Eden is really into doctors and school right now.
I'm not sure where the doctor thing came from. We are really behind in her well-baby visits. Anyway, Ed & Debby have an excercise chair and every time I pick her up after work she wants to go through the routine: Mommy lies down in the chair, Eden looks in my eyes, Eden pats my tummy, lifts up my shirt and presses my belly and announces me "good," Eden takes off my shoes to check my feet (???), and then we go chart how tall I am on the closet door that holds a couple hundred Jarrell Family Growth Measurements. It's too cute.
Tomorrow mrorning, we are going to go visit a preschool for a tour. There are three preschools we are looking at right now, priced low, medium and high. On the way home tonight, I turned around in the car and told Eden, "Guess what? We're going to go visit a school tomorrow!" I thought we could approach it like a field trip, since she most likely won't be going until next Fall. She immediately lit up and said, "My school?!" which totally took me off guard. Apparently, she has already thought about this! I told her we were going to go shopping for a school and were going to look at several different schools so we could pick the best one. Hopefully she gets that analogy. At one point I sighed a happy sign and said, "I looove school!" and she replied, emphatically, "Me, too!" Hee hee.
Speaking of shopping, I can't begin to say how cute she is when we go shopping. She and I went to the craft store the other evening so I could look for fabric for Auntie Erinn's new baby, baby Simone. I started out looking at the fat quarters, and Eden would run down the aisle to grab my selections, run way back down the aisle to her predetermined basket location, and go about sorting and organizing all the colors. When I thought I had what I needed she wouldn't let me look at them until she had stacked them "just right." She was SO helpful that I suggested she go pick out some stickers on our way out. We found the sticker aisle, and she hemmed and hawed, gently removing one sticker pack at a time from the merchandise peg and slowly turning it over and inspecting it before she replaced it and moved on to the next one. Occasionally, she would come running to me holding one saying, "This is the best one. Buy this one." only to change her mind and say, "No, Mommy, no buy. Keep looking." And the whole process would begin again. If I walked too close or did anything that appeared to be speeding her process up she would look up at me, put her palm out in front of her and say, "No, Mommy, no. Not finished. Keep looking." It was the dearest shopping trip I'd ever had.
She's starting to wean herself more at night now, too. I still lie in bed with her, and we have our routine. But she will only nurse for five minutes or so, then turn away from me toward the wall with a whispered, "Ni-night, Mommy." She'll spin back around a few times exclaming "Milk!" or just to pat me and make sure I'm still there, but our 60 minute falling asleep rituals have naturally shrunk down to 15 or 20 minute rituals. Her daytime naps seem to be shortening, too. If people find out how much I've "coddled" her at night time I invariable get incredulous looks, pity and advice, but I wouldn't change a thing if I got to do it all over again. She will never again be this little, and our nursing days will eventually end. She'll move on to more grown-up behaviors, as she is, and I'll eventually end up back in my own bed from start to finish. That will be nice, for sure, but sharing nighttime with my baby and now my toddler has been more wonderful than I can put into words. It's really been a gift. I know that these sorts of gifts are different in every mother/child relationship; if we have another child our experience would more likely than not be entirely different. I am just really, really glad that Eden and I have this time together and I am appreciating and savoring it all the more as I see it gradually coming to a close.
That's all for now. My laptop's battery is almost dead and it's time for me to go to sleep, anyway.
Coming soon: my new yoga adventures and Eden's first (real) Halloween pictures!
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