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After the play date, Buttercup and I went out lunch with Uncle Dandy (that’s what she calls him, so sweet.)  You know, I really can’t get over how well she behaved today.  She was the perfect angel at the restaurant.  It was a reasonably upscale restaurant with the nicer linens, footed glasses, you know the routine.  I was really anticipating broken glass and ketchup stained napkins.  I guess practicing our table manners has paid off, because she was a perfect little princess.

There was a moment that if I had brought my camera with me…Uncle Dandy showed Buttercup how to balance a spoon on her nose.  Oh, that entertained her endlessly.  If you could have seen the two of them looking at each other with those impish grins…He’s one of those people who when he plays with Buttercup, it gives me such joy, such happiness.

I love my big brother.  He’s so strong and big and brave.  I think he could still pick me up and swing up through the air.  I missed him, and it was so great to have that lunch.  Good food and someone to share it with, I think that may be all I need in life.

We went on a rather exciting play date this morning.  There were tons of children there of all ages.  They were causing havoc in a wonderful “wheeeeeeeeee!” kind of way.

The house the play date was at had a truly huge play castle for the kids.  It was on playground-equipment scale.  Two towers, two slides, two rock walls, ladder, steps, three swings:  the kids had a blast.  I was watching the kids on the second story of the castle for a while.  There was a 13 month old up there, a 16 month old, and three kids over two.  Oh, dear Jesus.  There were too many openings, and I was fielding them all, trying to decide which child had the highest risk of falling to pick that one to chase back towards the center.  It turned into a game of, “You can’t catch me!”  I won’t be having five kids anytime soon, and needless to say, I was having a stroke.

One of the mothers moseyed on over and she said to me, “You look so relaxed, I don’t know how you do it.”  I turned around to gauge whether she was being sarcastic or not, but she was sincere.  It knocked me over, because, I realized I was having a great time.  Even while chasing those little wild cats all over the place, I was having the time of my life.  The sun was shining, the breeze was up, and all these little ones were hanging onto me, holding out fat little arms to be caught.  Life doesn’t get much better than that for me.

Buttercup was an absolute darling, too.  She played nicely, was so achingly gentle with the babies, and she even helped me clean up the toys before we went outside to play.  She’s becoming such a mature little lady.  It breaks my heart.

Making deals with Buttercup has become quite a challenge lately.  When baby meltdown commences, I’ll tell her if she does what “Mommy says,” she’ll get a cookie.  Most of the time that works.  What I didn’t realize is that Buttercup has begun to use my tactics against me :)

We bought a jar of pickles the other day, those little delicious kosher dills.  I really like them, and so does Buttercup.  In fact, I think she likes them more than any of her other favorite foods.  I truly think she could have eaten the whole jar in one sitting.  However, I’d been fending her off by saying, “Just one more!’  That worked for day one.  By day two, Buttercup was saying, “One more, please!”  Oh, no.  It’s the please that kills me:  we’ve worked so long on saying please.  Now, when she does it, I have a hard time saying no.  Needless to say, the pickles are gone, and I’m not buying anymore for a while!

We did another 1.3 mile walk today with the other play-date moms.  Now, for those of you who are in shape, please do not read this post or comment on my lack of physical fortitude.  I don’t know why I’m so out of shape, considering I chase a toddler all day, but I am.

The walk was gorgeous.  The fall has broken in, and I’m ready to get strengthened up before the winter comes and all I want to do is lie in front of the fireplace with a book.  For now, I’m mommy-on-the-move.

The walks downtown have been so good, too.  The storefronts are all freshly painted from the summer months, and two of our favorite local toy stores are open in full-swing.  One of them, as I discovered in the middle of a toddler meltdown, gives animals crackers out when customers leave.  Those animal crackers saved the day.  Buttercup has been behaving well in her stroller, despite the fact that she really is a baby on a mission lately.  Some of the other mom’s have jogging strollers, and I am very jealous ;)

On another note, I think I found a school of ballet I might be able to bribe into taking us for their “Mommy and Me” class.  Oh, boy - I’ve wanted to do ballet since I was a little girl.  Here’s my shot :)

The bookstore in our mall closed, and I’m really disappointed.  It feels like the whole thing is going to shut down soon.  I hate to see it go, but they did add something new much to Buttercup’s delight.

