Sweet Victory!

I have been sitting here at my computer for two hours trying to send a file. It is an important file, and I´m already really behind schedule in sending it. One time it almost sent, but then Bella woke up and by the time I got back to the computer the connection timed out. I was just about to call it quits and throw my computer against a wall when, miracle of miracles, the file loaded! I could have cried I was so excited. (That might be the hormones, though.)

I´m about to go to bed and join my sleeping angels (big and small) in the land of sueños, but I felt like it was time the world hear my thoughts again. After all, what would you all do without me?? ha.

Bella and I both have some kind of cold, so it has been a long day (made longer by my stupid, stupid email provider-no, I will NOT like you on facebook!), and I´m looking forward to a few short hours of sleep before we do it all over again. I am also excited, however, because tomorrow is my first weekly coffee day! Jairo has agreed to take Bella once a week for 2 hours or so while I go get a frappuccino and read a book. All by myself. Yes, alone. Are you as astonished by this idea as I am? A moment where I am neither wife nor mother. Although I will probably be thinking about Bella and whether or not Jairo got her to take her nap, and if I remembered to turn on the washing machine before I left...But still! I think it will be fun! So much so that I don´t care if I have to take a whole roll of toilet paper with me to the mall for this runny nose.

I´ll let you know how it goes.

I´m working on a whole new schedule for our home which I think will be better than our previous schedule, which could more exactly be defined as a ¨good effort¨, which all over-acheivers know to mean ¨yeah, not so much.¨ I got the meal plan done which was a huge undertaking. I was underwhelmed by meal plans I found online that include only dinner. I planned for three meals and two snacks, every day, so it was a lot of thinking. But now that it´s finished I LOVE IT! It takes so much thinking out of the mealtime process. So, my goal is to get to that point with the rest of the daily ruitine, so it just flows without a lot of thinking. The problem is that after the meal plan, I was so sick of planning things that I have been putting off getting back into it, even though I know it will help.

But you don´t care about that, right? So, on to tales of our lives. The other day Bella Boo had her first bloody fall. It sounds worse than it was, although that fact did not stop my heart from jumping into my throat and staying there for the whole day and night. She was walking and slipped, hitting her lower lip on the edge of the furniture. She has a perfect imprint of her two front teeth on the inside of her bottom lip. Luckily, Jairo was in the bathroom when it happened and by the time he came out to see what the crying was about I had cleaned up most of the blood. (He´s incredibly squeemish). Finally having a use for Bella´s boo-boo bunny, I went to retrieve it from the freezer, only to find it frozen to the freezer. OF COURSE. So I gave her a bag of frozen peas to suck on while Jairo went to the store to buy her a popsicle. In over-all crisis management I would give myself an A-, if only for that brain-dead minute where I stood there holding Bella thinking, ¨What was it that you´re supposed to do with blood?!¨ But it´s healing nicely now, and Bella herself was laughing with us about 10 minutes after it happened. Oh, the magic of icecream! (More proof that she is, in fact, her mother´s daughter). I, however, still have some high blood pressure every time I think about it.

On a happier note, Bella is now trying to talk more. She already knew a few words, but she added ¨all done¨, ¨no¨ (GREAT.), and ¨chau¨ to her vocabulary. (Chau is bye in Spanish. You probably knew that.) She´s also starting to love on her stuffed animals, which she used to just throw away every time I gave them to her. So, progress. It´s amazing how much there is to learn when you´re just a tot! And even so, it seems she learns it all so quickly, without any discouragement that there is still so much more to go.

In all, I think if you live with a toddler and you don´t find a reason every day to laugh, cry, scream (on the inside), marvel, and kiss, kiss, kiss, then you´re missing something. Because all of those opportunities are there, and you don´t have to look to hard to find them. And you should grab onto them, and live life with that same intensity that your toddler does (tempered with some wisdom and maturity). You might just learn something. I know I do, every day. And tomorrow morning I am sure it will be an extra effort to master a Bella classic: waking up with a smile!