it's the little souvenirs

Despite my incredulity that I've been a mama for 2 whole years, it really hasn't gone by *that* quickly.  I have made it a point to be immersed and present in T's life so I don't look up later and wonder where it all went.  Mind you, when she's 18, I'll probably think that anyway.

At the end of her first year, when people asked me how it went, I'd tell them that it was both the longest and shortest year of my life.  Short because I couldn't believe I had a year-old baby already.  But also long, long, long because of the broken sleep, figuring out what the crying means, learning how to tell when she was ready for a nap, wondering about when she'd hit her physical milestones, and the seemingly constant bucket of NEED.  The hours of nursing, the painstaking meals I prepared that ended up on the floor (at least Spike ate them), the hot relaxing shower interrupted 3 minutes in by a hungry baby.  All the usual stuff that goes with having a new baby.

The fascinating thing is how sharp the transitions are.  One day she's my tiny baby, and the next day her hands seem HUGE.  One day her size 4 shoes are just fine, the next day we can't squeeze her little feet in there.  She went from pudgeball baby to little girl seemingly overnight.

Lately it's in her speech.

Overnight she went from 'wakawa?' to 'What's that?' and 'What's his name?'.  She was using 'wakawa?' for months to get more info about something.  Even my parents started using it with each other when they had questions.  Hehe.

For months she's been calling her self 'Tee-yan'.  Just last week, it turned into 'Twill-yan' and sometimes even 'Trill-yan'.  Sniff.

In the past two weeks I've noticed a huge increase in her use of (correct!) pronouns - him, her, it.  She now uses 'myself' and 'I' correctly about half the time.  Previously it was always 'you', like 'mama hold you' when she wanted us to pick her up. 

She can also follow complex directions, like 'go downstairs and put your hat in the laundry basket'.   (Not to mention that she can actually get around herself now.) THAT is crazy.

I've been keeping a little written journal for a couple of months of one daily "fun fact" or word/phrase that she's using, so that I can keep track.  It's fascinating to go back and read the entries.  Now, if only someone could remind me to take lots of pictures when we do stuff together...

you live in a zoo

You know when you have a big event in the future, and you spend a lot of time preparing for it?  Then the event comes and goes.  And then you don't know what to do with yourself because you hadn't thought of anything past that event.

I felt that way on a HUGE scale about my wedding.  I'm feeling that way now.  T's 2nd birthday party is over.  We met my parents and our awesome photographer Kristi this morning for family photos.  Both of these were planned several months in advance, so it seems crazy that they're over now!

And how crazy that I am the mother of a TWO year old?  I can't believe that.  These past two years have been nothing short of transformative.  I never imagined I would love being a mama so much.  She makes me a better person every day.

Happy 2nd birthday to my sweet baby girl.  I look forward to our new adventures!

handcrafted life plan part 5 - i've got dreams to remember

So this has been Week Zero of the Mondo Beyondo class I'm taking, and I LOVE it so far.  The geeky me also loves that they are using a zero-based index.  I was skeptical that the exercises would be too fluffy, airy-fairy, filled with things like "open your third eye" or chakras or other new-Agey type concepts that I'm just not into.

But it's not.  It's surprisingly down to earth for being a class about dreaming.  Which is just what I need to ease into it.  I'm looking forward to the emails that arrive each day to see what new activity they'll bring.  It's a little slice of quiet contemplation in the middle of my busy days.

One exercise this week had us identify our core values.  Here are mine:

• AMAZING WIFE & MAMA – guide my daughter and partner with my husband by being patient, kind, gentle and loving
• KICKASS WOMAN – be me, be joyful, experience life, have fun, be crafty, redevelop close friendships
• CONTENT & CALM – have time for quiet moments, mellow days, no envy or major unmet wants, low stress, happy and present
• HOME BASE – make our home organized, functional, warm, comfortable, imprinted with “us”
• LOOKIN’ GOOD – get to a healthy weight, exercise and challenge my body, dress well in clothes that make me happy

I know, nothing earth shattering here.  But it was good to go through the process, and the way they framed the exercise was cool.

Another activity was to print a bunch of positive phrases and put them somewhere we'd read them regularly.  It wasn't enough for me to just print them on plain white paper - I needed some color.  So I got crafty, and made pretty circles out of them.

I put them in a ceramic bowl made by my friend June our senior year of college.  She didn't like it, but I thought it was cool that she made it herself (this was long before I became crafty). 

We're not in touch, really, but I like to keep it around. She is someone who follows her big dreams - seriously pursued an acting career, quit her job to travel the world, went to business school after working as a scientist, just to name a few.  So I thought her bowl was a fitting place for these statements about dreaming big.

There are still a few spots left in the class and it's not too late to catch up.  If you want to sign up, use the link here or in my sidebar and I'll split the referral bonus with you so you'll get a little discount.

so you can take that cookie

I've been trying to find a good dairy-free sugar cookie recipe so that T's birthday party guests can decorate them.  Because what's better than a bunch of 2 year olds with access to icing and sprinkles?