When we walked in the other day, we headed towards the play center, like we do, and in front of it was a three-seater carousel.  Oh boy, has it started something.  Buttercup went around and around and around until I was dizzy.  It costs a buck for like two minutes, but they’ve got us now.  There’s no way we can avoid that carousel without toddler fury!  She’s adorable on it, and I wish I could have taken pictures.  It’s adorable, she holds on with a death grip, laughing and squealing so loud it echoes down the corridors of the mall.  We’re working on “inside-voice” over here.  I just hope they add more things like that.  It’s going to be a long winter inside, and I need all the indoor areas I can find!

The autumn is turning the world into the coolest Eden I’ve ever come across.  Buttercup is enthralled.  We’ve been doing all the traditional fall-projects with leaf tracing and making pumpkin cookies.  We’re going to make apple tarts tomorrow.  I love it.

My favorite part has been the long walks we can take.  We’ve been traipsing all over town and the park.  I can’t wait to get to my parent’s house.  We’re going to take a walk through the orchard.  It smells so good in the orchard this time of year, the fall creeping in and the apples smelling so clean and fresh.  Soon, I’ll be home soon!

Christmas is coming.  Let the retail nightmare begin!

People seem to be particularly keyed up about the holidays this year.  We’ve gotten a ton of invites for the season, and everyone I know has already started their Christmas shopping.  Personally, I plan on doing as much shopping online as humanly possible to avoid the in-store madness.  While I do love that time of year, I can’t bring myself to step into a department store.  I am not a Black Friday warrior.

I’m planning Buttercup’s Christmas list ardently.  Christmas and gift-giving holidays have taken on a whole new meaning, now that I have her.  I want to give her everything I can possibly do.  Last year was wonderful, and I want this year to be just like it.  Nothing has ever made me quite as happy as sitting in our living room watching Buttercup open gifts.

The parentals and Grandma brought me another set of Old British Castles.  Today, I had to wash them and find a place to put it all in the cabinets.  This involved archiving other china and rearranging extensively.  At first, the project appeared to be impossible.  All I could envision was Buttercup chucking china all over the kitchen floor.  It actually worked out really well.

She got a huge kick out of matching up all the bowls, sandwich plates, and dinner plates with each other.  She was very gentle.  The set came with an adorable set of “fruit saucers.”  They’re small and dainty bowls.  Buttercup is crazy about them and declared them to be, “Mine!”  I think they’re just perfect for her, too.  She can have her raisins, cereal, cottage cheese, and all that jazz in those little bowls.

What surprised me was how well she handled it all.  Her fine motor skills have kicked it up to a new level.  She slowly eased the bowls into each other and gently stacked the plates.  She’s become such a big girl, and it still surprises me daily.

Yesterday, Buttercup was a on a tear of funny things to say.  All day long, it was one thing after another.  We were in the backyard in the afternoon, and she had on her heart sunglasses.
“Are you a cool cat, Buttercup?”  I was teasing her, and she looked over her shoulder, just as saucy as she could be.
“Meow, meow!”  Oh, she made me laugh.

Later, she started insisting there were elephants in the basement.  She threw up her little arm, like she does to make an elephant trunk.  I asked her what elephants were doing in the basement, she paused, looked up at the sky, and definitively announced, “Hiding!”  I told my dad about it later, and he laughed, because last week he had said in front of her, “That’s as likely as elephants in the basement.”  She’s a riot, this one.  I can’t believe the imagination, the memory, and the sense of humor my little toddler’s talking has brought to light.

