Here She Comes!!!

Today, toddlerness:

Saved the day!!! Right off the couch arm. 5,000 times.

Made a painting right on the table in yellow, orange, and clear-sparkly nail polish.

Re-cut her own hair.

Walked barefoot through the parking lot at Target. It was 38 degrees out.

Ate an apple before I paid for it. And after dropping it on the ground.

Threw a full-on kick-and-scream tantrum in the store, complete with "PUT ME DOWN!!!!" and "I DON'T WAAAAAANNNNNNNAAAAAA." When I did put her down she RAN LIKE FUCKING MAD down the main aisle, which apparently meant Boyness had to follow yelling NOOOOOO at the top of his lungs, me racing along a distant third yelling "[BOYNESS], [TODDLERNESS], STOP!" We sure did give the other patrons a tableau to laugh, cry, tsk, or call CPS over.

Isn't THREE grand?!

Beauty

A snowfall last night, a woman in labor. Deciding it wasn't an emergency, heading out into a world double-whitened by snow and sun at 8am. A baby born just past noon, pirouetting her way into the world, gracing my hands for the briefest moment before her mother caught her up to her chest. A family's joyous tears, a loved baby nestling on her father's naked chest, entirely content. The stirring of a longing for another of my own.

Beauty, beauty everywhere.

Fun with Scissors

Or not-fun, to be more accurate.

I cut Toddlerness' hair. Now that she's three, I should probably think of something else to call her...but I digress...

If there is anything harder than cutting a three year old's hair, it is getting a photo of that haircut. It took like 50 pictures to get ONE where you could tell what was going on with the hair. It is WAAAAY shorter than I was aiming for but DANG that girl was squirmy, even when I gave her a huge bag of jelly beans and told her to pick out a favorite. Still, she eventually calmed down enough for things to get roughly even (even if the final level was some 2 inches above what I'd originally hoped for). Not a perfect haircut by any means, but we'll survive. And by the time she's ready for another haircut, she had better damned well also be ready to sit still for a few minutes.

Before:

Submerged

In an ocean of school work.

We had an awesome week, with first my sister and then my brother visiting. Did all kinds of fun stuff; the zoo, the park, fires in the yard, lots of fun. The kids were burned out by yesterday, and had a pretty crabby morning - but by evening they'd levelled out, and then went to bed early of their own volition.

My siblings have been on a childhood-memories kick lately. The gifts they got us this year are awesome. Fairy Tale Theatre on DVD! There were even a couple we managed to miss as kids. Strange, many of them, but the kids love it, and I'm getting a real kick out of it. LittleBrother got us something very like this, which elicited happy childhood memories (including one of my dad making a mad dash across the living room, blowing wildly, after it had crashed to the carpet).

Meanwhile, the tide of school work has come up on me, beginning with an artificially short four-day first week.