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Yesterday I took Maya to get her hair cut. She has been in desperate need of a trim for a while and since she is on Spring Break this week and I’ve been looking for little things to do to fill our days I declared yesterday “Hair Cut Day”. She loves going to the “salon” to get her hair cut so she was super excited.
In St. Louis I had been taking her to this adorable salon in the mall dedicated to little girls. Everything was princess themed and they always did her hair in a cute little up do after her cut and sprayed her hair with glitter. She LOVED it! I looked into taking her to a similar place here but when I saw the cost for a hair cut (simple cut, no style/no shampoo) was $30!! I said forget it. The place in St. Louis was $15, and included shampooing and styling along with a few extras like glitterly face stamps. I was not about to pay that kind of money for a simple trim. So, off to Great Clips we went. She didn’t really care, she enjoyed herself anyway. Although she did ask the girl for glitterly face stamps and spray glitter for her hair and was a bit disappointed when they didn’t have that stuff.
She ended up with a pretty adorable little hair cut. They trimmed about an inch off to get rid of the split ends and added a few face framing layers. It looks adorable, and so grown up!
When exactly did she get so grown up? I swear every day she looks more grown up than the day before. I feel like just yesterday I was taking her for her very first hair cut. Where does the time go?
This little monkey. This little ball of giggles and snuggles turned 20 months old yesterday. 20 MONTHS! That is two thirds of the way through her 2nd year already. In just 4 short months she is going to be 2. Crazy!
Anna at 20 months makes me smile and laugh on a daily basis. I love this age. Her vocabulary is incredible and her communication skills are stellar. There is rarely a moment of frustration where I don’t know what she is trying to say. She can name at least a dozen or more animals. She can easily tells what she wants or needs. She carries on little conversations half real words, half babble that make complete sense, it is amazing.
Anna is hysterical. Her little Annaisms make me laugh on a daily basis. She is at that age where she will not let you get her on video doing anything. If she sees camera she stops what she is doing and runs away. There are so many things I would love to capture on video to watch later when she is driving me crazy. I need a more sly way to get video of her 
Instead I’ll have to write it all down for now.
A few of my favorite Annaisms at 20 months…
She can name tons of animals. We’ll go through some of her animal books and she’ll know about 80% of them. However, there are several animals that she refers to only by the sound they make, even though she knows the actual name for them. A pig for example is always identified but a nasal grunting sound. A cat is a “meow” and a horse is a “neigh”. She uses these sounds so enthusiastically it cracks me up every time!
The way she interacts with our cat, Louis, is just darling. It is something that needs to be seen to be truly appreciated but I’ll try to do it justice with my words. For starters she calls him “Lou Lou” which is so adorable and has us all calling him Lou Lou now. In the morning he always comes into her room with me when I get her out of bed and she’ll cry out “Lou Lou” when she sees him and then say “mon” (come on) to get him to follow us downstairs. Whenever she sees him doing something she thinks he shouldn’t be doing she’ll say “No Lou Lou” like this little mother. If she catches him on the counter or the table she’ll shout “NOW” (down) at him. She snuggles and kisses him constantly throughout the day. I love it. They are quite a pair.
She loves to sing and dance. If she wants to hear music she’ll bring the remote over to you and dance to tell you what she wants. On and off throughout the day you’ll hear her singing, which is truly just adorable. If she hears a song at the store or on the radio that she recognizes she’ll start singing along. The other day in Target Pink’s Try came on and the whole rest of the time we were in the store she was singing “try try try” 
The girl is funny and she loves to know you think she is funny. If something makes you laugh she gets this look on her face that I can’t even really describe, it is pure pride, and she’ll perform whatever it is she did again. She even seems to understand that things stop being funny after a while and will move on to something else before she hits that point. We may have a little comedian on our hands.
Thanks to her big sister she is surrounded by princesses on a daily basis. She has taken to calling all princesses “lella” (Cinderella). When I put a skirt or dress on her she looks down at it and says “oh, lella, pree” (oh, Cinderella, pretty). It stems from Maya wanting to play real-life princesses with her one day and both of them wearing their fanciest dresses to dance around the living room. Now she thinks she is a princess every time she wears something other than pants
One of my truly favorite Annaisms is how she says goodbye. She used to just say “bye” and wave, then one day she all of a sudden started saying “bye you”. It is adorable. She says it every time. She’ll wave her cute little wave and say “bye you”. It is so cute I love it.
I could go on and on. She is full of adorable little sayings and expressions these days. Her zest for life is contagious. Anna at 20 months is a doll. Now if only I could get her to perform for the camera so I can try to record some of this posterity.
Last week, with both kids in tow thanks to Lorne being out of town for work, I headed down the street to our local elementary school. Now, why was I going to the elementary school with both children you might ask. Well, it was kindergarten registration day!
As it turns out each school in our district handles kindergarten registration a bit differently. After reading through all the details online and calling the kindergarten school board rep I determined that our particular school was not handing out registration packets ahead of time and parents had to show up at the school between 1:30pm and 6:00pm on March 6th to fill out the registration forms, hand over copies of all the necessary documentation and get their kiddos all signed up for kindergarten. I was not exactly impressed that I couldn’t fill out the paperwork ahead of time. I’m not a fan of last minute stuff, but what could I do.
