Two amazing years!

Before we had Elijah, I wondered if having a baby would interfere with life in a way that would make me want my baby-less life back. Dan and I love to travel and we love to get out and do fun things and I wondered if those things would come to a dead halt and make me sad. For a few months after Elijah was born our life was certainly put on hold, but that was to be expected. Turns out, once the newborn fog lifted, we were still able to travel and we still find time to get out and do things that we enjoy. And I must say, it is all much much sweeter now because we know to appreciate it in a way that we never knew before. Vacation before was fun. Vacation now is AMAZING. We have had to give up a lot of our spontaneity, but that is such a small price to pay for the new wonderful things that have spilled into our lives.

I'm so happy that we decided and were able to become parents. I could never have fathomed the weight of the following words before we had our little Elijah: The things I have learned! It's like I was roaming around the world half-blind before February 20, 2007, with half a heart and half a brain. I just wish I would have met Dan sooner so we could have twelve kids! I'm kidding.

Elijah, thank you for changing my life in the best way I could have ever imagined. Thank you for making me a better person. Thank you for showing me how fulfilling it is to live life with someone else's best interest as my first priority. I love you like crazy. Happy second birthday, sweet boy!

If you find a manual for ELIJAH PORTA please send it our way!

I feel so stupid sometimes when it comes to parenting. I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time. Now that we have a strong-willed and very stubborn toddler, being a parent suddenly requires a lot more thinking and planning. I find myself doing or saying things and then I think, Wait! Was that right?

Elijah still isn't saying many words (just HI and BYE, which he says ALL THE TIME) and he only knows a couple signs, so he has a hard time communicating with us. I imagine this is very frustrating for him because it is definitely very frustrating for us. Because of his frustration, I think, he has started hitting Dan and me in order to get our attention or to let us know when he is upset with us. We have been consistent in letting him know that hitting is not ok. We have even designated a little time-out spot for him to sit in for a few minutes when he does this. I feel a little bit of guilt about punishing him for not knowing how to communicate, but he has to learn that hitting people is never appropriate. I just hope that time will bring better communication skills, which will bring a lot less frustration.

Another point of stress for us lately is eating. It seems like overnight, Elijah suddenly won't eat food that he has loved for his whole life. And sometimes he will refuse a meal altogether. Last night I prepared his favorite meal for him, a piece of lasagna with yummy cheesy gooey-ness. He wouldn't take a single bite. I got frustrated and put a lot of pressure on him to eat. That just made him more upset and then we were both upset and had a lousy rest of the evening.

I felt really unsettled about how I handled the dinner situation, so I did some thinking and realized that Dan and I needed a plan. We know what eating habits we want Elijah to have and which ones we don't want him to have, so we needed to set some standards on how to handle meal times. We chatted about it, and I feel really good about the ideas we came up with. It always feels good once I have my head somewhat wrapped around something.

Every day, I'm amazed at how much I don't know about being a mom. Something new happens and I have to think about the best way to handle it, usually after I've already handled it poorly. I want a pet fairy who whispers all the correct answers into my ear in moments of parental distress.

Curls and travel dialogue

Please see the poll to the right and vote on whether or not to get rid of these curls. I don't want to cut off Elijah's hair but Dan does. I told him that if the results from this poll weigh in favor of cutting them off, I will take Eli to get a haircut next weekend. If the results weigh in favor of not cutting his hair now, I will get it cut in two months. Dan says if we wait two months, he will grow out a mustache until the day of the haircut, I think as an attempt to lure me into changing my mind. Oh well, I guess he'll be the one with the sweaty upper lip in the middle of the summer! EVERYONE reading, please vote! We need a wide variety of people included (we can't have only my close friends voting, to be fair).


On a completely different note, I found some of the communication between parents and children in airplanes/airports this past weekend interesting enough to share here.

Sitting in the MSP airport, I overheard a mother tell her 12ish-year-old daughter to turn off her ipod because "once we get on the plane, you'll need to do it anyway."

The daughter ignored her mother and continued to listen to her ipod.

Mother: Fine! The plane is going to crash and EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE! All because of YOU! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!

I giggled because I thought, she has to be kidding, right? I turned around to see that based on the looks on both of their faces, she was not kidding. A few minutes later, just when our flight had started pre-boarding, which means there was still plenty of time before the coach class would begin boarding, the daughter said she was going to run to the bathroom quick.

Mother: You can't go to the bathroom NOW!

The daughter got up and went anyway. The mother yelled after her, "Fine! MISS THE FLIGHT! See if I care!"

Shortly after, I heard the father call their other daughter a moron. Nice.


Then on the airplane from Ft. Myers back to MSP, there was a baby about Elijah's age crying in the row behind us. The ride was pretty bumpy for a while and every time it got really bad, she would cry harder. I didn't have a problem with the crying. I have a lot of patience for that because I know how hard it is to fly with a baby. It was the mother who was annoying me.

She kept telling her baby to "STOP THAT!" Dan and I kept looking at each other like, Really? Does she think that's going to work? Then the loud SSHHHHHHH-ing started followed by more STOP THATs.


Good, so now we know what works! I have a few things to work on: I need to turn up the drama, I need to start calling Elijah degrading names and I need to yell at him to STOP THAT whenever he is upset. You can all thank me now for sharing this parenting wisdom!