I’m eating popcorn with my four year old and we’re watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (and skipping over half of the movie to avoid the scary parts).
We’re watching the part where the Boggart is brought out of the classroom’s closet and the kids are meant to face their biggest fears.
J is laughing. It’s a sweet moment. Then he turns and asks me, “Mama, what are you afraid of?”
Immediately, I know my answer. I can feel the weight of the words on my tongue, as I hem and haw, pretending to have to search for my answer.
When I think that it’s been nearly two years since we closed on our property, I can hardly believe it.
On our closing date, I was just beginning to show in my pregnancy with H and now he’s ONE.
The frame is up and the roof is on. By this summer, we should be starting to move in.
But we’re not exactly getting out the packing tape just yet.
Now it’s time for all of the little decisions that make up the fun of building a house. We get to pick out the cabinets, the vanities, and the fixtures that will give our home it’s character.
It’s exciting, for sure. My Pinterest account has been getting a lot of use these past few months. But it’s also surprisingly stressful.
What I didn’t picture when thinking about this phase of our build was that life would still be going full-steam ahead.
In the perpetual Hallmark movie that plays in my mind, this phase looked more like that part of Fixer Upper where the homeowner sits down with Joanna Gaines over a cup of coffee and looks at different shades of shiplap.
Guys, it is not like that.
What really happens is that one day you get a call from your contractor (shout out to my brother-in law, for building our house), and he will gently remind you that in order for him to install your kitchen cabinets, you actually need to pick them out first.
Whoops.
Where our future kitchen, powder room, and door to the deck will be.
I had no idea that picking out a bathroom vanity would feel as monumental as picking out a baby name. Or that, like deciding on a baby name, my husband and I would have very different ideas about what we liked.
*Cut to a scene of me sending ten different types of wallpaper to my husband–him picking one that he likes–me, telling him that I have since changed my mind about that one and it is no longer a choice. Then put that scene on repeat, but swap the wallpaper out for sinks.*
There is a ton of back-and-forth, disagreements, and compromises that occur when building a house with your significant other.
In fact, I think that pretending to build a house together should be a necessary exercise in couples therapy. I mean, it hits all the boxes for working on those communication skills!
D and I have butted heads quite a few times throughout this process, but it has also made us work on being better listeners and ways we can better express our wants and needs to each other.
Our future living room area
Speaking of miscommunication: check out our GIGANTIC windows. When we were working with our architect to design them, we said we wanted lots of natural light. He gave us a design with big windows. We said, No no! Make them even bigger!
D and I, looking back, had no clue just how big we were asking him to make them. On the tiny paper, the windows looked just above average!
Even when he said, Are you guys sure you want them this big? That’s pretty big…, we assured him that we did.
So here we are with our big, beautiful, and extremely overbudget windows…oops again.
It’s been a minute since I’ve last written here, and that’s with good reason. Becoming a mama of two back in December turned out to be only the beginning in a year of changes for our family.
We bought some land in upstate New York and moved from our beautiful apartment in downtown Stamford, Connecticut.
A then two-year-old J, after we bought our land
We moved into a townhouse with our toddler and newborn, and then I went back to work, with a now three-hour roundtrip commute.
I got accepted to begin PhD level coursework.
I had two health scares that, with the second one being most recent and a major wake up call to prioritize my health and well-being again.
J began preschool. H is crawling and trying his best to catch up to his big brother. D and I are marveling at how fast life seems to be going and trying to make time for each other in the whirlwind of this stage of our lives.
Our family of four
Our house is now in the early stages of construction. By this time next year I will be writing from a room in our “forever home.”
It got me thinking about how we choose where to raise our children, and how much of that choice is based on where you can afford to live.
D and I had never had any intention to move back to upstate NY, as smitten as we were with downtown life and the conveniences it held. But when we looked around for a home for our family, we found that there just wasn’t anything we could get for our money that looked like the houses we had grown up in. So we looked further and further north until we landed back in our hometowns.
I had a conversation with an old friend last night that made me realize how prevalent this kind of move is. She had been born and raised in Westchester and intended to buy a house with her husband in the area, until realizing that they were priced out of the market. And upstate they went.
Even thinking back to why my parents moved here from the Bronx with my siblings and I almost twenty years ago. They wanted a yard for us to play in and for us to finally have our own bedrooms. Things that they couldn’t afford in the neighborhood they had been raised in.
I’m sure this is a tale as old as time (to blatantly steal a phrase from Beauty and the Beast). City populations grow and grow, so people begin to spread farther out to afford housing. But still, there’s a small sadness about not being able to afford a home in the place you’ve called by that name for so long.
