I don’t talk about Shanna much anymore. 🙂 I should do that. Today Shanna dragged her Mega Bloks out and built a foot tall tower. She’s never done that before. I really should have taken a picture but I’m lame and I didn’t. Normally she maxes out on attaching about three blocks together before knocking them over. This kind of sudden leap always makes my brain hurt. It seems like she pretty regularly can’t do something, can’t do it, can’t do it, Oh no big deal I can do that. It’s really amazing. I think kids are so awesome. (I don’t think my kid is a special snowflake I just have limited exposure to seeing this kind of development in other kids. 🙂

I thank God just about every day that her speech is so developed. I am growing to understand toddler tantrums more and more. She has such strong feelings and desires that if she couldn’t express them I can see her screaming and hitting. I made a list recently and off the top of my head I came up with more than 250 food words she knows. And boy howdy does she exercise them. 😛 It’s really nice that she can very specifically say what she wants because then neither of us get frustrated. I’m kind of terrified of next kid being less verbal and equally strong willed. I think that Shanna feels mellow to me because she is very good at asking for what she wants and I’m pretty happy to give it to her 9/10. I only say no when I have a good reason to. I’ve never really understood the principle of telling kids ‘no’ just as a matter of course.

Toddlerhood is far more challenging than babyhood. We struggle to find the balance. If I am well rested and feeling patient we do ok. If I’m tired… oof. I have cracked two teeth gritting my jaw when she gets frustrating. Oops. Well that coping mechanism needs work. By and large our days are still very joyful. It’s hard that if you stop doing something (like playing on the computer) to go stop her from doing something (like running water in the bathroom) she RUNS back to mess with the computer. Every so often we get into loops where I am chasing her back and forth from thing to thing and that’s not my favorite. I somehow doubt that the toddler years are going to be my favorite stage. 🙂

She has (mostly) stopped eating her books, which is really awesome. At this point she only occasionally will put an already well gnawed book in her mouth. Oy. She loves reading so much. I read to her for probably at least an hour a day and Noah also does a lot of reading. No signs of her being able to ‘read’ and that’s so completely ok. I recently introduced the alphabet song out of desperation when I couldn’t think of any other song to entertain her with and she loves it. She doesn’t know much of the alphabet and that is ok with me. 🙂

I feel like an EC failure because she is still in diapers. I put way too much pressure on myself. She potties more often than she goes in a diaper most days but sometimes she just has no interest in using the potty and pushing it seems kind of silly. So the march of laundry continues on. I have used disposables a few times in the past year because of traveling and man do I prefer cloth. The smell of disposables makes me gag. I don’t know why it seems so overwhelming to me. I am sort of hoping for at least a couple of weeks of break between kids but if it doesn’t happen that will be ok too. 🙂

This pregnancy is So Much Easier. I have been really exhausted all through the first trimester but that is abating a lot in the last week. I need to start getting out of the house more and doing some exercise. I have no interest in being completely out of shape when TBD arrives. That was a pain when Shanna was born. And this time I’ll have a toddler to chase too! Very exciting. I am having a bit of trouble with controlling my temper. I am not resorting to hitting and I’m not yelling much at all, but I’m not as patient as I can be. This is a big enough thing to me that I think this is the deciding factor for me on two kids versus three. It’s not ok for me to be this frustrated as a matter of course with my kids. Just not reasonable. And if I am struggling this hard with one child it would be orders of magnitude harder with two children. So it looks like we are done. I have mixed feelings about that because I feel like in my heart I really want more children. But there are wants and then there is the ability to meet the needs of your children and I’m really not all that selfish of a person. Having children at all is a selfish act and I can only push it so far. 🙂 It’ll be great. It’s cheaper to travel with two kids instead of three. 😛

I spend a lot of time looking at Shanna wondering how something so amazing came out of me. She is so joyous and giving and upbeat. I wonder if I ever had that lightness of spirit. When I have dark days wondering if I ‘deserve’ to have children because I am a horrible person I look at her and think that whether or not I deserve to have children, the world deserves to have someone like her in it. She really is wonderful.