On Day 6 of 7 Days, I asked Annalie to go outside on the deck and play with Elliora for a bit while I cleaned up the kitchen. She didn’t really want to, but she did it anyway, wrapping up in her blanket and grouching her way out there. Despite her reluctance, I thanked her politely. (I’d gotten my way, after all, which makes it easier to be polite!)

I saw her pick up a piece of sidewalk chalk and brightly suggested I could give her some sentences to write for handwriting practice. “How about, ‘My mom is awesome’? Or maybe ‘I love my mom! She’s the best ever!’”

Annalie gave me a dirty look and said, “How do you spell ‘stupid’? I laughed, said she could figure that one out on her own, and went back to cleaning the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Annalie called out, “Mom, can you please come and see what I drew?” I went out on the deck to see her sitting next to this drawing, fighting a grin.

She drew me scolding her, and herself imagining blowing a raspberry at me. See the little tongue in the thought bubble? I cracked up and told her that was very smart, because blowing raspberries in her head is much less likely to get her into trouble than doing it in someone’s face. She laughed, all hostility gone.

I love that Annalie can pour her anger or frustration into creating something–a drawing, a dance, a puppet show–and the negative feelings seem to evaporate in the process, leaving only the art.

Then, even though I had another idea planned for that day’s photo, I took a picture of the drawing and all our feet for my 7 Days self-portrait. How could I not?

These two. They’re such stinkers sometimes, but they make life so very fun.

We’ve had a string of good days lately. It’s probably due to a combination of factors—we’re recovered from all the travel we did in January and February, no one is sick, everyone is sleeping better—but I think the biggest factor is that we’ve gotten back into a routine.

I know that I function better when life is somewhat predictable, and I know that my kids do too. For some reason I have a really hard time sticking to a routine, even under ideal circumstances; throw a baby and frequent travel and a husband regularly working long hours into the mix and all is confusion and chaos and lost tempers and pouting and hands thrown up in defeat.

A few weeks ago I stumbled across some reading and math workbooks that looked like a good fit for Annalie. I had Annalie look them over, and she thought they looked good too. We talked, and agreed that we were going to start out by doing one lesson per day from each book. That’s not very much, considering that last year before Elliora was born we were consistently doing two to three hours of sit-down schoolwork per day, but I figured it would be a good way to ease back into things.

At first, Annalie resisted every suggestion that it was time to do some schoolwork, but I stayed calm and persisted. She thought it was pretty cool when I told her that she could take a pre-test before each math chapter, and if there were concepts she already had a grasp on, we could skip some of those lessons. Within a couple days, she had stopped arguing and was doing the work with no complaint. Now, she actually seems excited to sit down and do school. (Of course, this is in addition to all of the unschooly things we do every day, but it seemed like it was time to re-introduce some discipline back into our days, for both of us.)

Today, she suggested that instead of doing the one page of reading in the workbook, she could read the Magic School Bus book that my mom had just sent her. I told her that was a great idea. She read every single word in that book to me, without hesitation or angst. We paused several times to discuss additional information she’d gleaned about the subject (teeth) from Wild Kratts (you might want to turn your volume down before clicking that link). The reading moved from the dining-room table to Elliora’s bedroom briefly when there was a diaper change, and Annalie didn’t even blink, just moved, made herself comfortable in the nursing chair, and kept reading.

Something seems to have clicked for Annalie with both reading and math recently. She’s had the skills for a long time, but it was almost as if she wasn’t emotionally ready to read on her own. Now, she’s suddenly doing multiplication and adding two-column numbers in her head with ease. She’s reading pretty much everything she sees without much difficulty at all. She still isn’t what I’d call a reader, which makes me a little sad, but that’s okay. I imagine that there are a lot of people who would shake their heads at all the hours I spent indoors reading books as a kid when I could have been outside enjoying fresh air and sunshine.

I think when she’s ready, Annalie will discover chapter books and how reading them is like seeing a movie in your head. (Also, she’ll discover the house rule that kids have to turn off the light at bedtime…unless they’re reading. That’ll probably motivate her to read more!) Until then, there isn’t really a reason to rush. One of the best things about homeschooling is that kids have the freedom to move at their own pace. And I’ve been doing this long enough now that I know Annalie really will move ahead. She doesn’t really do slow and steady. Just when it seems like she’s been stalled in the same place forever, she’ll leap and bound far ahead of where I would have expected her to be. And that’s absolutely, totally okay.

