Had to say goodbye til next season after the sweet 16, but it was a great year!
I’ve been negligent toward the blog, but life is hectic and I have very few readers so I’m not too worried about it. Here are some pictures of the pumpkin over the past month or so…
I made this lovely tutu! Go ahead, it's ok to be impressed!!
Can't pull this girl away from a mirror-can you blame her??
Nothing like a little snow 2 weeks after spring break!
March 2008
This is a picture I took in March last year of Chloe holding her referral picture. Our referralversary is actually on February 8th, but I missed it again this year. Luckily my friend Laura is more on top of things than I am and she remembers. I have also started missing our monthly Mama and Chloe anniversaries, which indicates a couple of things to me.
First, I have stopped counting my life and Chloe’s in one-month increments. Seems strange, but I think it’s an encouraging sign that things are going well and I’m not looking at life in those “survival” terms like I had to last year. Each month we conquered together last year was one month closer to Chloe being done with night terrors, getting caught up on her nutrition, getting caught up on her physical development, getting caught up on her verbal development, and the two of us being one month further in our attachment journey. We’ve been working more on reading books, singing songs, playing with toys, and generally hanging out like two best friends enjoying the good life together!
one year later-still not looking at the camera
Second, while I’m relieved that I feel like I’ve moved out of survival mode and into enjoyment mode, it stresses me out a little bit. I’m afraid I’m getting lax already on things I should really be paying attention to. I should be doing more to uphold all the little mini-traditions I intended to start with Chloe. You can’t just start up a tradition again after ignoring it for a year can you? Oh well, Chloe’s staying with my parents tonight so as usual I’m spending my alone time worrying about what I’m doing wrong in my role as a mother! Don’t worry, it wasn’t all this cheery tonight. I made it to four different places I needed to run errands to in record time and have everything marked off my list for the week! I’ve talked to the Princess already today and she doesn’t really seem to be missing me because she’s having too much fun with Grandma!
One more of my silly girl!
We are ready for spring, too bad the colors this weekend didn’t look much like spring! Maybe I’ll play with some editing and try to at least boost the color. I’m getting tired of all the brown grass and leaves. The weather was very nice but windy on Saturday so we pretended it was fall without our coats on and played in the leaves!
Grace wanted to pose with her favorite Big Leaf! We had such a great morning!
Here is Chloe taking pictures of me with a rock.
That’s about all I can do for tonight. I feel like it’s going to be a really long week and it’s barely started.
With this sweet little valentine I had one of the best V-day’s I’ve had in a long time. Nothing exciting, but as you can see Chloe was in an entertaining mood so I laughed a lot. My little baby is growing up. This weekend at Grandma and Grandpa’s she started drinking coffee!
Ok, it’s really chocolate soy milk, but she was so proud of herself and so excited about it I couldn’t take that joy away from her. She was as always very dramatic about it and kept going with it all weekend. She’s amazing and I can’t think of any new ways to say that so I’ll sign off with one more picture.
My family had a get together this weekend to celebrate my Grandma’s birthday. She is such a wonderful woman and is and has always been such a positive supportive force in all of our lives. As always we had a great time. Chloe loves being at my parents’ house so much. I love it too, because they almost always give me at least one morning of sleeping in, and usually two! Tomorrow night I have to attempt bedtime at a reasonable hour again because Chloe was up late again tonight and that’s not a great combo after a long weekend with too much excitement and not enough sleep. My cousin had a great idea to create a scrapbook for Grandma with letters from her kids and grandkids telling her what she means to us, thanking her for the beautiful person she is, and sharing memories that we all have of her. We had a great time finishing up the scrapbooking part of it late Saturday night and the great part is that my best friend came over to check on us and offer a little moral support when we still weren’t finished at 2 a.m.!