I’ve got to get home soon.  The fall is here, I need to be romping in the fields with Buttercup.  My parents have a large piece of land that they affectionately call a farm.  They’re very cute as farmers.  They’re from Northern New Jersey ;)

That farm is an oasis of gorgeous rolling hills and tall trees.  This time of year, when the leaves are just starting to think about changing and the air is cool, it’s like it pulls me right back in…I must get back home soon.

I miss it desperately there.  I’d spend my whole life there and be content, I think.  It’s my Garden of Eden.  It’s almost completely private, and there’s just no noise.  Once I step out of the car there, it’s all hushed and the wind is moving through the trees, and you can hear the rain coming from miles away.  It’s just a whole different world there, and if I don’t get back soon, I’m going to started screaming at people on the street to stop honking their horns ;)  I’ve never quite adapted to the interruption of the noise of a city street.  I’ve heard people say it eventually becomes white noise, but I’m still waiting for that changeover after more than 4 1/2 years.

I miss my dad and mom a lot too.  There’s nothing like going home, because my mother cooks the most amazing food on the face of the planet, and I get to sit back, play with Buttercup, and eat like a queen.  Funny part is, she cooks so healthy, I actually lose weight when I’m there.

My dad, too.  I never appreciated Dad until I moved out.  He took care of so much of the minutia of my life.  At least once a week, he always checked all the fluids in my car, the pressure in my tires, and washed the windows.  He does these thousand of small things I’d never noticed until I moved out.  In the cold months, he’d warm up my car before I went to school/work and scrape the windshield.  Last time I was there, he serviced the car, cleaned it, and filled up the tires with air before I knew what was happening.  I just, I miss my mom and dad!

Something else to think about too, is that if I go home for a few nights, I can let Buttercup’s Daddy have some time for himself.  He can turn up the music loud, play his guitar at all hours, and sleep in as long as he can in the mornings.  He needs space, too.

I’ve got a buddy towards home, too that I really want to go with to take the kids out to pick apples, get cider, get a pumpkin or two, and do the local fall things with…I’m going to try and get it together to go this weekend or next.  It may have to be next, but I’m going to get there soon!

I’m working on figuring out how to handle the playground germ land.  The more time we spend in these settings primarily populated by toddlers, the more sick I’m getting.  I mean, it’s like I’ve got the plague.  I usually don’t get sick, and if I do, I’m out for a day or two, and then I’m back.  Lately, I’m not sure if it’s just the playground thing or if it’s getting to be flu season out there, but I am getting sick left and right.

I carry hand sanitizer in my bag, and I’m also a take 5023455392 vitamins in the morning kind of gal.  We wash our hands lots around here, as Buttercup is prone to getting a little sticky ;)  So, what’s the deal?  Is this just the season or am I getting to be *gasp* what work calls “a sickie?”

We had a play date in the park today with a couple of the other parents from the mother’s group.  It was really nice.  Buttercup made some new friends.  There was a particularly sweet little boy who was very good about sharing and holding hands, and then a wee little girl, about 14 months old, who Buttercup continually tried to help around the playground.  She did very well today - she didn’t say “mine!” once.

The park here is huge, divided up into a variety of different areas.  There’s an adorable duck pond that Buttercup loves to go to.  She chucks food at those ducks like crazy, but even more than the ducks, she likes the fish.

We’re also going to start doing story time at the library.  We’d been to a couple of other places locally that have story time, but I’m really interested to see what the library has to offer.  She loves books so much, and I want to do everything I can to encourage her to explore the world of books.

The mother’s group folks are so far, so good.  I’m still impressed with how organized they are and efficiently the group is run.  We’re getting ready to do a meal train for a family whose father has been diagnosed with leukemia, and it’s just, I’m really amazed, but it seems like they’re good women without an agenda other than helping people and getting the kids together.  There was also some talk of a MNO (mothers-night-out) and that sounds so good to me right now ;)  Daddy and I get to go out about three times a year sans Buttercup.  This would be a big deal for me.  I’d put Buttercup to bed and ditch Daddy with the baby monitor!  Woohoo!