In addition to the ease with which we’ve been getting schoolwork done every day, Annalie has gone from surly and uncooperative to pleasant and helpful when it comes to unloading the dishwasher, playing with Elliora while I make dinner, putting her toys away, running downstairs to fetch me a Coke Zero, whatever. I suppose her change in attitude is partly because she’s consistently getting more sleep, and partly because she’s not seven and a half anymore (she’ll be eight in two months). But mostly, I think it’s because we’ve gotten a good routine going.

Annalie knows that when she wakes up, she can play games on my laptop or watch one of her shows until Elliora and I come out for breakfast. She knows that after breakfast, she can play till 8:45, when I’ll ask her to unload the dishwasher if it needs doing. She knows that after that, we’ll sit down and do some schoolwork until it’s time for Elliora’s morning nap, and so on. And knowing what’s coming next seems to make her happy.

It makes perfect sense, really. I’m the same way. I can handle unpredictability better than she can, probably, but I am a lot happier when I know what’s coming up, even though I resist schedules. That’s why I am writing this post: to remind myself, when I start to slide away from the routine, that it really does make things easier. And if we have a routine, then we get to experience the best part about living a predictable life: doing something unpredictable! Being spontaneous is about a hundred times more fun when you have a routine to break away from.

This afternoon I was telling some friends in an email about the difficult morning we’d had with Annalie and how seven is going to kill me ded when I realized: she’s seven and a half.

We’ve been here before, with Annalie testing her boundaries at this time of year. The halves always seem to be a challenge. I know of no research or developmental theory to back this up, just anecdotal evidence. I’ve discussed with friends many times how it always seems like kids go through something developmental around their half-birthdays that turns them temporarily insane. Realizing this made me feel immediately better. Not only am I not imagining it, but there is an end in sight. Also, Madge and Bonnie both assured me that eight has been one of their favorite ages so far with their kids.

Thanks to all of you who commented on my last post about your own woes. It makes me feel better to know I’m not the only one who finds life overwhelming from time to time. I hope we all get a break soon!

Sleeping face-down on Mom’s crossed legs is SO two days ago. Face-UP is where it’s at.

This afternoon Elliora fell asleep in the car on the way home for a few minutes, which normally doesn’t affect her napping. But today when I brought her inside and nursed her, she didn’t fall asleep like she normally does. She was wide-awake and happy. I mentally shrugged, figuring she’d go to bed a bit early tonight, and we got up to play.

When her slightly-earlier-than-normal bedtime came around, she happily nursed and easily went to sleep, not even making a peep when I put her down in her bed. I went off to meet a friend at Starbucks for some companionable side-by-side laptopping, confident that she’d stay asleep…only to text my mom an hour and a half later and find out that she had awakened ten minutes after I left and had been awake ever since.

So I wasn’t surprised when she had a hard time going to sleep after that. I wasn’t even surprised at how hard she was fighting sleep; Elliora is very strong-willed and has been able to keep herself awake since she was born. What did surprise me was that when she flopped into a position face-up on my crossed legs, she relaxed and immediately went to sleep.

Nothing regarding this kid should surprise me anymore when it comes to sleep, though.

I’ve been gradually cutting down her night-nursing for a couple of months now, working my way up to eight hours without nursing. I did the same thing with Annalie, who was much more interested in nursing than Elliora ever has been, at about the same age. After a couple nights of her waking up and being denied a chance to nurse, Annalie just kinda went, “Oh, I won’t get fed if I wake up? All right then, I’ll just sleep,” and she stopped waking up at night almost entirely. The times she did wake up, it was easy to settle her back down by just patting her on the back and whispering to her.

Elliora, on the other hand, shows no sign of being even close to sleeping for eight hours without waking up, or of being willing to settle back down with just a touch and a reassurance. She does go back to sleep without nursing, so I don’t feel like she’s missing that. It’s more like she just isn’t a big sleeper. Annalie is like me: once we’re asleep, we’re out for the count and it’s hard to wake us up. I think Elliora just might be more like my brother: he has a hard time going to sleep and a hard time staying asleep, waking up more than once most nights. He’s been like that since the day he was born.

Elliora will sleep from bedtime (usually between 7-7:30) till around midnight without waking up about half the time. (The other half of the time, she might wake up once between bedtime and midnight, or she might wake up every hour on the hour. We never know which it will be.) She wakes up almost every night around midnight and usually takes about 10-15 minutes to settle back down with one of us picking her up and cuddling her. Just to keep things interesting, on some nights nothing on God’s green earth will calm her down for an hour or more.