I love looking at old family pictures. We have done a lot of that lately because my dad has a new photo scanner that he is putting to good use. It is amazing to see and hear the stories of all of the family members and try to keep the family tree straight in my head. It makes me sad to think about how different this type of experience might be for Chloe some day. She will have a million family pictures to look through and she will be in 97% of those pics because she is so darn photogenic and incredibly fond of the camera. What she won’t have is the possibility of looking through old pictures and finding a shot of grandma when she was 3 looking exactly like her. Grandma looks like her cousin Grace, not Chloe. Maybe Chloe will not be the worrier that I am, maybe she won’t be as insecure either. Maybe I’m raising the first child in the history of the world to be completely comfortable in her own skin and self-assured enough to not need to find those type of answers? Maybe not. Maybe, despite how amazingly happy-go-lucky she is at age 2, she will be your average teenager and young adult with questions about who she is and how she fits into the world. Maybe on top of all of that she’ll wonder why she is where she is, who she came from, how she got here, and why it had to happen to her. Maybe she’ll try to second-guess the decisions that were made for her by a bunch of adults that she didn’t know. Maybe. Maybe for her those questions will be impossible to answer. That’s not fair. That’s the part that makes me sad for her.
Who ever said life was fair? That’s a favorite quote from a very wise friend of my mom’s who I really miss. It’s not fair for any of us, at some point we all have to realize that. No one’s life is “perfect” but there are people who have figured out the secret of being perfectly happy. I’m not necessarily one of those people, but I have a tremendous amount of happiness in my life. I just usually find a way to balance out the happy with a hefty dose of worry. I wish I could leave out that second part, but no luck yet! I hope Chloe is better at this than I am. I’m not sure how to teach her to look at life in a more realistic light than I sometimes do, but I’m really trying. We’ll see how it goes…
I haven’t really proofed this post, just kind of getting some thoughts out of my head so I can get to sleep. Here are some of the cute pics we took this weekend at the birthday party!
Yes, I might be guilty of spending too much money on pictures of my tiny pumpkin, but I looked at her the other day and realized that she looked different than she did a few months ago. My Grandma’s birthday is on Wednesday and I decided that was a good reason to get more pictures taken last weekend. She wasn’t sure she wanted to smile for the camera at first, but she decided it was pretty funny when the photographer’s assistant attacked Mommy with a furry monster/hand puppet!
These were the earlier shots. Maybe not a big smile, but I’m sure Gap would sell a million of these outfits if they decided to use them in an ad campaign.
We had one of those weekends where I just felt like my heart might overflow over and over just from looking at Chloe. She is in such a fun and wonderful stage right now. Still some temper issues and some extra screeching that I wouldn’t miss if it became rare, but she’s such a sweetheart most of the time. I carried Chloe around an antique mall for almost an hour and she didn’t fuss about it too much, she even snuggled her head on my shoulder and chattered about all the treasures we saw. We had lunch in the park and played on the toys and she had a ball playing in the sand and climbing around. I worked with my camera a little more and got a couple of shots I really liked. I’m hoping to continue to improve with this camera, but after six months I’m proud of my progress. The next thing I need to work on is clearly shadows. It’s kind of a trade-off between the shadows on her face or her annoyed look at the sun blinding her. Next time I’ll bring something to wash her face after lunch and before photos!
Yes that is her own 6-in sub sandwich, but she didn’t eat the whole thing.
She loves balls, but was not impressed she couldn’t move this giant cement ball by kicking it or batting it with her hands.
This is a new face my silly girl is making a lot lately.
She really liked this little rock. She snuggled it like a baby and wanted me to take the picture of it.
She liked playing in the sand almost as much as she likes playing in water. I was just excited she could play outside without a coat on in the middle of winter. She was very brave going down the slide by herself.
I just love this one.
Hope everyone else had a great weekend! This week we might get to go wedding dress shopping with one of my cousins so I’m really excited for that. Nothing much planned other than that. What did that groundhog see today? I think I could be ready for spring now.
We had a really great supper tonight at Saigon. I wish it had been IN Saigon, but that will have to wait until tiny Miss gets a couple of years older. The waitresses and Chloe & Grace were all dressed in their ao dais and all looked beautiful! I felt too much like a tourist asking the waitresses if they would take a picture with the girls so I just have a couple of the two of them. Chloe chowed down tonight on fresh spring rolls and rice and fortune cookies. My sister and I shared catfish in a clay pot that I had been wanting to try, and of course the fabulous coffee! They even had envelopes with lucky money for the kids hanging in the windows that they gave out. I’m so glad we went, the weather wasn’t great but it was worth the trip out in the cold.
I hope everyone had a great day!
Yes, they had to cover up their fancy clothes while they were eating!
