Proud Momma Moment

This morning, at daycare:

Me: Annabella, stay right there while Mommy puts your carseat up.

Annabella stands in place, waiting.

Me: Annabella, come on. Let's go to your classroom. (Puts out finger.)

Annabella grabs my finger and walks down the hall and into her room with me.

Me: Annabella, wait! Mommy needs to take your coat off and wash your hands before you go play.

Annabella starts to take her coat off and waits for me to help.

Me: Annabella, go to the sink.

Annabella walks over to the stink and steps up on the step, waiting for me to wash her hands.

I can't believe how much my little munchkin understands and how well she follows instructions. (And also how much she blatantly ignores me other times!)

1.5 years

Annabella turned 1.5 today. I can't believe it's been so long since the magical day she came into my life. She has gotten so big, and I'm just so proud of her. Every day she does something that makes my heart swell. She follows simple directions. She asks for cheese (chizz). She squeals for her shoes (sooz). She signals for more (and says moh). She climbs the chairs and walks across the table...ok; so this one isn't actually allowed, but watching her learn to climb and take risks still makes me proud.

We've had a pretty busy weekend. Yesterday we took her to an Easter egg hunt/extravaganza. We were 1o minutes late, which means we missed the hunt. But there was a big bunny for her to get pictures with; so we waited in line for him. Well, she HATED the bunny. Would not touch. And then we saw that there was food; so we went and got her a cookie. No surprise here, she LOVED the cookie. While she ate the cookie, we waited in a long line for pony rides. Her reaction to the pony made her reaction to the bunny seem downright heartwarming. She clung to me and wouldn't even get near the pony. She normally likes animals...so we weren't expecting that. I didn't think she'd actually ride the pony. But I thought she'd at least pet the pony. So the highlight of the extravaganza was clearly the cookie. Which means we could have saved ourselves some stress and effort. Oh well.

Later in the day we had an experience that was more traumatizing to Momma than to Annabella. You see, Annabella's hair has been constantly in her face. She refuses to wear bows, and won't sit still for me to tie her hair back. So we took her in for her first haircut.

Here's a before picture that shows why we really needed to get the haircut.

And here's a couple pictures that show that Annabella did NOT like getting her haircut one bit. (Although I still maintain that I am more traumatized, at least long term.)

And here's the best post haircut picture we have right now. I'll try to get some better ones soon.

The woman cut her bangs much shorter than I would have liked, and I'm really not sure I like the haircut at all to be honest. But I'm not sure she could have had a haircut that I would actually like. And they gave us a certificate that says "For meeting all the requirements of a first haircut with courage and bravery". (Yes, the certificate made me tear up. I blame the pregnancy hormones...)

Today a couple of friends watched Annabella for a few hours so that Jason and I could go on a date (gasp!). Our friends have 2 small dogs, and Annabella love love loved the dogs. I think she's going to start asking for a dog as soon as she figures out that it's a possibility. It's always a little nerve-wracking leaving your kid with somebody new, even somebody you trust. But at the end of the day, everybody had a smile on their face. We really should take advantage of our babysitting friends more often. Getting a couple hours out is nice, and I think they spoil Annabella rotten. For instance, where Mommy and Daddy are too mean to chase her up and down the stairs over and over again, the babysitters think it's cute and put up with it for much longer than we do :) So it's really a win-win.

I still can't believe my little girl is 1.5. It seems like just yesterday she was a tiny little ball curled up asleep on my chest, head buried straight into my skin. I remember staring at her for hours just falling more and more in love with her, wondering how this perfect little creature could be mine. I can't imagine loving her more, but my heart just explodes in new ways for her every day. And now my precious, tiny, sweet baby isn't so tiny, and she's not much of a baby anymore. She is still the most precious, sweetest thing I've ever had the pleasure of seeing though. And I love her so much it hurts.

Sometimes life just doesn't make sense

In my mind, people get sick, act sickly/have symptoms, and then we find out they're sick. The bigger the disease, the more obvious it is that something's wrong. I mean, that's the way it's supposed to work, right?

Apparently this just isn't the way it works with cancer.

For those of you who don't know my Grandpa, he is strong, vibrant, full-of-life. He's 70+ years old and still works 70 hour weeks. He puts in hundreds of tomato plants every year, along with peppers, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, corn, and so many more. His garden is always immaculate, and his vegetables are always tasty. And out of nowhere he has stage-4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

And last night we found out that Jason's Aunt Cindy has acute leukemia. Her symptoms? Nonexistent. She found out because of a routine blood test. Aunt Cyn is strong and passionate and charismatic and not at all sickly.

So how does this even make sense? It just doesn't.

Kisses

Little Miss Annabella refused to give Mommy kisses all weekend. She did however wave bye and blow kisses to the fan when I turned it off. I guess we know her priorities.

A tale of two trash cans

Our kitchen trash can is open at the top, which means that Annabella can throw whatever she likes into it. After completely losing her Aqua-Doodle pen, finding one of her balls in there, and digging through it looking for another, I decided it was high time to get a new trash can.