Regardless of when or how often she wakes up, if we don’t pick her up, she will stand up in her crib and screeeeeeeeam and wake Annalie up. If we try to leave her in the bed and just pat her on the back, we have to physically hold her down to keep her from getting up, which makes her scream more, which wakes Annalie up. Annalie, very understandably, gets grouchy when a screaming baby wakes her up from a sound sleep.

The rest of the night is pretty unpredictable. Elliora usually only wakes up once between midnight and 4am, and can be settled back down with 10-15 minutes of cuddling. Or she might wake up every hour and need 10-15 minutes of holding each time, or she might just wake up and be awake for an hour or two.

Elliora has slept entirely through the night, from 8pm to 7am, exactly once in her life, on a night when we hadn’t done anything differently from any other night. So we know she can do it, but we have no idea how to make her do it again.

I would happily let her sleep with us and cuddle all night, but if she’s in bed with me and I won’t nurse her, she gets monumentally annoyed and will scream her annoyance for a long time. She’s also quite strong for her size, and trying to hold onto her when she’s struggling is difficult and exhausting. The times I have stuck it out and let her cry in my arms without giving in and nursing her, she’s screamed for two hours or more. Usually if I nurse her, she’s fine and will go to sleep eventually, but if I nurse her in bed I’ll probably fall asleep, and since she’s learned how to crawl we don’t feel safe leaving her in bed with us all night while we’re sleeping. She’s an explorer and she takes every chance she gets to wander off.

What it all comes down to is that Elliora is incredibly strong-willed. She isn’t a sound sleeper and she isn’t very flexible about her sleeping habits. She’s very good at letting us know how she’s feeling, and when she’s mad she screams about it.

It’s already gotten so much better than it used to be with her, sleep-wise. But there still isn’t much consistency, and that’s both baffling and frustrating at times. We know it won’t be this way forever, and we’ll deal with it like grown-ups and do our best to gently teach her, when she seems ready, how to sleep through the night without the all-night milk bar or on-demand snuggling. But we’ll still be really happy when she’s sleeping through the night consistently.

What about you? Does your kid have a sleeping habit that mystifies you, or drives you crazy? Or do you have one of those mythical kids who sleeps beautifully?

I’m SO close to 10,000 comments on this blog! Will this post be the one that gets the 10,000th comment!? I think it could be…and that 10,000th commenter will win a piece of custom-painted pottery, or something crocheted, or maybe something else entirely. It’s just my way of saying “thank you” for all for the great comments over the past four years. So gimme your two cents, and YOU could be lucky #10,000!

Tonight, we didn’t get going on bedtime till an hour later than usual. Elliora was overtired and resisted sleep for an hour or more, with much whining and crying and squirming around. She nursed and then got mad when I tried to snuggle with her. I put her down in her bed, and she relaxed for a few seconds before getting mad, and sitting up and crying. I tried putting her down in the pack’n'play and rubbing her back while singing to her, and got the same reaction.

After about an hour of going around and around in this way, I was so exasperated that I did something completely ridiculous. I sat with my legs crossed and laid Elliora down on her tummy across my lap, her head on one knee, and patted her back. She calmed down almost immediately and was asleep in less than a minute. My reaction could be summed up thusly: What the–!?

BABIES.

Remember, I’m not far away from 10,000 comments (real ones, not counting spam) on this blog, and the 10,000th commenter is going to win a prize—maybe a piece of pottery of their choice, or perhaps something crocheted, or maybe something else entirely—just as a “thank you” for all for the great comments over the past four years. Keep commenting, and YOU could be lucky #10,000!

Just for kicks and out of curiosity, today I kept a log of my day.

Today I spent 698 minutes between 7am and 1am caring for my kids. And today was pretty easy, aside from the fact that Troy didn’t get home till almost 8pm. Neither of the girls were overtired or sick, and my cough is almost gone and I’m feeling better. Everyone was in a pretty good mood all day. There were no tantrums or lost tempers.

Still, I spent nearly 12 hours nursing Elliora, preparing food, cleaning up after meals, changing diapers, attending Annalie’s gymnastics class, getting Elliora to sleep at various points during the day, encouraging Annalie as she did her chores, and just playing and talking and being a mom.

I’m taking two big things away from this exercise: (1) No wonder I’m so flipping tired all the time! That’s a lotta hours for an extraverted introvert like me to be on duty and around people, even two of the people I love most; and (2) I’m never feeling guilty about not blogging* or not getting laundry done again, not while my kids are little. Clearly I have more important things to be doing.

*That doesn’t mean I still won’t wish I had more time to blog, though. Just today I had great ideas for two blog posts—even took photos for one of them—but didn’t manage to download the photos to my laptop or write a single word of either one. Oh well.

