judges too much, too quickly and pushes too hard?

And other days, I’m proud that I know my daughter will not break. She will cry when occasionally when I put her down for a nap, but she will still grin at me when she wakes and I pick her up.  She will hurt herself on the corner of furniture and on our tile floors as she learns to crawl and (God help me) walk.  But she will get back up and try again. 

Am I alone in this? Does anyone else worry about the parent they will become when their child hasn’t even celebrated a birthday?  Are you the good guy at home or the bad guy? Do I worry too much about what the books say, that I lose a connection to my kid? Is it different between mothers and sons or dads and daughters?

I’m accepting that there’s a balance between Craig and I as parents.  And if I had to guess we’ll switch good guy, bad guy roles many times as C grows up.  I may be the parent that makes her go to bed and clean her room, but he’ll be the one to greet the boys at the door.

My daughter’s mouth runs constantly these days.  From the moment I get her out of her crib, to the time right before bed when she’s sucking contently on the paci, she’s babbling and talking.  It’s a constant whirl of ba-da-ga-ada-mpf-ag-wa-ma. I’m sure in her head she is telling a pretty good story complete with details about her big teddy bear, her new Winne the Pooh or complaining that her mean mommie won’t let her chew on electrical cords.  Regardless of whether the person on the other end of her conversation understands her, every one talks back to her.  The cashiers at the mall get a kick out it, her aunts and grandparents all smile and babble to her in return. 

Mostly her ba-ga-fa-de-pfftshh-a-ma-da-da sounds are just nonsense.  But once in a while, when she says da-da-daaaa  it’s because Craig has walked into the room or she sees his picture. 

So, I’ve decided that I want to hear mama.  I gave the child life, dammit.  I feed her on demand, have changed a bazillion and three dirty diapers, give her more kisses than a person can possibly count and make sure she has cute shoes.  And, I want to hear mama. 

So now when she’s babbling I say, “C, say mama.” 

She looks at me and says “dada!”  

“No, punkin. MAA-MA.”  

“DADADAAAA!” 

 ”No, sweetie, listen.  Like this.  MAA-MAA” 

“DADADADADADA!” 

And then Craig giggles.

Me:  Hon, tonight while nothing on the computer went the way I wanted it too, I was looking through pictures from when C was itty bitty. 

Him:  Oh?

Me:  Yep, there are pictures from the hospital, the first few days home and her snuggling in bed with me after you got up for work. There are pictures of her laying  on the couch by herself.  You know, when we used to be able to put her somewhere and she didn’t move. 

Him:  Can’t do that anymore. She’d crawl off in a second. 

Me:  And, remember when she used to lay on your chest and you’d both fall asleep?  There’s a couple of those pictures too. 

Him:  Yeah. If I’d have known that was only going to last a month, I’d have done it every damn day. 

Me:  I know, honey.  Me too.

Internet! I haven’t been this excited about summer since the summer of 98, before I went to college and took full advantage of sleeping in until noon, working at MickeyD’s and drinking beers camping in the woods. 

If you read the Twitter Home Tour post from a while back, you saw that when we built a house, we put in a pool.  Now, you should know that this pool is sort of silly.  I live in a town where it’s warm enough to swim about 3 months out of the year.  But Craig’s happy place is in the sun, so we put one in.  And, guys?  It’s so worth it.  Even if it doesn’t add $5 of value to our house. Because this weekend, we put my daughter in the pool and SHE. LOVED. IT. 

We were hoping to give her a little bit of pool time on Saturday but a late nap combined with a picnic that we were headed to and a mom who forgot to buy swim diapers meant that she only got to dip in her toes.  She stuck in her little toe and looked up at Craig with wide eyes.  When he smiled at her, she giggled and kicked her right foot while keeping her left leg way up in the air out of the water. 

On Sunday, we decide to go for it.  We lathered her up with suncreen, blew up the baby raft and wiggled C into her swim diaper and suit.  (side note:  do you know how hard it is to get a baby girl into a swim suit?  I think it’s a little like trying to put two weeks of clothes into an overnight bag.) Once she was properly dressed with a hat that she was willing to keep on her still sparsely covered noggin, we headed outside. 