This happens to be one of my favorite color combinations, especially for baby/toddler girl clothes. It also happens to be the color scheme for Thursday, January 8. Thursday is the 1st birthday of Gwenyth Rose, who you can meet and learn all about if you visit the CF Husband blog over on my sidebar. She is an absolute miracle and I have loved watching her grow and develop and surprise her doctors and everyone else over this past year. It’s kind of like Shelby’s signature color of pink in Steel Magnolias if you’ve seen that movie enough times to have every line memorized like I do. I am going to try very hard to get Chloe up and dressed in something festive and get her picture posted here with a Happy Birthday sign, but we’ll see how that goes. You’ll notice you haven’t even seen our Christmas pictures or anything yet so don’t actually hold your breath for that to happen on Thursday. If you’d like to check them out and add any birthday wishes or prayers, they’re celebrating all week over on their blog. I’m sure they’d love it if you decided to wear pink and or brown on Thursday, too. For me, it will probably have to be brown, I can’t really pull off pink–it just looks kind of out of place on me!
Here are a couple of fun pictures to tide you over until I get more descriptive Christmas and New Year’s posts up.
New Year’s Eve, cheering for the Jayhawks in the bowl game…
(Hopefully the next time you see her wearing this outfit she will have a new KU bow to wear with it from Da Holly G!!)
This is as close as we could get to a cute Mother/Daughter pic during the past two weeks…Chloe in her Halloween kitty jammies, and not really looking at the camera.
Look how absolutely adorable she can be for a picture when she chooses to be. I love this picture of Chloe and my Mom, can you just tell what great friends they are?
And here she is with Grandpa’s hat…
This is one of my new favorite pictures of Chloe and my dad. I’m not sure what it is about this one, but I think it’s the colors of my aunt’s house in the background.
I know what you’re thinking, it may be time for another hair cut for Chloe. We’re trying a new detangling spray first to see if that can tame the ‘do. Some days it just looks so cute long, but others it just looks crazy. One of these days the little hairs underneath the comb-over will grow in and i can start pulling it up or back and I think longer will look cute, but for now maybe not so much?! We’ll see.
If this idea is already copyrighted in some parenting book, my appologies to the author. If not, I’m just lazy for not copyrighting it before I publish it here on this blog, because the idea is genius if I do say so myself:) Whisper Day is something I think Chloe and I might try once every couple of months–we have had an awesome day today! Right now I have ZERO voice. I don’t have a stuffy nose, fever, sore throat, or hacking cough with this illness, but I am unable to speak above a whisper so that’s what we’ve done today. It is amazing to me that Chloe has joined in on this because she is a loud child. I personally love the drama associated with this tiny peanut’s personality, but others tend to get a headache if they’re around her too long and she’s comfortable enough with them to let her little light shine through! She makes some of the most grating screaming noises that you can imagine, but after today I’m afraid that my enjoyment of her may be contributing to her use of this particular tactic. Her volume is just usually up, as is mine and we like it that way. Or so I thought. I have to admit today has been rather relaxing. I guess people are right, loud can be stressful sometimes. I still like the drama, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to work on our quiet voices every now and then. I would suggest this to anyone dealing with a loud or spirited child and finding themselves frustrated with them. My sister came home for lunch and automatically just started talking quietly to us. It’s certainly contagious. I hope this illness is not contagious because I can imagine that Chloe will not be thrilled if she gets sick. My parents also hope it is not contagious because they are coming to pick her up tomorrow and take her to their house for a couple of days so I can try to recover some voice before Christmas Eve, and get presents wrapped, and get the house cleaned up, and get a little decorating done so it looks festive, and, and, and….
Enough of my rambling about today’s lightbulb moment, here are some pictures taken in spite of my pathetic illness!
pretending to sleep (drama queen)
one second later
Breakfast with Santa party at my Aunt & Uncle's house
please ignore the cleavage, it happens when you gain weight!
Chloe and her cousins
Chloe and Great-Uncle Peter
PS- I’ll save this for another post, but Chloe got her ears pierced a few weeks ago. I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world before that, but the earrings might have made her even that much cuter!!! About that time her hair decided it would plaster itself over her ears so you can’t see them in any pictures. Don’t worry, Da Holly G at Kick Ass Bows (notice the button on my sidebar) has created the worlds greatest bows and they are going to solve some of our hair styling troubles! Chloe’s baby-fine hair is no match for Holly’s no-slip grip baby bows. She looks so unbelievably cute in them, but as you might guess Chloe has to be in the right mood or they don’t stay in. Drama!!
