Thank God It's Monday

This past weekend was horrible.

HORRIBLE.

It was the kind of weekend that makes you think, “How can people possibly deal with more than one child?”

Grace has fallen into some kind of precursor to the terrible twos, along the lines of ….

I’m one and you can’t tell me what to do.
And you can’t make me do what you want me to do.
And you can’t make me eat what you want me to eat.
And you can’t make me take a nap right now even though I’m exhausted and have only had two 20 minutes naps since I woke up at 5:30am and it now 3:15pm.

Examples of this deplorable behavior are …

She would sit in the middle of the kitchen floor and just start screaming. Nobody touched her, no dog licked her and there was no injury of any kind. Just sudden screaming like she’d been stung by a bee….

….Unless we were out of the house shopping. And then you HAD to keep moving. Any stopping to browse or compare labels and it was all over. Luckily, at 7:30 am there aren’t too many folks in the grocery store. So when necessary I would stop. Otherwise I turned it into a game of trying to remember what was down every isle, so I could just grab items off the shelf while still moving. Sometimes we did several swoops up and down before I had completed the purchases. Sometimes I would just push the cart to keep it moving and then run to catch up. Grace thought it was great fun. Frankly, it would have been if I wasn’t so tense….

….Until 6pm last night, she refused to eat. Anything. She would drink milk, but only at 2 ounces at a time. This made for lots of dirty bottles and wasted formula. It also made me constantly try and feed her, because she MUST be hungry. Nope. She would take two bites of the 20 I’d just given here and then start flinging it over the edge or just flat out scream and buck….

….Finally, ½ an hour before she normally goes to sleep, she decided she was hungry. We went outside to gather ripe tomatoes, and before I could stop her (because it looked slightly funky and had a fresh worm hole in it) she chomped into the tomato. I tried switching it out with one that an insect hadn’t been feasting on, but she freaked. OK, you want a wormy tomato, fine, go for it. And she did. 10 minutes later, and completely covered with tomato snot and juice, she had devoured the entire thing.


Then she spotted the dish of mashed carrots I had tried to feed her earlier. She grabbed it and started scooping food into her mouth with her hands. Between that technique, and a first try at self feeding with a spoon, she ate 2 containers of carrots.


This was topped off with a baby who happily splashed in the tub for her longest bath ever, drank an 8 oz bottle and then slept through the night for the first time in what feels like forever.

This parenting thing isn’t so hard, right?