I feel fortunate that our parents chose to move further north while we were young, even as the prices here steadily creep up as well. We have a home here and a safe place for our children to roam. I just hope they get to have the choice to raise their own children here as well if they choose to.
On December 14th, 2012, 26 people lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Many of those killed were children.
As this horrible anniversary passes, it makes me think about the progress and lack of progress we’ve made as a nation towards keeping our children safe.
Ten years ago there was such momentum to pass stricter gun control laws that ultimately did not go as far as they should have. There are still loopholes in our system to get around background checks.
There are still people out there who believe the faulty rhetoric that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” even as we witnessed this past May how an armed security officer fled the school during the Uvalde shooting and police officers stood on the sidelines as children were murdered inside of their classrooms.
The reality that school shootings, that mass shootings in general, are still occurring is a harsh one that makes me feel at times hypervigilant.
There is an annual Thanksgiving parade that happens outside of our apartment building each year. I told D there was no way we were going to take Jameson to it. Running through my head was the parade shooting that had happened in another state this past summer. What if that happened here, in our city?
It wasn’t until the morning of the parade, as I was walking to get coffee with Jameson, that I decided it was safe enough to go.
On our short walk I passed at least five bomb sniffing dogs, police blockades, along with FBI agents. Back into our building I had a brief chat with a neighbor who said he could see snipers from local law enforcement on the rooftops along the parade route. That is what it took for me to feel safe.
When I told my husband what I had seen and that now we could go down to the parade for a bit, he shook his head in disbelief. Not at me, but at the fact that a local parade now needed this much security for people to attend with their loved ones.
It is unrealistic to expect every community event and every school to be armed like this. We can’t live each day in constant fear but we also can’t live in ignorance either.
As just one person, the problem of gun violence can feel overwhelming and insurmountable. But at times like this I hug my son a little tighter and I try to find something productive to do with my worry. Today that looked like going onto the Sandy Hook Promise website and signing a petition for stronger laws regarding background checks.
It was a small thing, but it was something positive and empowering. I encourage anyone feeling overwhelmed by the issue of gun violence (or really anything in the news), to find something small they can do to contribute to being a part of the solution. After all, every little thing counts.
We had Jameson’s six month evaluation last week for his speech progress.
He has come a long way.
Things Jameson loves: Buzz Lightyear and a good leaf pile
He uses his words when sharing (or not sharing) with peers, instead of his hands. A big relief!
He imitates new words and sounds with confidence!
He can string together a number of phrases and can be understood most of the time!
According to his speech therapist, he is still about 6-8 months behind his non-speech delayed peers but we are confident he will close that gap eventually.
He requested a side of cereal with his chicken tikka masala. An odd choice, but a choice he was able to ask for!
I am just so happy my little boy is trying out new words every day. I’m so happy we are able to understand him more and he gets the joy of feeling understood.
We still have many moments when it is hard to understand what he is trying to say, and he will still resort to gibberish often when he is playing. We still have moments when a meltdown occurs because we can’t understand what it is that he wants. It isn’t perfect or easy, but its progress.
It’s another step forward for our baby boy. He’s speaking more and more each day, and for that I am so very grateful.
I will be 37 weeks pregnant tomorrow and today was day one of my maternity leave.
It came about a bit earlier than I had planned, thanks to a brief hospital visit for dehydration (thanks, stomach bug), followed by another head cold.
At the advice of my OB, I “pumped the brakes” and took my maternity leave early.
And the timing couldn’t have been better. Jameson developed what we’re pretty sure is a case of pink eye yesterday, so I got to spend my first day on leave at home with him.
Sure it was a slight wrench in the plans I had to finish packing the hospital bag and organize the house. But honestly, it was also a relief to know that I could just decide to keep him home with me today without worrying about the repercussions of calling out of work again with a sick child. Or having to guiltily try and send him to school and hope he does okay because I can’t afford another missed day.
My little pink eye guy, eating just the cream from some candy cane Joe Joes during our Christmas movie marathon
So yes, it was a different kind of day than I had planned but I’m still very grateful for it.
We mostly stayed home and played make believe games and watched one too many Disney Christmas movies. I got to make him every one of his meals today, which was nice to do. And I even took him food shopping with me in the morning (something he really enjoys because he loves to sample stuff as we go along).
Like mother, like son. This kid loves to snuggle in laundry baskets, just like I did when I was little. It cracks me up and warms my heart all at once.
He’ll probably be home with me again tomorrow and thankfully I can once again choose that option without stress, thanks to being on leave. Man, what a pleasant feeling that is.
