Do You Hear That?

It's the sound of peace and quiet in my home. Peanut is napping (Gboy fell asleep with her while trying to get her to stay in once place long enough to nap - a rarity these days). Sweet Pea is snoozing. I'm alone. For at least a few moments.

I find there are precious few moments to myself these days. Sleep is an ongoing battle (more with Peanut than Sweet Pea, but between the two of them, I'm lucky to get 2 hours of sleep in a row for the last 3+ weeks).

Needless to say, this may be why I find myself incredibly short-tempered lately. Still, we do have good times and laughs. The other day, we went to the store and when I put Peanut in the grocery cart and started pushing it across the pavement in the parking lot, she giggled and said, "That tickles my bum!" Or there was the other night when she started telling jokes and cracked herself up until she couldn't speak because she was laughing so hard - at her own jokes! Sweet Pea laughs at everything, but especially her old sister, which means that the more one laughs, the more the other laughs. They're a comedy team already.

Gboy and I may lose our minds in the next year. We've started thinking about the possibility of buying a new home. We'd like to exchange our current configuration for one more suited to our family's needs. But that's not proving to be easy as we're looking for something fairly specific and of course, it doesn't appear to exist as is. The possibility of a renovation is in our future and while exciting, we need to find the right fixer-upper to start. Yay! And urgh.

A star is born?

Last night, Peanut put on her "inside shoes" and ran back and forth in the hallway, tapping her feet on the hardwood floor all the way. Then she grabbed her "brushy" (toothbrush) and ran to look at herself in the mirror. Who doesn't look stunning in the equivalent of tap shoes while waving a toothbrush in the air? And then she began to sing a little tune I like to call the "Don Don Anpan Song" since the words basically consist of "don don don don, Shokupanman, don don don don, Karepanman," etc etc. with various Anpanman characters. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when she tapped her way through the doorway, waving her brush and singing her song. She looked like such a showgirl!

While there are moments when I find parenting challenging and when Peanut shows that she's heading in the direction of difficult behaviors or tantrums, I mostly find her comical and delightful (even when she's pressing my buttons by testing her boundaries). Her easy smile and frequent giggles, along with the desire to constantly be entertaining us, makes things awfully fun. I'm not sure how I survived the first 4 months or so of her life when she was frankly, quite boring. Adorable and cuddly, but boring. After that, things picked up and I've enjoyed her much more. I still find the day to day parenting to be monotonous at times. Many times in fact. But that doesn't change the fact that I lover her and I love parenting and when she pulls out the stops and puts on a show like that? What can I do? I laugh and melt and want to eat her up.

Without further ado, one gratuitous cute kid picture and a video. In the video she is watching the ducks at the duck pond, saying "patta patta" (the sound of beating wings in Japanese) and "duck ota!" which I think roughly means "there's a duck!"