I was pricing some new products tonight, and I saw this sterling silver centerpiece that that was over 77,000 dollars retail.  I started breathing heavily, and I thought to myself, what if I mess this up?  What if I truly screw this up?  For like, 30 seconds, I was completely immobilized with fear, paralyzed.

I’ve had a couple of moments in my life like that lately.  I feel like, my God, if I mess this up, it’s serious:  not a little mistake, a HUGE MISTAKE.  It’s made me realize something enormously important.  There’s no point in operating under the idea that you’re going to fail.  Absolutely none.  If I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail, but there is no benefit in operating under that assumption.  In fact, it’s wrong to work that way.  If I’m working with failure in mind, I’m going to perform more poorly than I would be if I believed that it’s all possible. 

Before I started a series of personal project, I read a bunch of quotes on perfectionism.  In my heart, I think I am a perfectionist.  I force it away myself as hard as I can, but it’s still there, the need to be perfect, “everything to everyone.”  These quotes helped me a great deal, in fact, they moved me to a place where I could operate as a creative person without that enormous fear of not being good-enough.  The creative process is always worth the journey, and it’s not a search for perfection.  It’s a search to find the place where you can create, be, live, laugh, love without being demoralized by comparison.

Nothing that is complete breathes.  - Antonio Porchia

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.  - John Henry Newman

To escape criticism - do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.  - Elbert Hubbard

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.  - Confucius

Once you accept the fact that you’re not perfect, and then you develop some confidence.  - Rosalynn Carter

Always live up to your standards - by lowering them, if necessary.  - Mignon McLaughlin

Rody is an inflatable horse/donkey/pony.  I’m really not sure which, but we love Rody.  One of our local toy stores sells him, and Buttercup, from the time she was about a 1 1/2, climbed on Rody the minute we walked into the store.

He’s made in Italy, and he is a ton of bouncing fun.  They also have an adult sized Rody that Play Date Mom and I tried out in the toy store which was very amusing for us and the other customers ;)  Any case, he comes in a variety of colors, and he’s just a whole lot of fun and won all kinds of awards for helping little ones develop physical skills.  I can’t tell you how many times Buttercup has been bouncing on the bed, and I’ve talked her down with bringing Rody into the room.  He really wears her out, too.  Good before bedtime thing to get the wiggles out.

Buttercup loves to paint.  From the artistic talent of various relatives, including my father and Daddy’s mother and grandmother, I’ve gauged that she may have a shot at being a very creative person.  So, I’m nurturing this past time.  However, painting with darling Buttercup can be a catastrophe of smeared paint.  The other day, Daddy and Buttercup were painting, and Muddy Paws (now called Paws of Paint) tromped through the finger paint and took off through the house.  Oh, dear God.

Nevertheless, a dear friend of mine had some words of wisdom about the messier projects in life.  It’s seriously made a difference in the life of a mommy of a toddler.  She said to use those inexpensive thin vinyl tablecloths for painting, play dough, etc.    It’s a good call.  Anycase, the other day Buttercup and I were painting, and I realized it looked like we were having a picnic.  I’ve been using paper plates for the paint palette, and a red plastic cup for the watercolor brushes.  I stood up, looked down, and it was a painting picnic ;)

How brave is this?  I just read an article about a family of three who sold their home to go tour la world for a year.  How much fun is that?  I can barely get to the grocery store and back with Buttercup.  Reading the story got me excited, I cornered Daddy.
“Why don’t we just sell the house and go live in Europe for a year.”
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“Whatever you want, sunshine.”  I showed him the article, and he was totally into it.  Selling all your worldly possessions, finding your way around the world, tasting the different foods, the air, the different textures of the earth.  I’m just so impressed to have read about someone who did it.  I found the mom’s blog.

They are my new heroes.

I think I may live, but oh boy.  This little go around w/whatever Daddy brought home is truly vile.  Buttercup appears to be the healthy one in the house, and she’s running, jumping, laughing.  I’m just hoping it doesn’t hit her next.

