Mom Remembers

Soren has a few tricks that are endlessly amusing to me, even if he doesn't know what he is doing. I don't want to forget what a clever boy he is, so I thought I should make a post about his clever little tricks. Maybe later I will try to get a video of some of them. 1. When I sing "If You're Happy and You Know It", he claps his hands. Sometimes he even does it at the appropriate pause in the song! 2. When I say, "high five!" and show him my palm, he gives me a (weak) high five. 3. When someone offers their cheek (and sometimes even their lips), Soren gives them a kiss. It's more like a face bump but I think it's really cute and relatives go wild about it. 4. This is a bran-new trick: When I sing "When We're Helping, We're Happy" Soren will put his legos away. I've been working on teaching him to help clean up for ... oh, probably six months now. And Scott's been making terrible fun of me but it is finally paying o...

I am so proud of my son! Yesterday Scott and I dumped a basket of mega-sized legos out in the living room. We were putting them together, trying to interest the boy in them. Soren usually doesn't care much for the legos. When we build a tower with them, he has a hard time knocking it down. And that was about the only use he had for blocks. Until yesterday. He watched us putting the lego pieces together for awhile and then he surprised me by grabbing one of the blocks and a ttempting to stick it on top of my structure. He struggled with it for a long time; I was really surprised that he didn't give up. But after a while, he snapped the piece into place. Scott and I gave him one of the bigger legos, to be a base for his tower, and we held it to the floor so it wouldn't wobble. Then we just sat on the floor with him and watched while he built. At first it would take him a long time to attach one lego but after a while, he got faster at it. Not adult-speed faste...

I finally pulled all of Soren's 9-month clothes out of the mix with a bit of dismay yesterday. How can it be that he has gotten so big? I know it's long past his first birthday and I should have realized that meant he was more than 12 months old but--seriously, are they supposed to age this fast? If I blink my eyes, I'll find he has grown to middle-age while they were shut! I'm determined to appreciate his current stage of development more. I've been struggling with my newfangled camera this past month but I can't afford to let the time just pass me by anymore. I need to take pictures and make videos and allow myself the time to just watch him play. Why am I so worried about when he will reach the next developmental milestone? Why am I so caught up in getting his daily routine over and done with, instead of enjoying each moment as it passes? I suppose no one can be acutely aware every moment of their child's life. No one can really live that fully in ...

I am nine weeks pregnant. I've been trying to get pregnant since Soren was four months old. I'm not sure why I felt such a sense of urgency in connection with our next child. I knew I wanted another almost immediately after Soren was born. Even while I was still struggling with the impossible wish to turn back time and undo our first child, I felt the need to plan and desire for our second. And when I told Scott that I wanted another, he was unbelievably good-natured. He was still in shock at the broken pieces of our former life but he only laughed in disbelief, not disapproval. Amazing man that he is, he agreed to try for another baby. It was several months before I became fertile and I have had two miscarriages since then. It's almost scary to admit that I'm pregnant again because I've been wanting and waiting for this baby for, what has seemed to me, an unbearably long time. So when I got pregnant this time, I didn't take a pregnancy test and I didn'...

The other day Scott, Soren, and I were in the car, doing errands. Soren was sitting up in his new forward-facing carseat, enjoying the view and babbling contentedly. Out of the blue, his babbling (which is usually very spit- and grunt-based) changed. "Mamamamama." Surprised, but wanting to reinforce this pleasant turn of events, I turned around and looked at him. "What is it, honey?" "Juz!" "Oh, I'm sorry. We don't have any juice right now." "Nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh!" And he dissolved back into incoherency, albeit with a lot more whining. Scott and I laughed about the coincidence, not sure that Soren could understand a word we were saying and quite positive that he had no clue what he was saying. But first thing the next morning, while I was carrying into the kitchen, he demanded "Juz juz juz!" over and over until I gave him the sippy cup.