It’s funny how so much changes from your first to your second pregnancy. When expecting Jameson, I documented every week diligently and took monthly bump photos that have been lovingly scrapbooked.
At 37 weeks, I’m pretty sure this is the first update I’ve written for this baby. Oops!
My beautiful baby shower, thrown by my sister and mom
As for bump photos? I was laughing to my mom about the fact that I might have five or six photos on my phone. Honestly, even that number sounds a bit high.
The only real “bump shot” I took around 4 months pregnant
I had heard from other moms that after your first pregnancy, the future ones fly by. Boy, were they not kidding!
Here I am, almost at the finish line of my second pregnancy and it feels like only last week I was finding out that I was expecting again.
I’m currently entering my second week of maternity leave, thanks to some back to back illnesses that caused my doctor to encourage an earlier rest period.
I’m finally packed and ready for our hospital stay and for Jameson to stay with our relatives while we’re at the hospital with the baby.
I’ve been able to do some fun stuff with Jameson to soak up these last days of him being an only child.
I got to attend Jameson’s school dance during the middle of the day. He was excited to have me there and I was grateful to have the time to spend with him.An outdoor holiday lights walk made for a perfect family day while trying to social distance while waiting for baby boy #2 to arrive
And my ankles have remained relatively un-swollen since I’ve been off from work, which is a real miracle in itself!
My scheduled C-section date is the 29th but I’m hoping this little guy decides to make his appearance before then. Jameson arrived at 38 weeks, so we will see!
I’m excited, I’m ready, and probably as rested as I’ll ever be, so I can’t wait to welcome baby number two into our family.
This past Wednesday, Jameson got hurt at school. He was running towards the slide, slipped, and rammed headfirst into it. This resulted in a seriously big bump that required me to leave work and take him to his pediatrician to get looked at.
The entire drive to his daycare had my mind reeling with how bad it might be. When the director called me that morning she had told me to “prepare myself” for how bad it looked, even though he was running around again and seemed to be doing fine.
Needless to say I was not doing fine as I pictured how horrific his head might look.
To try and calm my nerves I called my mom…which turned out to be the opposite of a good idea, as she went over the many reasons why she thinks our daycare sucks and we should pull him out of there.
Thankfully, when I got there he was in good spirits. The bump was large, no doubt about it, but still better than what I had been picturing in my mind after the daycare call.
All smiles for mama when I picked him up early for a doctor visit
Even with the relief of seeing that he wasn’t as injured as I had imagined and hearing from his doctor that he didn’t have a concussion, I still felt terrible.
My child got hurt again at daycare. My child got hurt while being in the care of someone else. This wouldn’t have happened if I was home with him, the guilty voice in my head scolded. I should have been there.
Never mind that toddlers trip all the time. Never mind that my son has fallen, tripped, and somersaulted over apparent thin air while in my care. He had never gotten a bump like that, and for that I was racked with guilt.
So what did I do to quell said guilt? Talk to another mom about it to make myself feel better? Journal about it even? Heck no.
I did the stereotypical working mom penance of ice cream and material objects.
One scoop of vanilla ice cream with a mountain of sprinkles and whipped cream at eleven in the morning? Coming right up!
Not one, but two new Halloween books from Barnes and Noble? Sure, you deserve it!
And why don’t we throw in a ten dollar realistic elephant toy since you’ve recently learned the word elephant and it will make mama feel better for having abandoned you at your very pricy daycare all day?
Picking out one of his new books at Barnes and Noble
Now here was my injured but happy as a clam child, thumbing through the pages of his new pop-up book with a belly full of sugar.
And there I was on the other side of the camera, feeling guilty still but placated by the fact that there was a smile back on my child’s face.
D came home later that evening and shook his head at the impulse buys I had made.
“He didn’t need any of this stuff, honey,” he said.
In a perfect world, each twenty-four hour day would magically fit in all of the things crammed onto my to-do list.
The laundry pile (aka my Everest) would never reach peaks that make my husband give me a sideways glance while casually mentioning that there sure are a lot of unfolded baskets of clothes in the living room.
The floors would be spotless, the toys put away, and the only dishes in the sink would be the ones from tonight’s homecooked meal.
But alas, this is the real world and it can be a total sh*t-show.
My son encapsulating the “lovable hot mess” vibe that his mama does as well
When I get out of work, assuming I don’t have to grocery shop or run some other errand, I have approximately one hour before Jameson needs to be picked up from daycare.
This leaves just enough time to cook something quick (if D is not home and cooking already) or try and tidy up a bit, OR try and tackle the laundry pile.
The hour flies by.