T's first masterpiece

I was pretty stoked to find a recipe that wasn't vegan as T isn't allergic to eggs, and I figured that would be closer to the real thing.  Unfortunately, those cookies, while pretty, were dry, not very sweet, and doughy in an unpleasant way.  Not that it stopped us from eating all of them.  Sigh.  On the bright side, this was T's first baking experience, and she loved it.

So I needed to try another alternative.  I found several recipes online for vegan sugar cookies.  I know, that just sounds awful, doesn't it?  But this one seemed like it stood a fighting chance because it uses Earth Balance spread in place of butter.  Earth Balance actually tastes a lot like butter to me, and more importantly, has the *texture* of butter.  I needed to bake a test run to make sure they'd work for the party.  (Ah, the sacrifices we make for our kids!)

Unfortunately, this recipe wasn't perfect either.  The dough was way too fragile - it was fluffy and hard to work with because it didn't hold its shape very well.  I think that might have been because it needed a bit more flour, so next time I'll increase it by 1/2c or so and see if that fixes it.  I did notice that leaving the dough out at room temperature for a longer time made it slightly easier to work with, as did re-rerolling the scraps.  I'm guessing that's because I use a lot of flour while rolling and cutting our the shapes.

After baking these, the cookies were pretty good - maybe a touch too sweet for my liking but much better than the first batch.  TJ thought they were too lemony so I'll cut down on the extract next time.   Since the dough was so soft and pliable, the cookies oozed a little more than I was happy with.  I like sugar cookies to have nice sharp well-defined edges.

I haven't iced cookies in my adult life, since I'm not a fan of frosting.  But you can't do cookie decorating without a nice royal icing to go with it.  Since raw egg whites make me a little nervous, I used the vegan recipe on Chez Bettay's site.  It was super-easy to make, and I even divided it up to make different colors.  I let T choose two colors.  She chose pink and blue.

This was my first time working with gel food coloring, and holy poo, am I impressed!  I bought these so I

could tint cupcake frosting, plus those little tiny pointy egg-shaped liquid bottles at the grocery always annoy me because they're so freakin' messy. 

First, be it known that A LITTLE goes a LONG, LONG, way.  I squeezed in a tiny bit of blue, decided it could use a little more, and ended up with a really deep shade, nearly BMW M3 blue (my favorite color ever!).  It's not at all subtle and I'm sure many grownups wouldn't be willing to eat a cookie that blue.  We'll find out tomorrow at work, I guess!

serious baby face

Then I let T loose (well, sort of).  She chose the shape of the cookie she wanted to decorate, an icing color, and squeezed it out herself from the really awesome Kuhn Rikon bottles I ordered a few weeks ago for the aforementioned cupcake baking.  I helped her with the sprinkles on a tiny spoon, as the sort-of-natural, locally made India Tree brand doesn't come with shakers in the lid. 

She managed to dump out about half an ounce of pink sprinkles all over her FunPod tower and our kitchen floor when my back was turned for a second.  I hope the dye is ok for dogs because Spike has eaten what I couldn't effectively pick up with a paper towel.  Sigh.

But it was a lot less messy than I expected, and she had a GREAT time.  My mom and I did a lot of baking together when I was a kid, and I was really excited to be able to finally share it with T.  We'll definitely do more.

The third round of baking will happen on Saturday when I make the birthday cupcakes and the last batch of cookies and icing for decorating.   Our oven and my KitchenAid stand mixer will be busy, busy, busy.

This post was brought to you by a crapload of things I bought on Amazon.com, and highly recommend if you're baking with your toddler.  Or by yourself, but you can probably reach the counter without the FunPod.

handcrafted life plan, installment 4

My online dreaming class starts today.  Yippee!

I've been taking a ton of training at work lately, because I needed to renew my Project Management certification this year, and it requires about 45 hours of continuing education every 3 years.  But all of those courses were practical and of course, work-related.

This one is just for me. And like most classes I've been to, they ask why you're there. Except here it's more deliberate - not just idle curiosity, but to consciously articulate what we expect out of the class.



So here's why I'm taking it:

I want to figure out what my dreams are and how to create a life of joy for myself. I’m practical, analytical, and skeptical so it’s really hard for me to allow myself to dream big dreams. I want to set a great example for my daughter on how to create the life you want, not one filled with “should” and “supposed to”.

I'm really excited about the next 5 weeks.  Laura told me it was nice to have something little to do for herself every day.  I also love that it's not required for me to be social or "share" with the rest of the class - I can do all the exercises myself, and keep it to myself.  Or share when I feel like it.

Also, it's been a week since I started my health goal.  How did I do?  Well, my weight is at its lowest since mid-2009, so yay for that.  I was 7 for 7 on tracking my weight daily, but only 4 for 7 on tracking my food.  Did I mention that I hate tracking food?  Sigh.  But I can only improve on that front, so here's to another week.

But the simple act of writing out my goals has helped me be a LOT more focused on it than I used to be.  I even wrote it up on the whiteboard we have in our kitchen.  (Yes, after Caltech, I can't live without a whiteboard in my home. Or several.)

Well, enough navel-gazing for today.  T and I have a busy day, with a trip to the library, Trader Joe's and the park.  *That's* the life I want.