Home Alone

I am home alone tonight...not really, Maggie's sleeping upstairs but for the first time in a long time I am able to have complete control of the remote and I'm watching What Not to Wear with a Fine Living Network chaser. No, scratch that, I am not flipping back and forth between channels, I'm actually sitting through the commercials! GASP...

But I have the monitor on next to me and find myself missing whole segments of Stacey and Clinton's wise advice just to listen to the sweet hum of Maggie sleeping. Our heat has been on the fritz for a few days so Maggie has been sleeping at Aunt Jen's and I didn't realize how quiet our house was without her until then. Even when she's upstairs sleeping she breathes life into this house.

Maggie turned 19 months yesterday and she celebrated by officially calling an end to her morning naps. We have still been putting her down for a morning nap the past 2 weekends but lately she has just been sitting in her crib singing songs at the top of her lungs. The monitor is like XM radio now. Her catchy tune "baaa baaa baaa" really cannot be missed.

So now we have more of Maggie on the weekends and she is truly cracking me up. I was pretending to read a magazine today but was really watching her read a book out loud. It was a book of baby animals and as she flipped each page she very seriously made the correct animal noise for each one "R-O-A-R (lion)...BBBPPPPP (elephant)...AH AH AH (monkey)". It was amazing to me to watch her do this un-prompted. But my favorite book that she "reads" to me is the Good Night Bear book. She flips through each page saying "that's a bear, that's a bear, that's a bear, that's a bear..." in a perfect Italian accent. Her new most used phrase is "that's a [insert noun here]" and, as already mentioned, it is always in an Italian accent.

I think I might have gotten what I wished for years ago when Erik and I watched the movie "Life is Beautiful". We fell in love with the little Italian boy (Giosua) and swore we wanted to teach our child Italian just so he or she would sound that cute. Maggie really does sound that cute and the likenesses in our recent family picture are uncanny:

Toddler in the Hood

I was away for work a few days last week and can't believe how much Maggie grew up in such a short time. She literally repeats everything we say which, as you can imagine if you have ever read Erik's blog, is not always a good thing. We are officially on the shoot, darn, fudge, God bless it bandwagon. Our ipod playlists are set to Maggie-friendly vs. non-Maggie-friendly.

And we spell. You can't just say "should we give her mac-n-cheese for dinner?" without her immediately running to her high chair crying "UPPA...SIT DOWN". Someday Erik will learn this. Yesterday I asked Erik what we should make her for dinner and he responds "we could do nuggets, peanut butter and jelly, mac-n-cheese, hot dog, whatever". Now in Maggie's little head, there is immediately a buffet of all of the above-mentioned items waiting for her at the kitchen table at this very moment. This is information overload and inevitably ends up in meltdown for the entire dinner preparation time. Thanks Erik.

It's hard to switch from being parents of a baby to parents of a toddler when it seems like it changes overnight. All of a sudden she gets everything and who knows what she will teach the other kids at daycare. We are not big regulators as parents. We let Maggie watch some TV before bed (Blue's Clue, Noddy, Sesame Street - it's not like she's watching Entourage - it's on too late), she may have an unhealthy snack here and there, and we might forget to censor ourselves around her sometimes but hopefully we are teaching her the right values despite all of that.

It's more important to me that she learns the unspoken things from us...how we treat people (I'm proud to say Thank You is her favorite phrase), how we live for our family, how to always have fun and not take anything too seriously.

I guess it all remains to be seen...look us up in 18 years!