I used this recipe and they are GOOD.

But no one is here for a pumpkin seed recipe, are they?

You’re here because…..

….Emily got an awesome report with just 2 B’s and just as many A+’s.
….I am the mama of the cutest baby ever….


…it’s pumpkin carving night!

She has hardly enough hair for it, but on a whim I decided to give Cadence two piggie tails today (usually she just has one, jaunty one on the side)



She is also wearing her Little Miss Trouble shirt, which suits her well. See?



Here she was saying cheese, it’s blurry but still cute.


Aren’t toddlers the absolute cutest??

In September, I realized something about Cadence.  The truth is, Cadence wasn’t much for sleeping.  She didn’t really seem to have time for it.  It was frustrating for me as trying to find ways to entertain a four week old baby that wouldn’t sleep was a difficult task.  I struggled with it, as Cadence would lay on the couch next to me snuggled in the boppy, her dark blue eyes focused somewhere around me as I pondered what exactly one did with a baby that young who didn’t sleep at all.

It got to the point that I actually began to keep a daily journal of how long Cadence slept thinking, in my mind, that she slept much more than I thought but that I wasn’t really hitting on her cat naps.  The total was abysmal, really, and confirmed what I thought.  The baby didn’t sleep.  Really.  She didn’t.

Cadence got older and sleep times became more trying.  She would scream and cry when I would try to rock her to sleep, doing her best to fight off my intention that she sleep.  Nap times were abbreviated and night times were night mares.  There were times when I wasn’t sure that I could stand one more second of sleep deprivation.   But we pressed on.  Cadence didn’t sleep better at the “magic” six weeks when most babies start to sleep for longer stretches at night and she wasn’t sleeping better by three months or even five months when we started her on cereal in an attempt to see if her night time sleeping would stretch out at all.

It didn’t.

By nine months, I was desperate. Eric was even desperate and we scoured the Internet, asked for advice and read books trying to find some way to help our baby and us sleep.  After a very trying night, I made an appointment with the Nurse Practitioner at my Pediatrician’s office.  I was desperate.  We’d tried everything we could think of.

“You have to let her cry.”, she said, “It’s the only way.”

She outlined a plan for us.  We put Cadence to bed.  We closed the door.  We didn’t go back.  Not if she vomited.  Not if she cried until she fainted.  After a few nights, she said, Cadence would stop crying and would sleep.  I smiled and nodded and called Eric when I left the office.

“I can’t do that to her.”, I said

“I can’t either.”, he said.

So we didn’t.  We read more books.  We tried a bedtime routine which really didn’t do anything but stress us out if we didn’t start the detailed and long process early enough.  I bought things to put on her crib that other people claimed lulled their babies to sleep.  I rocked, I sang, I nursed, I bounced, I shushed.  Nothing worked.  Cadence fought sleep tooth and nail and woke up a handful of times every night.  When we slept away from home it was worse, Cadence feeding off of my distress at keeping other people up, would sleep in light, fitful snatches that left me in tears.

We tried, a few times, to use the Ferber method with her around her first birthday.  It didn’t work either.  Cadence cried no less than forty-five minutes at each sleeping time and she wasn’t sleeping any better over night.  There was no benefit to her crying, so we stopped and went back to rocking and cajoling because it seemed more gentle.

I joked, of course.  We wouldn’t be doing this forever, right?  I mean, at some point she’d either learn to sleep or be old enough to deal with her wakefulness on her own..  We struggled in the mornings, Eric and I operating in a fog and Emily complaining grumpily that “the baby cried a lot last night”.

Two months ago, things started changing.  Cadence began, infrequently, sleeping through the night.  She combined two short naps into one longer nap and slowly but surely, around a month ago, began to sleep through the night more nights than not.  We still have a night about once a week when Cadence can’t resettle and we have to get up, but those nights are tolerable because of our new found glut of sleep.

And, of course, we have the added bonus of getting to feel superior over our refusal to engage in a bedtime battle of wills with an infant.  That we didn’t take the bad advice of leaving her along and scared to cry.  I don’t want to get into a debate. I can fully understand you need to get your baby to sleep, sometimes desperatly, but I couldn’t leave my baby to cry uncomforted for hours.  It’s just not how we roll (and, yes, my baby would cry for hours because that’s how SHE rolls).   All we really had was hope that our path would pay off and Cadence would sleep well in the end.  Of course, it it didn’t pay off, I wouldn’t feel superior, but it did so I do.

