Ocean

Grandma came to visit this week and we finally got to go back to the ocean with her and see a lighthouse, something Molly's been talking about since winter. We went to Halibut Point State Park in Rockport, which is a little because to get to the ocean you have to walk around a big quarry lake with no railings. She stayed right on the path, though, and I don't think I traumatized her too much with my fretting.

She stared at the crashing waves for a long time, then got up, turned toward us and waved her arms over her head and did a dance with wooshing sounds like waves. It was really cool. She also danced at lunch when she was eating. I think she had a good day.

We're still not sure what's happening with her sleep -- whether she's really giving up naps or just avoiding them. A couple times this week she took normal-ish naps, but then had trouble falling asleep at night and woke up early in the morning. That's a bad sign, right?

Yesterday she fell asleep in my lap in the living room without a diaper on, so I carried her into her own bed. She woke up two hours later dry and happy! Not what I expected. Then last night she woke me up crying several times, which hasn't happened in a long time. In the morning she woke up about 45 minutes before her night light and through some miracle she stayed in her bedroom playing until the sunshine turned on (you could hear her whispering songs to her dolls, it was really cute).

Every day her sleep is different. I think I'm having a harder time with the routine changing than she is. I miss my naps!

Big girl

We converted Molly's crib into a bed yesterday. I was afraid of what would happen with the new freedom, but she had a great first night. I went in a few times to soothe her and pick her water cup up off the floor but she didn't get out of bed once (at least that I know about) from the time I kissed her goodnight until the sunshine light came on at 6 a.m. Here she is this morning talking about it.



It's a good thing night sleep is going well because nap time is a nightmare. Molly has decided she doesn't like to nap. We'll lie in bed for an hour and she just quietly talks to her fingers and plays with her doll and stays awake. I lose patience, we debate, we finally give up on trying and then she is a wreck all afternoon. This was the worst day, last Wednesday I think. She skipped her nap and was crying, bumping into things, making constant demands, wanting to be held, etc. until around 4:30 when I finally snuggled with her on the couch and she fell asleep on my lap. She didn't wake up when Jim came home and took her into his lap. He ended up rolling her over to sleep onto the chair so he could change out of his work clothes. I don't think we've seen her nap in this chair since she was a baby.


Around 6:30 when she was still asleep I carried her to her crib. She didn't wake up until 6 a.m.

I have this fantasy that with her new bed she'll start napping there, or at least playing quietly in her room, and I won't have to fight so much. I'm not holding my breath.

Other random stuff from the week:

Molly in the dress she picked and with her hair done for her little music class. She likes to dress up for that, for some reason.



Baking with Daddy on Saturday morning.



Here's my favorite of her new interests -- writing! I like how she makes her "letters" so tiny and in straight lines across the page.



Sometimes she'll "read" her pages of letters to me if I ask -- usually it's a song to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle with the words, "saba saba saba sab, saba saba saba sab."

Goofing around

What better way to recover from a busy Easter weekend than by going on a field trip to Drumlin Farm with the neighbors? It was beautiful last week so we spent a morning visiting the new lambs. Neither kid was very interested in the animals this time. Teddy wanted to dig in the garden, play the wooden egg game in the chicken building, play with the saddles and do all that sort of stuff. Molly just wanted to sip her sippy and twirl her hair. She did perk up a little to chase a chicken around the garden.

Mostly she just watched from the stroller.

Not much different from our trip to Drumlin Farm last year.

Speaking of last year, I took this video the other day because Molly was following me around the house and singing the words to this book, which happened to be the same book she was "singing" to last year.





This was our excitement over the weekend. We got Molly a tricycle! Not bad for a beginner, right? She looks like such a big girl in that helmet!




And speaking of comparisons and getting big, this morning we were sorting out old clothes for a rummage sale and Molly insisted on trying on her baby clothes. She just learned to put on jackets and zip-up shirts by flipping them over her head, so she was extra excited to try this one on. It's size 3 months.

She tried to put on sleeper, the kind with just a sack at the bottom instead of legs, and got pretty frustrated curling up in a ball and contorting her body trying to fit in. I wish I had the camera for that.

This is from the day we got her boxes of summer clothes down from last year and discovered that most of it still fits. Yay! She went through a brief but intense summer dress phase for a day or two.

Please don't laugh

I just got back from the doctor. It turns out when I jammed my middle finger on a Frisbee at Easter brunch I broke a bone in my fingertip. That's right. I broke my finger playing Frisbee.

It's actually not a big deal. The doctor gave me a little plastic splint to wear on my fingertip for three weeks, which I can take off whenever I need to.

The worst part was getting laughed at by my doctor, the nurses, the receptionist and random strangers in the waiting room. It was an intense Frisbee game, OK? No, it was not Ultimate Frisbee. No, my team didn't win. Yes, the game has the word "jam" in the title.

When I got the x-ray, the tech told me at one point to hold my finger up in the gesture I should make at everybody for making fun of me. I could show anybody else that gesture, if they'd like to see it.

Easter

The weekend in photos:

Friday at Mendon Ponds



Easter brunch







The egg hunt

Catching up

We've had a crazy week. The big rain storm caused a culvert to collapse near our town's water wells so they had to shut them down to prevent contamination from the flood. So the town has only one working well and everybody has to conserve water to keep it flowing. My neighbors are doing things like putting a bucket in the shower to collect water to flush the toilet and shoveling water out of the back yard for flushing. We've been conserving too, but unfortunately Molly has made it incredibly difficult. She has thrown up every day this week -- a couple times from gagging on water, once all over Jim's truck from car sickness, three times yesterday for no reason we can understand. She doesn't seem sick. Anyway, I've been doing a lot of laundry and giving lots of baths, using more water than usual instead of less. Oh, well. The best was when she threw up just as we were lying down to fall asleep for nap. I had to strip the bed down, do a load of laundry and put Molly in the tub. Then I put baking soda on the mattress for the stink and when I was vacuuming it up, Molly's pants got stuck under the vacuum and I didn't realize it until the belt had melted and the entire room stank of burnt rubber. So I opened the windows in the blowing rain, trying to air it out quickly, made the bed and somehow pretended to be calm to get a 2-year-old relaxed enough to sleep.

Anyway, here's what I would have posted about a few days ago if I wasn't so busy cleaning up messes.

On Saturday we went to Vermont to celebrate Eve's third birthday. Molly was Eve's shadow most of the time, especially when she was opening presents.

Birthday cupcakes!
Playing around before the party.
Then on Sunday we went to Cambridge with Jeff to see Japanese Taiko drumming and dancing at MIT. It was Molly's first experience in a theater and it went about as well as we expected -- that is to say, she liked wandering around the theater with Daddy before the show started, got nervous as soon as the lights went down and after the second piece was crying so I took her out. Not bad. So while the guys watched the show we wandered around campus and down to the Charles River to look at sailboats.
Here's Molly at the river.
And goofing around at MIT (she's making a "bridge" with her legs, like I do when she's riding her little plastic bike thing down the sidewalk and I want to direct her back toward the garage by having her ride through my legs)
Happy to be walking back to the car.

And this is what we did yesterday. Easter eggs!!! We made most of the dyes out of food coloring but I did two colors from recipes in Joy of Cooking -- pink dye from beets and yellow from turmeric. They came out OK but not as intense as the food coloring. Probably not worth the effort.

Meanwhile, Molly's Easter basket grass is growing like crazy.

So we were able to use it as an Easter basket, at least for a few minutes until I felt bad about crushing the grass so we put the eggs in the fridge.