With my pile of necessary documentation in hand I headed into the school, which by the way is awesome! The registration process was set up very well. There were packets right at the front door with all the registration forms. There were tables set up in the hallway covered in paper so that the kids could color away while their parents filled out what felt like endless amounts of paperwork. The school nurse was on hand to review immunization records and go over any immunizations the child may need to get before school starts (luckily for us we are all caught up). She was also available to go over the process for special medical situations, like Maya’s nut allergy. She was super sweet. After all the paperwork was filled out and we had talked with the school nurse it was onto the front office to hand over everything. The office staff was super helpful and super sweet. It didn’t take long to go over all the forms and we were on our way.
Our school district is not currently offering full day kindergarten at no charge to all students. Instead each student who is interested in full day kindergarten has to enter a lottery and if selected through the lottery to fill one of the slots there is a monthly tuition fee. We are hopeful that Maya will get a full time spot as I’ve heard it is rare in our district for them not to accommodate all the children who have requested the full day program, but I’m really fine with either. Next week we’ll find out.
I truly can’t believe we are already here, getting ready for kindergarten. She isn’t my baby anymore, not by a long shot. She is definitely our big, smart girl who is more than ready to face this new challenge. I’m really looking forward to what next year bring for her. I have a feeling she is going to grow and change immensely.
About a month ago I found myself standing in the feminine product aisle at Target staring at the pregnancy tests, a place I really thought I’d never be again. A week before this moment I was standing in my bathroom getting ready one morning feeling…off, and it suddenly hit me that my period was at least a week late, maybe more. I had only had a few cycles since starting to wean Anna a few months prior and I wasn’t paying that close of attention to the timing. I chalked it up to things not being regular yet and figured I’d ignore that off feeling and waiting a few more days to give my body a chance to prove my intuition wrong. Fast forward a few days and I was hit with crazy nausea and was moody as all get out. No doubt about it, I knew before I even took the test, I was pregnant.
Life is full of little surprises, or big surprises as the case may be. I thought I was done with 2. I thought my family was complete with my 2 beautiful girls. Apparently, life has other plans for us.
Since we just moved to Seattle and I didn’t have an OB/GYN lined up yet so I had to scramble to find a new doctor. Since I was a new patient they wouldn’t see me until I was between 8-10 weeks. The first appointment they had available that fit my schedule was Friday, which put me at almost exactly 10 weeks. I hate waiting for that first doctor’s appointment to get confirmation that everything is okay. It was even worse having to wait almost a month for it. I’ve had crazy morning sickness all day, every day and have been so exhausted I feel like I’m barely functioning, so I figured everything was fine but it is always nice to get medical confirmation.
I got my confirmation Friday when I saw The Surprise for the first time on that ultrasound screen moving all around and waving its little arms at me.
Everything looks great. The Surprise is measuring a few days ahead and looks perfect.
I’ve had a month to let this sink in and yet I still can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’m going to be the parent to 3 kids! It feels crazy and scary and exciting and so many things I can’t even begin to name them all.
Today I am 10 weeks 3 days and counting down the days until this wretched first trimester is over and I can hopefully bid farewell to my constant nausea and gagging and pretty much daily trips to the bathroom to throw up. For the record I hate morning sickness.
Friday night, for the first time since she was born, I didn’t nurse Anna before bed. At 19 months it was time to be done. She probably would have kept going if I had been willing, but I was ready to be done. As I read her a story and rocked her for a bit before putting her in her crib I found myself feeling a bit sad. Even though I was ready to be done it felt like the last piece of her babyhood slipping away.
The process to get to Friday night when we were officially done breast feeding started about a month ago. Slowly Anna had been dropping nursing sessions on her own since she turned 1. We were down to the last 3, the hardest ones in my experience, for them to give up. The first one we worked on was her before nap nursing session. It was by far the toughest, and although she no longer asks to nurse before nap time it is still a struggle to get her to fall asleep. A few days after we ended to before nap nursing she decided to give up the first thing in the morning session on her own. It was nice not to have to battle her on that one.
Once we were down to just the before bed session I took a break for a couple of weeks from the weaning process and let her adjust to the new normal. I knew on Thursday it was the last time I would nurse her. I had picked Friday because I figured if it was a real challenge to get her to go to sleep it would be easier when we didn’t have to get up early for anything the next day. Surprisingly, she was fine with it. We read a story and then snuggled and rocked in the rocking chair for a bit. She was out within minutes of me putting her in her crib. And, she has continued to do well every night since.
I am proud of myself for making it another 19 months. Breastfeeding this time around was a much easier than last time as it didn’t come with any of the early struggles I experienced with Maya. It wasn’t challenge free but the challenges that did come up were easy to get through thanks to the 19 months experience I had nursing Maya. I’ll miss my quiet time with Anna all snuggled into me that nursing guaranteed daily. Although, Anna loves to snuggle so I’m sure there will be no lack of snuggle time with her.