What Cadence says=What Cadence means

• Mama=mama(or daddy or any human)
• Up=Up (or down)
• Mah=more
• bye=bye(also goodnight and possibly hello)
• ba=ball(also sometimes book)
• broom=broom
• arrr=what a pirate OR a lion says
• emah=Emily
• okay=okay
• ‘gan=again*
• clock=clock*
• all done=all done*
• gaga=good girl#

*not said frequently enough to verify
#said frequently but not yet attributable.

(please sing as if singing the theme to The Beverly Hillbillies)

This is a story about a girl named C.
Who  didn’t like to nap as anyone can see.
One dinner time she was eating up some Ragu
and in the afternoon came some bubbling crude.
Poop that is, stinky pants.  Yucky.

Well the next thing you know, C wiped poop in her hair.
Wiped poop on her face, wiped poop everywhere.
Mom said, in the shower is where you ought to be
So she stripped the girl naked and tossed her in….um….there.

Yes, it happened.  After 8 years of parenting and two kids in diapers Cadence finger painted her body with poop.  Why?  I don’t know.    Some things Cadence does I say, “Well, wouldn’t YOU if you could?”  But poo painting?  I can’t say I want to ever do something like that.  I think it’s POSSIBLE that some ended up in Cadence’s mouth considering her propensity for putting EVERYTHING In her mouth, but that makes me want to throw up a little bit, so I’m trying not to think about that.

When I hit the top of the stairs I smelled her and the smell got worse the closer I got to the bedroom.  You know that scene in “There’s Something About Mary” when Cameron Diaz uses Ben Stillers’….um….stuff becuase she thinks its hair gel and her hairs all standing up and stuff.  That’s what Cadence looked like, but she used POOP as mousse.

I took no pictures.  I had to shower too because I decided the easiest way to deal with it, was just pick her up and carry her instead of trying to NOT get her poop on me.  Sigh.

Never a dull moment, I say.

The crying lifts me up out of sleep.  My brain is in a fog and I lay in bed for a minute, silent, hardly breathing, to make sure I heard what I thought I heard.  The cry rings out again.  A wail that turns into a plea for “mumum”.  I drag myself out of bed and stumble down the hallway.  The bedroom is lit in blue light and she is standing at the crib rail, sobbing.  Her hair is touseled and if it were lighter her cheeks would be pink from having been tucked under her blankie.

I coo at her and she stops crying and raises her arms to me.  I pick her up and she rests her head on my shoulder, her breath coming in little raggedy gasps.  She pats the back of my arm and I pick up her cue and pat her back.  We make our way back down the hall and settle into the rocking chair.

She uses her arms to push herself off of my chest.  She gives a glance to Eric, sleeping peacefully and the t.v. and then her head settles again, on my opposite shoulder with a distinct thunk.  She tucks her left shoulder under my chin and we rock.  The chair squeaks a little bit and makes a tapping noise when I rock backwards and it touches the windowsill.  We rest our heads on each others shoulders and I rub her back, her spine feeling like tiny little pearls under my fingertips.  She sighs and wrestles her arms down, under my arms, to lay flat against her body.  Her sign that she’d like to go back to sleep.

I continue rocking, counting time in my head, one second to rock back, one second to rock forward.  The rhythm we established months ago in desperation at times and in comfort others.  Her feet twitch against my legs and I know she’s asleep.  I stop rocking.

I count in my head, to five or ten, to see if she stirs and I stand slowly and quietly.  Her feet kick for just a second having been unsettled, but I stand in one spot and sway for a few minutes and she relaxes again.  I make my way back down the hall and into the blue lit bedroom.  I reach into the crib and toss back her blanket decorated with little bugs having a parade (the lady bug plays a horn, a dragonfly holds a star).  I lower her into the crib and pull up the cover so all I can see is the tip of her nose and the top of her head.  She makes a few grumpy noises and i lean into the crib and rub her back in a circle, my hand on her blanket making a swishing noise.  She settles, her knees pulled up towards her chest, her butt in the air, her head turned facing the right.  The blanket rises and falls as her breaths join in symphony with her sisters.  I sneak silently out of the bedroom door and back down the darkened hallway.

…spiced pumpkin softies from Woman’s Day. You can find the recipe here

Overall, these are pretty good. I skipped the pumpkin pie spice and just added some similar spices of my one (1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ginger, 1/2 tsp ground cloves). Emily gave them a thumbs up and the baby and the dog liked them too. Oh, and if you drop them onto your cookie sheet you have to flatten them.

Mine looked nowhere NEAR like the one’s in my Woman’s Day (there’s were tiny and very flat and round). Mine were big and sort of ….bumpy? The recipe claimed to make 60 cookies and I made 48 so I didn’t grossly over do the size.