As soon as she saw the water, she was kicking her feet and flailing her arms. We lowered her into the water and into the baby raft and with only a slight moment of hesitation, she leaned back and soaked it in.  She grined and giggled, kicked her feet and splashed with her arms.  She chewed on the toys attached to the raft (does anyone know if this is a bad thing, by the way?) and just thoroughly loved being in the water. 

I joked with Craig this weekend that if it hadn’t taken him six years to marry me and build me a house, that perhaps I could have enjoyed the pool with a pre-baby body for a year or two before we decided to procreate.   But this?  Watching my little girl as she plays in the water and gets excited to be outside.  This is so much better. 

She is such her father’s daughter already, but I love that she loves being outside and I can’t wait to spend my summer chashing her around with the camera.  ::sigh::  Even if it means I have to suck in my post-baby belly as I do it. 

How did you kick off your summer this weekend?

I’m getting better at this turning work off on the weekends thing.  Do I feel bad about it when Monday arrives? Yes.  Well, sort of.  Knowing that I could work all weekend and still be behind helps me to feel better about shutting it down or only putting in a little bit of time. 

Some weekends are better than others.  Sometimes I find myself rushing C to a nap, so I can proofread, write some copy or clean out my in-box.  But other weekends are like this one.  Where I take my time, rock her a little longer and use her naps to blog, read books, or (gasp!) nap myself.  After those weekends, I go back to work on Mondays feeling less like employee of the year but more like the mother my child deserves. 

This weekend was full of sunshine and family time.  (hehe that rhymes.) We spent Saturday in my hometown visiting my family.  My goal was to get some good family photos since it was a rare occasion that I had make up and wasn’t rushing out the door. 

Mission (sort of) accomplished.

Yes that’s my little girl, all dressed up in pink, playing with a bat and chewing on a baseball.  le sigh.

Ever since she was born, all I’ve heard is how much C is her father’s daughter.  A few days after we were home from the hospital, he handed me a picture and I awed over it, asking who took that picture of our little one. In my groggy, sleep-deprived, new mommy state, I didn’t realize it was actually a picture of Craig as a newborn.  A few weeks after that, I left our bedroom for a minute with the little one sleeping in the bassinet and Craig asleep in bed.  When I came back, I saw them both still asleep but in identical poses with their hands up over their heads. 

If I hadn’t been for the fact that I was there when she was born, I would be beginning to doubt that she was, in fact, my daughter. 

Until yesterday.  When she tasted my Oreo and fell in love.  The “oh, that’s yummy” look in her eye was one I’ve seen in the mirror.  She may not have my nose, my chin or my dark as night brown eyes, but by God, my child has a sweet tooth! 

I’m not sure what prompted me to dress my child in PSU clothes on the same day that her daddy was sporting the Nittany Lion logo, but I thought we should go with it and get a picture.  Especially for the crazy, I mean, faithful Penn State fans in our lives.  You know who you are. 

PS.  When I see this picture, I can’t help but be a little sad that my baby is in a sweatshirt, my husband in a long-sleeved t-shirt and I’m in tights & heels.

Being married to a high school coach and athletic director, much of my adult life has been spent going to high school sporting events.  Seriously, I didn’t attend as many high school sporting events when I was IN high school as I did when the two of us started dating.  Now that I’ve birthed a child, I have a good excuse not to go.  This fall I traded in cold wet football games for the warmth of my house and a cuddly (and sometimes screaming) newborn and now I catch up on DVR instead of going to long, sometimes boring basketball games.  However, I sort of miss the socialization.  Because, let’s not lie.  I have a three-month old and unless it’s going to earn a paycheck, I don’t get out of the house very often. 

So, I decided it was time to give our munchkin a preview of what the rest of her life will be like and took her to a girls basketball game tonight.  We lasted 4:42 seconds …into the FIRST quarter before her father sent us home because she held her ears when the buzzer went off.  She’s such a sheltered child, most days the loudest noise she hears is someone sneezing – and that’s been known to send her into a crying fit.  Guess we’ll try again some other time. 

On another note, I paid a little more attention to teenage girls at this game.  And, Oh.My.God.  I do not want my baby girl to grow up to be a teenager.