You know you're out of it when. . .

When you think you've been doing a better job of posting to your blog and realize that you've posted LESS this month than in any other. I think I might have been fired if I was actually getting paid to write this thing.

Do you ever read the comments? I try to post back to comments. So even when I don't post, I might be on here commenting. Maybe.

Others post funny or touching stuff, too, but I haven't been too successful in getting others to comment, yet. Then again, maybe it's better this way? A blog is kind of an ego-trip. I can go on about myself without having to actually listen to what others have to say. It's all about me, baby!

I hate that when you're, you know, like, talkin' and talkin' and still talkin' and then you look up to see that the other person has this glazed look in their eye just waiting for you to shut up. And when you do, they just, like, talk and talk and keep ON talking. And you start thinking about what you're going to say when they finally shut their yap, but their mouth just keeps movin' and movin'. Jiminey! Don't they ever shut up??

See, with a blog, you avoid all that.

This month, three years ago

My due date had come and gone, and we were anxiously awaiting our second baby. According to the ultrasounds, we were expecting a little girl. A daughter. I would finally be able to indulge in all the sweet, ruffly stuff that I couldn't buy the first time. As one does, I wondered what this new little one would be like. What would she look like? Would she look very much like her brother? I knew from the souvenir ultrasound picture that she had a cute nose and a perfectly-shaped, four-chambered heart.

I'd begun having contractions in the middle of September. Twice they'd gone on long enough for us to stop and time them. I thought she might even come early. Not so. She was just making sure we were paying attention. Even before she was born, Laney made everyone in the room stop and take notice of her. Then, on a cloudy afternoon in October, she made her entrance. She was here. Our baby girl.

Three days old

I was more confident in myself as a mother this time around. No longer scared, but still worried. Would I be a good mother of two? Sometimes I wasn't sure I was a good enough mother of one. How much would our family change? A lot? Too much? But mostly I worried for Nicky. How would he handle sharing his spot at the center of our universe? Turns out, he handled it fine. There were a few bumps along the way, to be sure, but she flowed easily into our lives. Our family was complete, because she was now a part of it.

I would swear to you that Laney smiled at four days old. Despite what the baby books say, it's not totally unbelievable. Had she been born two weeks early, instead of two weeks late, she'd have been a month old by then. I have, however, dutifully recorded a date for her first smile on a day in November, at about the right time frame. Truth is, I'd been seeing little grins for so long that I wasn't sure when she really did smile for the first time. She simply is and always has been smiles and sunshine. (Okay, mostly smiles and sunshine. She's got a temper, too, that child).

Now, she's three. Three! I can't believe it's already been three years since we brought her home to us.

Sometimes, I wonder where this little girl comes from. This little girl who loves to make people laugh. A little girl with a sunny personality who charms family and strangers alike. A little girl whose exuberant enthusiasm knows no bounds. She certainly didn't get those traits from me. She is Tigger to my Eyore. I leave it to you to decide who is Piglet and who is Pooh in our family.

It's appropriate to me that she was born in the autumn. Just as we head into the dark Norwegian winter, when the nights are incredibly long and the sun doesn't rise above the horizon for two months, we have her -- our own little ray of sunshine to light up the house on those dark winter nights and keep us going until spring.

Happy Birthday, Little Miss Sunshine!

Three weeks old

One month old

Two months old

Eight months old

Ten months old

One year old

Two years old

Sugar and Spice. . .And everything nice. . .That's what little girls are made of.

Touche

Laney was walking around, arching her back, and sticking her stomach out as far as she could.

Seven teased her. "Do you have a big stomach?"

She didn't miss a beat and said nonchalantly, "Not as big as yours."

Nice.

Tact. We'll work on tact.

The gliding chair

Seven bought me a gliding chair and ottoman shortly after Nicky was born.

We had a big living room, not a lot of furniture, and a baby that wouldn't ever let us put him down. Nicky and I spent A LOT of time in that chair. The chair faced the sliding glass doors to the backyard. Much of my time after Nicky came into the house was spent looking out those windows and at the big shady tree we had in back.

Sometimes I resented it. I spend my whole life in this damn chair. Other times, I reminded myself to appreciate it. I will only spend this one small part of my life in this chair. . .and soon it'll be gone.

For whatever reason, a few weeks ago, Nicky couldn't sleep. He asked me to lay down in bed with him, so I did. He began whispering to me about the dreams he had had -- one a scary one in which one of his toys had come to life in the box. I let him talk, knowing that these moments would be fewer and further between, and suddenly it was very much past his bedtime.

"Can we rock in the rocking chair," he asked me quietly when I told him I was to go. I thought about it for a minute. It was already so far past his bedtime, so I figured that a few minutes wouldn't hurt.

The glider sits in the corner of the kids' room loaded down with stuffed animals and other miscellaneous toys and stuff. We never found the right place for the chair in this house -- too many small rooms, too much clutter. Laney and I never quite got the same use out of it.

I took down the stuffed animals and threw them in a heap on the floor and sat down. Nicky crawled into my lap and we rocked in the chair the way we used to do. Sort of. He is much too big to sit comfortably on my lap now. He turned this way and that, curling his feet up, then stretching them out, trying to find a comfy spot and never quite finding it. We rocked for a few minutes anyway and then, content, he went back to bed and fell quickly asleep.

I think it was a little bittersweet for both of us -- that moment Nicky understood that he was just too big for the rocking chair. It was a part of his past -- a part he'd long-since outgrown. We can't have those moments back, even when we want to, even when we try really hard.

There's a tired mommy in the rocking chair and a baby who curled into her just so.

Where we were married

Do you know that show Little Einstiens -- children's television that pretends to be intellectual by throwing in a couple of classical music bits? Laney loves it.

In one episode, the four explorers are flying over Florence, Italy in their little red spaceship.

"Hey, pappa and I got married there," I said, pointing at the television.

"In a spaceship?"

Um, no. In Florence.

Mommy better watch herself. . .

Yesterday, Nicky threatened me with the following:

"If we don't play one more game of Uno, I won't snuggle with you tomorrow."

I can't tell you how hard it is to keep a straight face when you're being threatened with the word snuggle.

Tower of Babble

The observant among you may have noticed my little 'translator' on the side of the page. At the quick press of a flag, my blog is instantly translated into several languages. Cool.

I added it on to the page in the hopes of translating the site into Japanese. My friends and family in Japan could read what I wrote and be a part of my blogging experience. The first time I clicked on the Japanese flag and my words came up in Japanese, I was thoroughly impressed. It would take me ages to translate one of my own posts. My Japanese is not all that good. This was done in a matter of seconds. Very cool.

Then I started reading the translation. Ummmmmmm, not cool. English to Japanese or vice versa is notoriously hard to translate. Grammatics, word order, colloquial expressions, well, basically everything is completely different in the two languages. Computer translations have been very unsuccessful for this very reason. Apparently, they still are unsuccessful -- at least, the free download-off-the-Internet-types are anyway.

For example, my intro:

I am two 29-year-old mother. I am America. My husband is the Norwegian language. Yada. Yada. I speak one language and two other broken fluently. I have a riddle for your benefit: my mother is the Japanese language, my father is an American, my kids are the Norwegian language, so what does that make me?

You get the picture. The widget is aptly named Babel Fish.

My mother told me to take the tool down immediately as it makes me sound like a tool and a raving lunatic in Japanese.

Raving lunatic is not the image I was trying to send across the language barrier.