I also used a pastry bag to pipe on the icing. It was easier, IMO, then trying to spread a dollop on each cookie.

This morning, Cadence was playing near me. I held out my arms and she walked into them, snuggling up against my chest for a hug. I’m so glad that this is something that Cadence has already learned, that we’re here and willing give hugs and kisses and that hugs and kisses make you and others feel good.

But more than that, I love the little world that our girls have come to understand as babies; a place where there is just love and kindness and hugs and kisses.

Emily is nearly eight now (well, 7 years and 10 months) and she’s learned, you know, that life isn’t all hugs and happiness and security. She has learned that sometimes people are downright mean to you for no reason and I wish I could keep her in that little shell she was wrapped in when she was Cadence’s age where you got what you needed and the only people around you were people who loved you.

But that’s not how life works, is it?

I don’t want this post to be a downer. That was totally not my intention. My point was, I love the fact that as babies and toddlers and young children , my children just expect to be loved because that’s what they live.

When Emily was a young child, she was fearless. It used to scare Eric half to death,b ut we realized that Emily had no fear of falling because, well, we never let her fall. She could climb as high as she wanted, secure in the thought that she wouldn’t fall and if she did fall, we’d be standing there to catch her and cushion her fall.

And I’m glad that Cadence will feel this way. That she’ll only know love and contentment because that’s what we give her and she’ll feel free to climb to the tippy top of the playground equipment because she has no fear of falling because we’re there. :o)

You all know it right? Basically what can go wrong will?

About six weeks ago, Emily got her annual cough. Emily gets this cough around the start of the school year and it lingers, on and off, through Christmas and into the new year. The past several years, we would run to the doctor and get sent home with meds. for her nebulizer. This year, we decided that we weren’t going to run to the doctor. We knew what she had and how to treat it and started giving her nebulizer treatments. But, this year Emily decided to change it up and started coughing so hard she would throw up. That accounted for three trips to the doctor and a just about that many days of missed school too.

Cadence, during this time gets a runny nose and a little baby cough. Nothing too horrible (and the cough was so little it was almost cute).

This week Monday, Emily is back to school We have a clean bill of health. We’re off the nebulizer for the first time in weeks. We get a call from the school. They think Emily has pink eye.

So, we’re back to the doctor. We get eye salve. Emily misses ANOTHER day of school to make sure she’s no longer contagious. Weds. morning I notice that the bloody patches Emily has on her eyes have gotten worse. I suck it and get her another doctors appointment and she misses a half a day of school. She has a < href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subconjunctival_hemorrhage">subconjunctival hemorrhage. She gets two different eye medications and a note so she can go back to school. The doctor makes a quick inspection of C’s eyes and pronounces her clear.

Thursday, I notice Cadence has a little baby fever and her runny nose is back. When she wakes up friday morning and starts “talking” it becomes obvious that she has Croup. Argh. We treat her at home, but she appears to be having trouble breathing over night from Friday into Saturday so we get out of bed and talk her to the ER. She has a breathing treatment, a chest x-ray and a steroid shot. We got home at 4 a.m. and cancel our activities for the biggest part of the weekend.

And now, to make matters worse, Cadence woke up from her morning nap with a goopy eye. Sigh.

We were in my bedroom, in my rocking chair in the sunny patch in the corner and Cadence was pushing against my chest. The sun catches her eyes and they turn a brilliant, clear hazel as she leans over my arm, half recklessly, stretching with every fiber of her body to try to and reach the windowsill behind me as we rock.

The rocking chair creeks and squeaks, making it’s own song. Emily is playing outside and the laughs and squeals of the kids carry up to the bedroom. I can’t resist and tickle the wrinkled skin under Cadence’s arm. She giggles in delight and turns back to trying and capture the window sill. I continue to rock. In the year since Cadence has been born I learned that my natural rock is two seconds. One second up and another second back to the ground. Cadence’s hair is swooshing softly in the air as I rock back and forth. Her head is becoming heavy as she is slowly giving over to sleep.

The dog comes upstairs to climb into bed. Cadence jerks her head up and swivels around to inspect him. He gives her a quick glance, spins in a circle twice and settles into a pile on the bed. I whisper to Cadence that puppy is going night-night too. She makes a brief attempt to catch Eric’s night stand before throwing herself over my arm again, her head dangling downwards. Within a few minutes, her eye lids are dropping and then closing. She’s asleep.

I shift her onto my shoulder and carry her into her room. She makes unhappy noises when I settle her into crib, but for now, she’s asleep.