Then Jameson is home and it’s family dinner time, bath time, and chill time with him. Getting any type of housework done while he is awake after school is pretty much a no-go, as he is super cuddly and wanting all of my attention.
I’ve tried folding laundry while sitting next to him and it always ends up with him playing a game of knocking over the folded laundry pile.
It used to be that he would fall asleep at 7 and then I’d go workout or do some housework or work work, but those days are gone too. He doesn’t get tired until 8 now and by then I am also exhausted and ready for bed.
And have I mentioned I’m pregnant? Pregnant and tired? Well I am both of those thing to the degree of very.
Anyway, this rant about finding time to do everything I want to do during the work week is brought to you by decaf coffee and interrupted sleep due to pregnancy bladder.
It’s starting to feel like Autumn here in Connecticut and we wasted no time doing some of the most basic Fall things you can do: hitting up the Farmer’s Market and going out for cider donuts.
Jameson’s love for apples has returned just in time for apple picking season. Truly his mother’s child.
D and I took Jameson to our local Farmer’s Market this Saturday and it amazed me at how mature he has grown in these few months.
Our first trip to the market was probably sometime in the beginning of the summer and consisted of D shopping for fresh produce and baked goods, and me chasing after Jameson as he weaved in and out of the seller stalls. An Instagram worthy trip it was not.
Cut to this weekend and our little man was in it to win it. He stood my my side the whole time, named the different kinds of fruits and vegetables with me, and happily chomped on an apple that he picked out with enthusiasm.
Earlier in the morning we went to a local diner for an early bird breakfast after dropping D’s car off at the shop. Which brings me to our title topic: dining with a two year-old.
With a big boy fork and a straw full of juice, who could be happier?
Here too I have seen how Jameson is growing up and into the person he’s going to be.
You see, Jameson loves food but hates standing still. Especially if we are somewhere new like, oh, a restaurant. He thinks its silly to sit and wait for our meal when there are perfectly good nooks and crannies to be explored. Like the giant gumball machine filled with what he assumes to be brightly colored bouncy balls. Or the table of toddlers sitting right behind us who are probably just waiting for a friend like Jameson to walk over and make their acquaintance.
That is where my tradition of bringing a “busy bag” has come in clutch.
Feeling proud of himself for matching the square to the square. He did this puzzle about five times. Note to self: buy more puzzles.
I don’t remember when I first heard of the idea of a busy bag for toddlers in restaurants, but it has been a heaven sent more times than I can count. I’m sure it was probably the result of scrolling on Pinterest one sleep-deprived newborn night.
Either way, it helps D and I stick to our rule of no technology at the table. There is nothing we hate more than seeing a kid sitting at a restaurant with their parents, playing on an iPad the whole meal. It’s even worse when the parents are also zoned out on their phone.
Let’s be real for a moment. Tech addiction is a serious thing these days and most of us are addicted to some degree. It can take some planning and commitment to rein it in and focus on the present moment.
In our house this looks like time limits on television, no iPads for kids, and a self-imposed time limit on my own social media accounts to remind myself to unplug. There’s actually a section on iPhones to set this limit, which is helpful.
But back to our busy bags. They usually work out great in keeping Jameson occupied while waiting for his meal. Of course this time in particular I had recently dumped out his busy bag with the intention of refilling it with new items…and completely forgot to refill it.
What was left when inside when I opened it up in the diner? One shapes puzzle and a hot wheels car. Oh man.
I could feel my heart pick up it’s pace as he finished his puzzle for the third time and pushed it to the side.
“Wow, you did!” I exclaimed, a little too excitedly as I eyed our waitress who was busy with another table. Damn.
“You want to try it again?” I asked. My husband shook his head and handed Jameson a hot wheels car instead.
The joy of playing with that lasted about three minutes and then he was trying to stand up in his high chair.
“No no, Jamie. We’re waiting for our meal,” D said.
Jameson sat down with a dramatic cry that had some of the other patrons giving us the side eye.
Trust me guys, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. That was just his warmup cry, I thought to myself.
We went back and forth with this borderline meltdown dance for what felt like an hour but was probably closer to ten minutes, before our breakfast landed on the table.
“A bite of the cider donut before breakfast? My parents must really be scrambling here.”
Jameson happily dug into his feast of silver dollar pancakes and strawberries while I pretended my egg white omelet was just as good. It wasn’t, guys. Nothing is as good as syrupy pancakes. But alas, I’m trying to make sure my pregnancy weight gain stays on the healthy track *sigh*.
My two year-old looking like a five year-old somehow. How??
It was a close one, but we managed to have a somewhat relaxing breakfast in public, with a toddler. And no tech.
Paige is Parenting 