All Puffed Out

One of baby girl's favorite books is the Itsy Bitsy Spider. It tells all about Itsy's various attempts of outsmarting the rain and the sundry adventures he gets into along the way. There's one page where he's running away from some birds; it says, "Itsy's running, all puffed out." When we get to that page in the book, without fail, baby girl pants along with Itsy, huffing out a "huh-huh-huh" the way we taught her.

That's where we are right now as a family. All puffed out. Panting. Catching our breath.

In the last 6 weeks, we've had one emergency trip to Dallas, two first birthday parties, one positive home pregnancy test, one family vacation to Florida, one doctor's visit where we saw a beautiful little heartbeat, one big job change, one trip to California, and one week of my mom and grandma visiting because TH was in Zurich on business.

We are all.puffed.out.

The good news is that 95% of our business the last 6 weeks was wonderful, exciting, happy, thrilling events. It is definitely easier to go through a stretch like this when that is the case.

The bad news is that we allowed it to all snowball in on itself. We've neglected our cats, our home, our cars, our blogs, our friends, and our laundry trying to keep up with our schedule. Never again (well, at least not until the next time) will we allow such a long, hard stretch with no break.

But we made it. Like Itsy, we made it back to our spout. Time to turn again and start to get our footing back in our normal lives.

It would be way too hard to do a fair job of recapping the entire six weeks. The last month has been amazing for baby girl. The most amazing yet. Her language and communication capacities have exploded. She went from speaking about 5 words on her first birthday to having more than 30 words now. More than THIRTY. She says book, ball, more, duck, go, out, no, blue, green, dada, mama, kitty, dog, bus, please, boo, bye-bye, night-night, boat, hi, cracker, there, hot (she says hot and then blows and shakes her hand for this one . . . SO cute!), eye, mouth, and bubble, and can make the animal noises (we're counting these as "words") for a dog, cat, snake, lion, monkey, elephant, cow, bird, and rooster. Her signs have also exploded in the last month. She now signs more, all done, please, milk, hat, diaper, thank you, and book. The rate at which she is learning things now is astonishing. She is a little sponge, listening to us, watching us, and learning, usually after only a few repetitions. What a cool age this is!!!

Oh, and one other little thing. She's walking. Or toddling. Or whatever you call it. She's been taking 2-3 falling steps between me and TH for about a month now but seemed to kind of plateau out there (apparently she was focusing on her language skills this month!). But while TH was in Switzerland and my mom and grandma were here, something snapped and she took 5, 6, even 7 solid steps between us, even stopping halfway and standing for a minute before starting back up again! We are on the brink of a totally new world with her, and as usual, I can't wait.

And an update on Dos? Ah, sweet Dos. How different this pregnancy is than my first. With baby girl, we had nothing else going on. Nothing to do in the evenings except daydream about babies and paint nurseries and talk names. I had all the time in the world to think about her and bond with her. But now? Now I spend most of my awake time with my daughter, entertaining and laughing and helping her walk and talking to her and making sure she doesn't get into anything. And then she goes to sleep and I do all the rest of our typical life-maintenance kind of stuff (dishes, laundry, cleaning, prepping for the next day, uploading pictures, writing thank-you notes, etc. etc. etc.) for as long as I can before collapsing into bed and passing out in sleep in about 0.7 seconds. I often forget that I am pregnant. I often struggle with feelings of guilt that already Dos is getting shafted. On the bright side, I have way less time to sit and worry than I did the first time around.

So, we're here. We survived the six weeks of insanity. We are all puffed out and looking forward to spending a few weeks at home, recovering our sanity and our lives. Along the way, life happened. Baby girl grew and gained amazing capabilities. She laughed and made us laugh. Our family grew. Life goes on, even when you are too busy to be able to stop and celebrate it the way you should.

What a ride.