Have a Merry Christmas if I don’t get back to this until then!!
Ok, it seems like the only news I have to share on this blog are family dinner celebrations, but that’s about all I’ve been up for lately. So as to not shift the focus of this blog too far off of Chloe and her adventures that will probably remain the focus. She is a party girl, what can I say?! As I was laying in bed the other night, trying to settle my mind so I could fall asleep, I kept seeing snip-its of the last year like a home video running through my head. Our family is huge, and loud, and fun, and wonderful and we all get together every chance we get. Getting ALL of us together gets harder as everyone is getting older, getting married, having in-laws, having kids, etc. but our partial family gathering for Thanksgiving this year was 25 people. Anyway, the video montage running through my head was a series of pictures of Chloe at these family gatherings over the past 15 months. It illustrates our attachment journey better than anything I could come up with so I’m going to try to give you a still version of it, of course with my brilliant commentary:) The point of this post is to show you what I am most thankful for this year, rather than just telling you.
Chloe’s grief upon meeting me in Vietnam was heartbreakingly fierce, devastatingly emotional, extremely loud, and very brief compared to what I’m sure others have experienced. I have some pictures, but I won’t share those here. She was just over 9 months old and she recognized her Vietnamese name even with my poor imitation of the beautiful language. She was loved by someone before me, and after only two days decided she would show us a little bit of her personality. She decided she would deal with me as her new mom and screamed immediately and uncontrollably as soon as I put her down, even briefly to go to the bathroom if anyone else held her. This lasted for several days, but she eventually decided to let my cousins who traveled with me hold her, which saved me from sheer exhaustion and more importantly from falling into the river during our rain-soaked tour of the Mekong!
Day 3
Mekong Tour
About 2 months after we got home I had a 1st birthday party for Chloe at my Grandma’s house. We kept it small, just family, but as I mentioned that was still 25+ people in a small-ish space. She started crying the minute we walked in the door because there were so many people, and would barely let my cousins or sister (her favorite people after me at that point) hold her. This was as close as she got to enjoying the party after a few hours of being around the crowd and not letting anyone really hold her.
Contrast that with these pictures I took of her at home about the same time.
A couple of months later, she had become friends with a few more of my cousins and was getting used to the normal crowd of family. This meant that she was enjoying these parties a lot more, but when we got home she would not let me put her down and had to fall asleep with her face pressed against mine and her arms tightly around my neck. It is one of the most bittersweet memories I have of that time. The closeness and the cuddling was the greatest feeling, but knowing the sadness and the anxiety behind it made me heartbroken for Chloe. Christmas, February birthday parties, etc. all went along about like this. As time continued to pass, she got braver at the parties and less anxious when we got home.
By spring she was starting to venture off on her own at parties and wasn’t glued to anyone. She could run (toddle) around after her cousins and try to have a little fun on her own, but still wasn’t always thrilled to let more than a handful of people hold her. Her comfort level continues to improve around our family and close friends, but she has what I think feels like a healthy level of stranger anxiety. She does not need me to hold her for more than 10-15 minutes after we arrive somewhere, and has slipped out of our pew at church to perform some dance moves in front of everyone once or twice! She is two, but is almost always happy, sweet, funny, singing, dancing, and giggling out loud. She is a riot to be around and the more words she adds to her vocabulary the crazier life gets around here! I am so happy with how things have progressed over the past 15 months. I am still in awe of Chloe’s all-out personality, this girl does not do anything half-way!!! Whether it’s having a mouth full of teeth before her 1st birthday, or going from toddling to climbing, running, and jumping within a couple of moths she finds something she wants to catch up on and just does it! She is just not giving me much to worry about any more, which is really saying a lot for me.
Here are a few more before and after pictures comparing this fall to where we started. I could not be more thankful for Chloe or more humbled by the gift I was given in being able to be the mom to raise her. I am so appreciative to her first mom for this opportunity, and only wish I had a way to contact her to tell her just that.
And just a couple more pictures because I love how cute they are in this hat!
Happy Thanksgiving!
