Blueberries for K

At two years old (!) K is a wonderfully sweet, inquisitive, and strong willed person. She is building her sense of humor, and independence (favorite word: no!), and very engaged with everything that goes on around her (goodbye doing the dishes while she plays in the other room, hello to toddler helping with everything).

She has tremendous empathy for the people in her life as well as for animals, and characters in books. Even for my phone, with its poor shattered screen – she will point to it and say “Bump! Bump! Oh no!” and get sad. My phone did have a bump. On the concrete. I really need to get a new one. Tangent.

Her language is changing so rapidly now. The usual metaphor I hear is ‘exploding’ but it has more of a ‘quick, quick, slow’ pace for K that reminds me of time-lapse videos of flower blooming – still, still, ten petals all at once, pause, more unfurls, pause – bloom! She will go a few days with no new words, and hours with just her core 10 words or so, then bust out with three new words, a full sentence, and some connection I had no idea she’d made.

Life lately is slow and fast at once in the way time with small children is. I quit my job last month and we are just now starting to settle into the change but our quality of life is so much better already. It was very tough to leave a great, challenging and rewarding job with a truly fantastic team, but after over two years of my commute averaging around 3-3.5 hours a day round trip, and in the last two months there were 5 days where the round trip commute crept up over 4 hours in a day. It was just too much time away from family to keep going that way. I had days in a row where I wouldn’t even see K awake as she was asleep when I left and asleep when  I got home. I started looking for work closer to home, but realized quickly I was hoping not to find the perfect fit just yet. I always wanted to take a few years to stay home with young kids, but career is important to me as well, which made it a very tough call. We took a hard look at the budget, practiced life on one income for a few months, saved up an emergency fund, and I put in notice.

In the few weeks I have been home, we have already done more fun outings and playdates than in the last year combined - blueberry picking (pics above from this morning), raspberry picking, and blackberry picking - all multiple times. Long walks, many parks, trips to the zoo, the river, the children's museum. Visits with friends and family. I am treasuring this time, and I think she is too.

Party

K had so much fun at her party that she learned the word “birthday” just so she could request “more birthday!” 10 times a day since, which is just about the sweetest thing. I did not pull things off nearly so well as last year – her present (the kitchen) isn’t all the way done, the cake was not as cute as planned (but it redeemed itself by being delicious), and even with wonderful help from my parents and G, I was still making frosting with a messy kitchen when people started showing up.

But, this girl had an amazing time, our house was full of friends and family all afternoon, and there was plenty of food, beer, wine and visiting so all in all it was a success.

K LOVED her balloons and kitchen so much. She carried the ballons all over the house and yard (as did her friends) and when she saw the kitchen she was so excited and ran right for it. She loves her other presents too, play food from her grandparents, art supplies, books, bubbles, a Duplo bird and a blue floral monkey her Nana made her. She isn’t crazy about the lion cub I got her (I knew it was a risk as while she loves real animals she only sort of likes stuffed toys, but it was $7 and is a little lion, she’s a Leo, so I gave it a try).

I think her favorite part though was being sung to and blowing out the candles – at the end after she blew them out she clapped, beamed at everyone and requested more. We distracted her with cake, but later after everyone left she requested “more” and pantomimed blowing out candles, so we sang to her again with another candle and let her blow it out three more times before we called it a day for bedtime.

More on the still-in-progress kitchen remodel later. For now, we are still exhausted from celebrating. Happy birthday, K.

Two

Happy birthday, little one! Celebrating two years with you, and your unending sweetness and mayhem. You are so very, very loved.