Elliora was so smiley during a middle-of-the-night diaper change that I grabbed my camera to document it as a happy thing. Then I realized I was in the photo too (faintly, but I’m there) and it was after midnight. Boom, Day 6.

Yawn.

Happy baby is happy to see you! Even at 1am. To answer the question many of the Flickr commenters had: yes, Elliora went back to sleep pretty easily after this, even though it looks like she was wide awake. She usually goes back to sleep quickly as long as she can nurse.

Annalie said, “Ever since I was one year old and started walking, I’ve run to my Gramaw at the airport.”

Annalie took this alternate self-portrait in the mirrored side of the moving sidewalks at the airport.

My friend Bonnie decided on her birthday this year that she would take a picture every day of something that made her happy, to remind herself in the midst of a difficult time to Find the Happy. She decided to create a Flickr group so her friends could share the happy too.

Finding a bit of Happy each day.

The rules:

1. Find some Happy and photograph it each day. You could choose to do it less often if that works better for your life but my theory is that the more often you look for the Happy, the more the Happy helps.
2. Do it for a year. Or less. Or more. Or as needed.
3. No Unhappy allowed. That also includes self-abuse if you miss a day or lots of days. Hippie voice: Go with the flow, man. Everything is as it should be.
4. Rules are for breaking. Except Number 3, it’s best not to upset Hippie Voice.

My heart has been heavy lately, thinking about Samantha. So I’m reminding myself of some happy things.

I don’t know about you, but homemade black-and-white cookies make me very happy.

So does the cool way the sun was reflecting off this dotty coffee mug. Like little bubbles of sunlight!

I happened to glance at Annalie’s calendar a day or two before Troy’s birthday and was tickled to realize that she had drawn a miniature portrait of our family on that date, complete with him in a party hat.

I love it when I get a teeny painting of a harried-looking coffee-drinking cat in the mail. Thanks, Brenda!

French toast with powdered sugar on a sunshiny dottery plate.

Keeping a baby alive and homeschooling a 7-year-old are both time-consuming pursuits (duh), but while I barely have time to shower and I don’t seem to have time for housework, I manage to cook dinner almost every night and write emails and blog posts (sort of) and I’ve been crocheting a lot. So I guess it’s true that you do make time for what you love. And crocheting makes me happy.

I’m sure that in a year or so I’ll be hearing many cries of “Mo-ooom, make her stop touching my stuff!” So I try extra hard to enjoy the sweet moments like this, when it’s clear how much Annalie loves her little sister.

On one of Troy’s Navy deployments years ago, he happened to go to a wine festival in Cyprus, and he brought back two of these little glasses. They’re the perfect size for a shot of juice or taking a packet of Emergen-C, and it makes me smile each time I use one. It’s such a random thing to have in my cupboard, small wineglasses from a Cypriot wine festival, yet there they are.

I went to high school and college with Rainbow Rowell. (I know, awesome name!) She wasn’t someone I hung out with, but we knew each other. We had mutual friends, and when we went to the same university we occasionally ate lunch together. I’ve been reading Rainbow’s writing for two decades now, mostly in newspaper-column or blog-post form, but now I’ve read something way more exciting: Rainbow’s very first novel, a romantic comedy called Attachments. The night I started reading it, I actually got out of bed at 3:30am, feeling compelled to send Rainbow a message to let her know I was loving her book and was genuninely happy for and proud of her. (I’ll be interviewing Rainbow soon and doing a giveaway of her book in a blog post, so stay tuned for that!)

The sun was shining into Annalie’s room just right one afternoon so that her bright fuchsia sheets were reflecting a pink glow onto everything else in the room. A few days later, Annalie picked this bouquet of wildflowers, leaves of grass, and a wild strawberry from our yard for me and arranged them in an old vanilla bottle.

The first Saturday that Sonja was here, Karyl & her girls came up to spend the day with us, which was super fun. We started with brunch—aebleskiver and home-fried potatoes and bacon and fruit—which made me very happy because I love brunch. Also, I made the aebleskiver with almond milk and coconut oil and maple syrup (in place of cow’s milk and butter and granulated sugar) so Sonja could eat them, and they were totally as delicious as usual. It was a Very Happy Thing indeed: brunch everyone could eat!

Sonja-safe brownies, made with coconut oil instead of butter and honey instead of sugar. And they tasted good! Yay! I had fun meeting the challenge of cooking without ingredients I usually rely on while Sonja was here.

I love it when naps end like this, with Elliora waking up in the Ergo and smiling when she sees me.

