REALITY CHECK

Posting has gone down here. Way down. With work, commuting, taking care of Lauren, making dinner, and trying frantically to create photobooks before my Groupons expire, posting has taken a back seat. It is a definite change to my life. I feel like I'm so much more busy, but I've also been getting up earlier and making better use of my time. This morning, I got Lauren and I ready to head out and we were early so I turned on some tunes so that she could dance (her latest favourite thing) and then scrubbed down all of the sinks in our house. 

Lauren has done amazingly well at daycare this week! Her daycare worker, K, offered her Shreddies on her first day this week and Lauren decided that since the Shreddies were so great, she would be okay going there. She has napped like a champ, played by herself and with some of the other kids and spent lots of time outside at daycare (even jumping on the trampoline).

In the evening, Lauren is so wiped from daycare that she goes to bed by 7. It is nice to have a bit more time in the evening to ourselves and I have been using that time to work on those dreaded photobooks. I say dreaded, not because I don't love a good photobook, but because I was stuck at 5 months. Until that time, I love looking at photos of Lauren, but at 5 months, when she starts to look tired and sad in some of the photos and I just know what is coming up, I hate it. However, it is amazing what I will force myself to do in order to save some money. So I sat down with Matt beside me and started editing photos. There has been a lot of crying, with one particularly hard evening, but also a lot of healing. Putting the photos and the words from the blog onto paper make it seem so much more real than just an elusive memory. It is hard because it makes it seem to permanent. Yes, it was a time in Lauren's life, but it doesn't define who she is today so I just don't want to go back there and get stuck again mentally. Today I ended on this post. Maybe not the best place to stop but it isn't her reality right now. Her reality right now is being curled up in her crib with Pat shoved down by her feet and her soft blanket draped across her side. And 9 hours from now, her reality will be starting on another day of mischief (like a few days ago when she toodled out of her bedroom where Elysha and I were and when I went out a few minutes late, expecting to see her playing with her toys in the kitchen, I found her sitting in the middle of the dining room table holding a container of cookies! Is it wrong that my first thought was to get the camera?). 

I'm excited to spend time with her again tomorrow. She is so much fun right now with so much dancing, her love of interactive songs, using my makeup brushes to pretty up the bathtub, climbing on anything and everything and her interest in going new places. Tomorrow she is going to come to my school for a bit in the evening for a Back to School Picnic. I wonder what she'll wear?! (Oh, because that's one of the other things, she picks her shoes now, so her outfits need to match the day's shoe selection. Her obsession with shoes has started already.)