For those of you who don't know my husband well, he's kind of resistant to change. Especially small little changes involving things like trash cans. And he liked our trash can. But even Jason could see that a new trash can was in order.

So I'm at Target with Annabella, and I'm in the trash can aisle. And there are a bunch of different options. But the most expensive option is almost identical to our current trash can, except with a lid and a step that opens that lid. But it's the most expensive one. And I could get another one that would do the job for 50% less. And my husband is also super frugal. So I stand there and weigh the merits of both, and finally decide that I should go with the near-identical more expensive one.

I bring it home, and Jason's not 100% thrilled with it (the lid mechanism causes it to stick out a little farther from the wall), but all in all he's pretty happy. So we set it up, and life is good. Until Annabella grabs a tissue from the box, wipes her nose, and toddles over to the trashcan. And of course she can no longer throw her tissue away. So we say, hey, we'll just keep both trash cans in the kitchen. It's not ideal, but we can just throw out stuff that isn't gross in the open one, and use the closed one for everything that's nasty. And it looks a little ridiculous, and nobody ever quite remembers to throw stuff in the right trash can, but it's basically worked for us for about a week.

And then last night Jason spied our little toddler lifting the lid of the new trash can to throw something out. She's just too smart for her (and our) own good!

Really, we should have known better. If she's smart enough to grab a tissue from the box, wipe her nose, and throw it out, we should have realized that she'd figure out how to get the lid of the new trash can open. But still!

I'm guessing this won't be the last time she outsmarts us.

FIRST Screen results

I can't believe how much easier this pregnancy has been emotionally than last one. Our little one is measuring right on track, and we just got the screening results back. A woman my age has a 1/590 chance of having a baby with Down's Syndrome. The screen showed the chances as being decreased to 1/3200. They don't give numbers for trisomy 18 with this screening, but we screened negative for it this time around. Woohoo!!!!

I know it's early, and there's still plenty of time left to be scared out of my mind. But I'm just so happy and thankful that everything seems so perfect right now.

Updates

Monday was an intense day.

I got a phone call from a good friend in the afternoon who told me she's pregnant! Yay! And then I talked to another person I'm close with that night who told me she's pregnant as well! I'm so excited and happy for both of them. (Sorry for being a bit vague...it's not my announcement to make, and I think both parties are trying to keep it mum for a bit.)

And then I got a phone call from my Mom at 10:30 that night. Grandpa was in the hospital, and they'd found a crazy huge mass of cancer under his ribs. The details are slowly trickling in as tests are done and they are finally getting to talk to oncologists, but it seems that he has lymphoma. The giant mass is about 12 inches in diameter, and it has many fingers spreading into other areas of his body. He went to the hospital on Monday because he was in a lot of pain, and it seems that the pain is caused by the cancer being wrapped around nerves and also around his aorta, tightly enough that it is cutting off circulation to his legs. The good news in all of this though is that lymphoma tends to be highly treatable, and the doctor even used the word curable today. They still have to do a biopsy to determine exactly what variation he has, but it does appear that there is reason to be hopeful.

Even though in times like this life feels as if it should stand still, that is not what happens. I called Grandpa, and he wants us to wait to come up; so we're waiting. And during the waiting we met with a nutritionist about Annabella. Jason and I are still concerned about her weight. We have many reasons to believe that she is perfectly healthy, but we'd feel a lot better if we could at least get her up over the 5th percentile. (As an aside, I'm tired of telling people my kid is small only to hear that their kid is small too, only to find out their definition of small is the 25th percentile. If Annabella hit the 25th percentile, I think we'd throw a party to celebrate we'd be so excited.) But the meeting with the nutritionist went well. She thinks Annabella is eating enough calories, and seemed to be happy in general with the types and quantities of food she's eating too. She gave us a few suggestions to try to boost the overall nutrition of her meals, but we left the appointment feeling pretty good. The next step is to see an allergist, just to make sure we're not overlooking possible food allergies that would keep Annabella from absorbing nutrients properly.

Then today I had an appointment to screen for a couple possible genetic problems with the pregnancy. It's not at all the same screening we did last time, which caused us so much stress. And this one is supposed to give less false "positives". Also, this one comes with an ultrasound which dated the pregnancy. And the ultrasound was awesome. We got to see the sonographer (Dorette) who did most of our ultrasounds with Annabella, which was really nice. And the baby looks perfect. We saw little arms and legs and feet and his/her little nose. Dorette measured some space as part of the screening, and the measurement came back perfect; so that gave us some confidence that everything with this screening will be good. Dorette also verified that everything looks ok, no cysts or anything that could be problematic. And she showed us a trick that is somewhat predictive of sex. She said not to go out and buy paint yet, but she thinks we're having another little girl! I'll try to get the pictures scanned in soon to post. I can't believe there's a real little baby in there!