If I have to put up with hot and humid summer weather, at least I get to eat perfectly summery meals like this: grilled mini burgers, strawberries, and marinated cucumber salad. Yum.

After seeing Lauren’s Doctor Who necklace on Flickr, I stalked this Etsy shop until she listed more so I could buy one for myself. I like how the high-top sneaker is a reference to the Chucks habitually worn by both the Tenth Doctor and Chuck Bartowski.

We often make popcorn with the very air-popper that I used when I was a kid, and eat it out of the exact stainless-steel bowl I used to eat popcorn from. (My mom was getting rid of the air popper and asked if I wanted it; I basically swiped the bowl because I loved it so much. Both these things are 30+ years old.)

Trader Joe’s dark chocolate bar with caramel bar and black sea salt. Enough said.

We live near a good bakery and stop there on a regular basis for treats. Every time, Annalie carefully surveys the variety of lovely, fancy cookies and pastries…and then requests a plain butter cookie. I love that.

I believe we’ve mentioned before that our neighbors across the street actually own a bounce house? They put it up for birthdays and parties and random weekends just for fun. And they are happy to share it with the neighborhood kids.

Rain always makes me happy.

Neon aquamarine polish, and bare feet outside, and green grass, and bits of sidewalk chalk. Basically, summer’s here!

Elliora has tasted teensy amounts of applesauce and bananas before. She always seemed to be thinking, This stuff in my mouth is interesting—not grossed out but not overly intrigued either. Recently, though, she’s been very extremely interested in what we’re eating.

The other day at Spaghetti Works Annalie let Elliora taste a little bit of applesauce off her finger, and Elliora went bonkers. She loved it and kept diving for Annalie’s plate.

She was even lunging and grabbing for my plate of pasta. I thought, Hmm. Perhaps even though she is only five months old, Elliora is ready to start eating solids.

When we went to Trader Joe’s I grabbed some bananas and some organic applesauce with cinnamon. The bananas weren’t quite ripe, so later that day we offered Elliora some applesauce. Predictably, she hoovered it up. I only intended to give her a tablespoon or so, but I think she ended up eating more than twice that much and would have eaten even more. I didn’t want her to get a stomachache, though, and she still needs to get most of her nutrition from breastmilk.

But I’m glad she’s ready to start eating real food. Introducing a baby to the world of flavors and textures is my idea of a good time. Does that make me weird?

And where she lost her first baby tooth, right next to the new gap, the new adult tooth is coming in. This tooth just fell right out as Annalie was wiggling it. She and Elliora and I were just lounging around on the bed, hanging out, and suddenly Annalie said, “Hey, my tooth just fell out!” She actually had to search for it on the bed because it fell right out of her mouth.

In other news, we have not dropped off the face of the earth. We’re still here, still chugging along. How about a list?

• Elliora is growing and changing every day—she will play happily in the exersaucer long enough for me to get Annalie’s lunch made, and she flips herself over like it’s nothing and can almost hold herself upright in a sitting position.
• Annalie is extremely glad spring is here at last and tells me at least once a day that spring is her FAVORITE season. She spends a lot of time outside these days, wearing whatever she wants.
• Troy is still working crazy hours and getting home just in time to put Annalie to bed most nights. When he isn’t working he’s awesomely doing all the laundry in the house or unloading the dishwasher or doing our taxes.
• I am spending lots of time reminding myself that I am not just spending hours nursing and holding a baby when I could be doing something “more useful,” I’m preparing Elliora to meet the world as a secure, confident person, and even managing to get a bit of crocheting done occasionally. I’m also trying to figure out how to parent two kids without losing it or driving one of them to a life of crime. So far so good, mostly.
• Troy and I have gotten about halfway through Season 1 of Fringe—a show I’ve been meaning to watch since it premiered—thanks to Carrie lending us her DVDs! We are quite enjoying it. I actually know some of the stuff that’s coming down the road because I’ve watched a couple of random episodes at my parents’ house, and it’s interesting watching these early episodes knowing about the weird stuff to come.
• I really do intend to care about blogging again someday; it’s on my long-term to-do list. For now, though, eh. It’s just on the back burner. I think about things I want to blog every day, I just don’t quite get around to it. I miss it though. If you miss hearing from me feel free to check on my Flickr, which gets updated a bit more regularly.

Wow, this post was all over the place. Sorry about that. I’m also sorry if you’ve commented on this site recently and not gotten any reply from me even if you asked me a direct question. WordPress has decided to stop emailing my comments to me again. Probably I need to update to a newer version. Who knows.

What’s new with you?