Today, we really couldn’t take our half-dying selves anywhere in public, but we did take a walk with Buttercup in her stroller.  We just went around town and through some of the areas nearby I love so much.  We had to get her out of the house.  She really isn’t a stay-at-home baby.  By the time we got back here, Daddy and I were coughing up a lung, wheezing, etc, and Buttercup was kicking her legs in the stroller, begging to go further.  It’s a beautiful city to take walks in, especially with autumn pending and the air is cool.

It’s really a historic city of brick homes, tall chimneys, and metal roof tops; I think that’s how I’ll always remember it.  We’re way at the top of a hill, and after the leaves are gone, I can look out the nursery window and see half of the city.  It’s gorgeous.  It looks like a place where Mary Poppins would be, dancing with a chimney sweep on the roof ;)

If we could afford to, I’d keep this house always.  We could come here on the weekends, romp around the city, go the old familiar places that I love.  The view from the window next to my desk is amazing, especially at sunset.  There’s an old church tower where all these birds gather at sunset, and it’s the last place the sun beams touch before the sun sets.  I swear, it’s as if they go up there to watch the sunset, those birds.  I’ve often noted they all face west…check out pic.  How many hours I’ve sat here looking at that view, writing and dreaming up my world.  It’s going to be a shame to ever leave it, in a lot of ways.  I’ll probably end up in a suburban nightmare somewhere ;)

So, I joined the mother’s group today.  I went to my first official meeting where we took votes on things, and the kid’s reigned total havoc in the church basement.  There was also a guest speaker there talking about mother’s issues.  I was scared it was going to be a Desperate Housewives scene, but it really wasn’t.  It was surprisingly pleasant.

Unexpectedly, I think I might enjoy this a lot.  They’re very active in the community, and they’re organizing food drives for Thanksgiving, a coat collection for children in need, and getting folks to donate toys for Christmas among many other things.  I’m actually pretty impressed with how thoroughly they’re run and structured as a non profit organization.  Recently, I’d been praying for a way to help people, to be given that ability:  this might be it.

The social dynamic is pretty good, too.  There are mothers of all different ages and walks of life.  I’m impressed with who they are and what they’re doing with their time.  I’m hoping this is going to be a beautiful thing, where I can have this surrounding group of women who are in the same place that I am.  It’s exciting in a way.  My mom always talks about a dear friend who had children of a similar age, and how much it meant to her to have someone to reflect with about the obviously challenging events that comprise raising children.  I hope I don’t get too optimistic, because that always destroys me, but I think this might be a very very good thing.

I had left Buttercup home with Daddy when I went to the meeting.  Today was his day off.  I wanted to have a chance to kind of do the meet and greet without chasing Buttercup around.  Well, by the time I came home, Daddy, who said he had a slight sore throat, was practically dead.  I couldn’t believe it.  He had a plethora of health issues, and he needed me to take care of him.  It always surprises me when he gets sick, like it doesn’t happen, but of course it does.

When he’s sick, I’m limited in what I can do to help him because of darling Buttercup.  I have to balance her and him and keeping her away from Daddy on his day off is not exactly easy.  So, I loaded him up on vitamins and ibuprofen, gave him Chamomile tea with honey for his throat, and put him to bed.  Poor guy, then, I took Buttercup out so he could sleep.  I’m just hoping Buttercup and I don’t get it.  It’s nasty, whatever it is…

Gymboree is having a big sale!:  They have the cutest fall stuff.  I must have this hat for Buttercup.  Their Halloween stuff is pretty cute too.

Chinese Baby Formula Scandal: So sad.  This is the kind of stuff that makes breastfeeding look like a REALLY good idea.

Plastic Bottles: Bisphenol A Of ‘Some Concern’ According To U.S. Government Report:  Can we please get this crap out of our plastics, please?

Baby Center’s Freebie Area: Free stuff, gotta love that.

Acetaminophen Linked to Childhood Asthma:  Seriously, what can we use safely?  Now, TYLENOL is a problem?