Some things I want to remember...

The way Brody says, "Nooooo..." in his little sing-song voice. 

How when I'm holding Bonnie upright in my arms, she hugs me tightly and buries her face in my shoulder when she gets happy or excited at something. 

When Brody acts possessive over his toys, but then agrees to share one with Bonnie, even one of his favorites sometimes. He holds it close to her hand and waits as she eventually grabs it from him slowly. 

The way I can easily make Bonnie have a big smile when I say, "Bop, Bop, Bop." 

As we get ready to go somewhere, Brody is known to race to his room real quick, open up his sock drawer, and insist on wearing socks on his hands to wherever we are off to. 

How Brody says, "Hat-ie" for hat. And how he loves to wear some type of a hat most places (just like Dada), even if it is his bike helmet. 

How Bonnie likes being bounced to sleep each night in my arms. I commonly am seen bouncing my brains out at the edge of couch while watching TV in the evenings with Jeff.

The way Brody puts one hand in his high chair tray and says, "Upee" to let is know that he wants a snack. 

The only time Brody will snuggle (aside from being sick) is when he is playing a game on my phone. He will sit on my lap and lay back against my body. This is a time I give him many kisses. 

He curls and crosses his toes when he plays phone games too. His toes melt my heart. 

When Bonnie is all wrapped up in her swaddler, many times her tiny fingers stick out of the bottom of the arm wrap part. They tickle my stomach when I'm feeding her or cuddling her. 

When Bonnie reaches her arms out to touch my face. Her hands are the softest and when she touches me with her small, gentle fingers, it gives me the sweetest feeling.

Brody gives Bonnie kisses. This doesn't happen all of the time, but when it does, he bends down, puckers his little lips, and gives her a quick kiss on the top of her head. It's adorable and makes me really happy. 

Just let me tell you a bit about my little girl...

This little girl is perfect to me- from her cute round cheeks to her slightly turned up nose- I love her so so dearly. Dearly is a cliche word, I know, but it describes my love for her with exactness. I just want to squeeze her up and never let her go. 

She is so understanding, even at a young age of almost six months. With being a second child, she has learned to be patient quickly. 

While her brother is a daddy's boy through and through, I'm fully enjoying the fact that she seems to be favoring me. I'll hold her and love her as much as I can for I know that at some point that all might change a bit. 

She likes to sleep in later than anyone else in the house. (Well, later than Brody, which means when he is up, Jeff and I are up... Not so much by choice.) When I hear her sweet coo on the monitor I always walk in to see my happy little girl laying on our bed in the middle of all of our blankets. It's my favorite sight- her excited little smile. 

She still fits in my wrap. Oh thank goodness, because holding her close to my body gives me one of my favorite feelings in the world. Whether she is sleeping there, or just hanging out, she's content. And so am I- we have each other. 

I'm so grateful for this beautiful little girl. She is starting to develop a sense of humor and making her laugh is my new favorite hobby.

Bonnie Cait. I love that I get to call her my daughter forever.

Each evening I hold her until she's fast asleep in my arms. And while I know that I am not creating perfect habits, I just like knowing that she comfortable in my arms, and if that is how she wants to fall asleep right now, then that is okay. My baby girl won't be this small, sweet size forever. I will cherish these sweet sleepy moments. My little girl.

Two Years of Being a Momma

Brody,

You are two years old today. I could easily write about how this time has went by so fast and how I can't believe you are a two whole years old already... But actually, two years feels just about right. 

... I'm so thankful for that. 

When you were handed to me on that memorable evening that I became a mom, my life changed. My life became a bit slower and a bit more important. Each day since the day you were born I'm reminded constantly of how time passes with or without me noticing. I never want to stop noticing time passing while I am a mom.

I am not about to say that each moment of motherhood is packed full of rainbows and butterflies, but I will say each moment is filled with lessons and memories. I am so thankful I get to have so many memories with you as a part of them.

Brody, you have changed my life for the better. Before becoming a mom there were so many things I was unsure of. Would I continue my education? Would I start a career? Would I live in the city? Would I start my own business? Would I speed on the highway? Would I cheat on a test? Many, many things were harder for me back then, until I became your mom. As you were placed in my arms that day, two years ago, the stars aligned for the first time in my life. Things became clearer when I became your mom.

Life immediately felt different that day. As I felt your soft skin and looked into your perfect little eyes, I realized that I was important. I thought I knew what importance was before, but that day I learned a whole new meaning of the word. The responsibility, patience, and integrity that comes within that word was clear to me at that moment. 

From that day on, my life became about you. These past two years I've lived this new, wonderful, life of motherhood. A day hasn't passed that I haven't been able to kiss your sweet face or hug your cute little body. 

I know that someday will come that this won't be possible. You'll move away from the comfort of our home and perhaps a call on the phone is the closest thing I'll have to a goodnight hug. I hope with all my heart that when that day comes, I can look back and know that I did my best to make each day count. I hope that I can say that time went by as fast as it should. I hope that I won't feel too sad that that chapter is over, but rather I hope I will feel comfort knowing I was blessed with the experience of motherhood. 

