Serenity Now

Ok, this post is more self-therapy than something for Lily to fondly look back on when she's all grown up, but whatever. I'm having a tough time with Lily right now. I haven't broken down this hard crying "ugly cry" while she's in the room since my frustrating and painful start to breastfeeding 20 months ago. The same level of intensity of sadness, anger, frustration has returned. Replace the pain of the start to breastfeeding with humiliation and that's where I am at this moment. Lily's biting phase was a little bit embarrassing but I had good friends around that kept coming around to hang out with me and my little dracula which helped me so much. I kept saying "if she'll just stop the biting, it'll be ok...." Oh, how wrong I was. Lily is now a grabber/ pincher/scratcher/swatter and what makes it embarrassing is that she does it to kids that have not provoked her in the least bit. She'll be clear across the room and march up to a 1 year old playing innocently with a toy and Lily will pinch them just because. Heck, she'll do it to a 6 year old too, doesn't matter the kid's age. I don't get it. She also yells "no!"now to kids that are doing anything that Lily might like to do. At the zoo, if she sees another kid in a stroller, she yells no at them and does this swipe in the air with her arm. It wasn't even a month ago when she was being a ham with strangers at the German zoo. How things change. I know it's a phase and relatively speaking, this is all a big "whatever" but it's what's on my mind living with this day in and day out right now.

What really makes it frustrating is that we are actively trying to correct this behavior. I'm hovering to prevent the situations, I'm giving time outs (which she usually thinks are a game), I'm giving alternative behaviors (say "hi" instead of "no"), and none of it seems to have any effect.

I have a very spirited and challenging 20 month old. She's always been a rock star sleeper and eater, so this must be the challenge that every kid presents. Half the time she'll surprise me with new words that I didn't know she could say or things she remembers (like a dance move her cousin showed her a month ago) and the other half of the time she shows behavior that makes me think that she'll pursue cage fighting as a career. For now I'm changing up my routine to avoid situations that would showcase her crappy behavior. If it's just a phase, I'm going to follow her cue to make the environments a bit easier for her. I'm going to do fewer group playdates and more one on one time with friends she knows. The saving grace from all this is that she is still an angel when playing with the few friends she knows quite well. My glass of wine will probably be a little bit fuller for hopefully only a little while but whatever helps (I'm drinking one of those right now). Now, I just need to find a support group for parents with aggressive toddlers and I'm good to go.

The Bug

Well, it was bound to happen. Lily got sick. We all did, in fact. A stomach bug found us. With a vengeance. Luckily the worst was over in about twelve hours. But those twelve hours were not a pretty sight. Let's just say we needed to do laundry that day.

In hindsight, it was really hard. Luckily I wasn't too hard hit while the girls were down for the count. But as they were out of commission I was playing nurse and wondering how we would handle it if all three of us were hit. Nicole was in no shape to care for a sick little girl, and if I had gone down too I don't know what we would have done. I guess our house would have either been a complete biohazard or we would have begged a close friend to put on a surgical mask and come over to take charge for a few hours. I guess that's one reason that having family close by is a good thing. You can always count on Grandma or Grandpa (or Oma and Opa as the case may be) to pick up the slack in a situation like that, right?

Not good times, but now we're just about back to normal except for some still out-of-whack eating habits from the experience. It will happen again, but hopefully not for a long, long time. At least through the ordeal she was still cute...

Holidays in Snowy Heidelberg

Really glad I'm a little late going through all our December pictures from Germany. I wasn't quite ready to accept the adventure to be over and seeing these pictures helped keep it alive. We were in Heidelberg at my parent's place in December celebrating the Holidays with surprising amounts of snow the entire month.