Grace lately

My last post was more reflective than documentary so I need to catch up with my Grace reports. She is not quite two years old yet but she is definitely acting like a two year old lately. She is on to full sentences with her speech now and it is great fun trying to understand and interpret what she is saying. She'll say a word over and over again until I get the word right. She goes to daycare with a little girl named Brooke and one day in the care she kept saying "babybrooke", "babybrooke" and it sounded like a dozen different things to me: baby book, baybrook, belly book, baby broke etc. I finally figured it out! Then there are times when her words are very clear to me. She was struggling with naptime after the time change and was very frustrated with her confinement in her crib. I heard lots of crying and muttering from her bedroom along with the word "mad!" over and over again. I was so proud of her for verbalizing her feelings already:)

Singing songs is another new thing for Grace. Her favorites are Jesus Loves Me, ABC's, Noah's Ark, Baby Beluga and to round it out Baby by Justin Bieber. That last one is reserved for our dance parties:)

Other favorites this month include coloring and drawing circles on the paper. She has a box we call "craft box" and she knows where to find it. One of her favorite drawing subjects is her daddy. Every time I ask her what she is drawing she says "Daddy's face." No idea where she got that idea!

There is never a dull moment with an almost two year old!

Magical mixed in with the mundane

Do the stay at home moms out there ever get tired of the mundane, day to day, lonely monotony of motherhood? I sure do! I made the mistake of not scheduling any playdates for the first part of this week and found myself with two whole mornings completely open. Ok, I wasn't completely open, I still had to do laundry, clean the house, and entertain an almost two year old. But sometimes I dread those mornings because I feel like I'm on a treadmill to nowhere.

Make coffee, eat breakfast, try to feed daughter breakfast, make bed, pick up laundry, take shower, find activity for daughter during shower, get dressed, pick up toys, play babies with daughter, play babies some more with daughter, throw laundry in washer, go up and down stairs a couple times for more laundry, read book, read another, offer snack to daughter, daughter refuses said snack and throws tantrum etc. That is part of my "open morning" routine.

So, as I am lamenting this today, my daughter Grace finds multiple ways to melt my heart and show me that everything I'm doing is worthwhile. As we are sitting at dinner tonight, just me and her, she starts singing a song. It's not entirely clear to me at first, but then I hear the line "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so." So after hearing that and then hearing her little voice respond with "wuv you" after I tell her that I love her before bedtime, I have to admit that all of my lament about the plight of the stay at home mom vanishes and I'm just proud to be a mommy.