Brody, you made me a mommy. And for that, I am so thankful. It's the most important role I could ever hold during this life. Learning how to raise you is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. But at the same time, it's the most rewarding thing I've get been able to experience. 

Today I was teaching you how to push, one at a time, the peddles on the new little red tricycle we got you for your Birthday. I would repeat push, push, push over and over to help remind you what we were doing in order for you to move down the sidewalk. Every so often I would let go of the front of your bike and you would be moving, all on your own, until you would forgot again and you would come to stop. Your cute little face,under your helmet, would look up at me wondering what we were supposed to do next. And we would start again.

I love being that person you look up to when you get unsure of something. As your mom, I want to be a person worth looking up to. As we travel down the sidewalk of life together, I promise to always be there to remind you and help you along the way. 

I love you little bee. Happy Birthday! I have loved the past two years of my life and you are to thank for that.

Love,

Momma

Maybe if towels didn't exist, marriage might be a little bit easier.

As I walk into the bathroom the familiar hand towel is strewn across the counter. How in the world is a towel, meant to be used to dry your hands, supposed to get dry in time for the next use if it's left in a jumbled mess and not hung up?

At least it's better than having a huge bath towel taken out of the drawer (instead of the hand towel) to be used as a hand towel, and yes still left in the counter in a jumbled mess. Isn't the size a dead give away as to what the different towels are meant to be used for??

Speaking of different sizes of towels... Let's walk ourselves into the kitchen. We have two types of towels- hand towels and dish cloths. Hand towels are again, meant to be used to dry your hands. They are NOT to be used like a dish cloth. Therefore I should never see a hand towel drenched in gross whatever water and draped across the sink. Save me.

Furthermore, towels should never, and I mean never, be left with pieces of food inside of them. Thank you for doing the dishes, but seriously if I have to lift one more dish cloth that is left in the sink and find myself sprinkling mysterious food particles everywhere I'm going to scream!

One more thing to do with towels. These are ones commonly found in the bedroom. Bath towels don't belong on the floor. (Neither do dirty clothes for that matter.) I don't enjoy cleaning up toys off the floor, but I have learned to except that aspect of my everyday life. However, I definitely don't enjoy cleaning up adult sized towels off the ground that have been previously used. And hey, bath towels could be used more than once to lessen my laundry loads- wouldn't that be a concept. 

We won't name any names here. I'll let you use your imagination. 

Oh, towels.

#momlife

I probably shouldn't admit that the following event really happened, but I'm going to in order to describe some of the things us moms do in desperate situations... At least I hope a few other moms can relate with similar experiences. There is a good chance though that I might be the only one insane enough to let something like this happen.

Here it goes: 

Bonnie sleeps in our bed. I love being able to cuddle my babe all through the night. I may even be able to say that I love the restful nights I get by doing so even more. Anyway though, whenever she wakes up, I just pull her close to me and feed her. This is usually a perfect situation- she falls back to sleep, and therefore I fall back to sleep. Works like a charm every time... Well, except for last night.

So in the middle of night, I pulled Bonnie close and she started to eat. She must have been asleep for quite awhile before that because she started to experience  "the flood" of milk- so much that she started to gag. Oh no. Please, please no. And then cough, cough, whoosh, I then experienced "the flood" of milk, otherwise known as throw up.

Both my shirt and the sheets underneath me were sopping in warm liquid. Bonnie somehow was dry. (She has perfected the projectile technique in her short 2.5 months of life.) As I lay there, my eyes so tired I could barely keep them open, I thought, "Why me? Why this? Why now?" I got up, noticed how my baby was somehow now sound asleep, noticed how Jeff was still sound asleep, and left them both to change my shirt.

Now the question remained- Do I wake them both up by turning on the light, getting them out of bed, removing the wet sheets and mattress cover, putting on clean sheets, and praying that Bonnie will fall easily back to sleep? My tired self answered with a "Um, I don't think so."

So I solved my problem with the next best thing- two towels. One to soak up as much milky puke as I could, and one to lay right underneath us. Yes, on top of the remaining puke. 

And that's how we slept. 

Honestly, this decision felt absolutely logical in the dead of the night last night. Completely logical until I woke up this morning and remembered why I was laying on top of a towel. 

Yup, that happened last night. I slept with puke. 

#momlife

But gosh, she's so worth it.

a momma's identity

I have to say it- I just love being pregnant. When I'm pregnant I feel so happy carrying my little inside of me twenty-four hours a day. I feel proud to wear my belly out places and enjoy the extra attention I get for it.

When I'm not pregnant anymore, I find myself yearning for those same pregnancy feelings that I love.

This "wishing to be pregnant" feeling comes strongest at the rare times I'm out in public without my kids. I have a "baby face", as some would say, and I doubt that any stranger would guess that I had two of my own babies waiting for me at home. It has been a common thing for people to guess that both of my younger sisters are actually older than me. We all three think this is funny, but are very used to it.

With this being so though, when I don't have my kids with me, I don't think that anyone would think that I was a mom. And I am a mom. And I am so proud of that fact. It's my favorite identity- my momma identity.

However, when I'm pregnant- everybody knows. They see my baby bump and ask questions, or they don't ask questions, but I am just content that they know. This makes me so happy and so proud.

I love being a momma and I want everyone to know it. When I feel like people are looking at me like a regular person, and not a mom, it somehow makes me feel weird, because I feel like they should know. When checking out alone at the grocery store, I feel the urge to say, "Plastic please, and also, I'm a mom!"

I've never really done this, obviously, but I honestly get the urge to.

So my pregnant belly fixes these urges, and I love it. I love being pregnant. I love being a momma. Everyday I wake up and know that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing with my life- living and loving these two beautiful babies.

timeouts

Now that Brody is at the age where he is starting to understand right from wrong, parenting life has all of a sudden become a whole lot harder. He likes to push the limits. For example, if I tell him not to touch the TV, he will look me in the eye, and touch the screen as gently as he can with one little chubby finger. Another example is if I tell him to not hit, he will softly tap the thing or person he had decided to hit with a big smile on his face like he wants me to know that it is "nice hitting", not "real hitting". He is like this in many different scenarios, and let me tell you, it can drive me crazy at times.

Right now a speech pathologist comes to our house every other week to work with Brody. He is still not talking, so when I took him in for his 18 month check up, the doctor thought that it would be beneficial for him to be a part of this program.We'll see if it helps... it's been three months and we haven't seen much progress in the speech department.

The program believes that working on daily struggles with the child (such as hitting, screaming, throwing food, etc) in certain ways will help him in his speech development at the same time. She suggested that we try putting Brody in timeout. Before she visited at house, I hadn't thought much of trying timeouts with Brody because he seemed like he was too young and couldn't understand consequences yet. However she thought it was a good idea, and hey, who am I to question the expert?

So for the two weeks following that meeting that she had suggested timeouts, I was a strict "timeout giver". If he started to scream, hit me, or disobeyed, away he went to his room. It was awful! As time went on I felt as though life at home was just horrible. Brody never wanted to come to me. He didn't want to play with me anymore. He was overall more angry all of the time, which led to more screaming, more hitting, and more disobeying.

I noticed a change in myself as well. I felt myself becoming obsessed with punishment. If he did anything wrong, I immediately jumped up to correct him. I was starting to ignore the times when he simply just needed a hug. I began to not care. The fact that he was disobeying me and needed correction became more important than anything else that may be going on in that moment. 

Not only with Brody, but problems started to arise even with my relationship with Jeff. I started to blame anything that Brody did wrong on Jeff. If he was screaming at Jeff, I would immediately start to nag him with a phrase that sounded like, "Well its because YOU did ______ and are not doing ____." This made Jeff become defensive and everything would get worse and worse as the night continued.

Eventually though, a thought came to me that said, "What are you doing Karli? You are this little boy's mom. He needs a mom who loves him. He needs the person that is around him all the time to not be an angry person all the time."

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that there was any amount of time that I didn't love Brody, but my approach to parenting had gone in the wrong direction.

After this realization, I decided that timeouts were not helping. They were not only making Brody mad all of the time, me mad all of the time, and Jeff mad all of the time, but they were making our whole home life just... horrible. I can honestly say that after getting rid of the timeout technique, life has became extremely less stressful.

I will never know if this is because things had to become bad, and Brody had to experience a bad consequence to make him act better. I also will never know if maybe just my change of heart and perspective that came from giving all of those timeouts made things better. So maybe, after all, the timeouts had done some good. All I do know though, is after taking them away and focusing on love has made all of the difference in our house.

Another thing I realized through this experience is that one area I was lacking is to give Brody his individual attention. I caught myself getting so wrapped up in Bonnie's schedule, in my office job work, and in keeping the house in order that I was forgetting about the part of my day that I just sit on the floor and play with Brody's cars with him, or when I take him in my lap and read him a story.

I've since fixed these parts of my day and Brody is a much happier and content little toddler. Gosh, I love him so much.

The last thing that I'd like to mention about these timeouts is the sad feeling I'd get as I started to believe that Brody truly hated me. This sounds so sad, and honestly, it is so sad. He literally didn't want anything to do with me. He would choose anyone, or anything, over his momma. And while I kept telling myself that this was all worth it, and that being a parent was just hard so this was just part of it, I kept not truly believing these things.

We are now slowly fixing the friendship we once had. I know that I can't always be my kids best friend, but I know that I do want them to love me. In order for this to happen I know that I need to show them that I love them just as much. Now each time he decides to hit, we turn the situation into a time to hug it out, and end with a little kiss. I try to explain and show him how hitting makes me feel and how it is a sad thing to do. I'm relieved to say that the hitting has decreased dramatically since those dreadful timeout days.

I don't think that timeouts are a bad thing. I think that they can still serve their purpose. I predict that someday they will serve their purpose for us, just not today. I don't think Brody is ready, and may not be for awhile.

Gosh, parenting is hard. When you think you have found the solution for something... guess again, things change and you are back to ground zero. The only thing that gets me through this frustration is remembering that there always can be something to learn from each of these trials and errors.