A Week's Happenings

So what's been going on here for us in the past week?  Some good, some not so good, some icy icy coldness.

For starters, Violet has kept up her crazy pooping habits.  This tiny girl is going 2, 3, or 4 days between bouts of pooping.  This is quite unusual for her age and it's a bit unnerving, I must say.  She is obviously gaining weight, even without a fancy pediatric scale to tell us quantitatively how much, so I suppose there's nothing to worry about.  On the plus side, I have fewer poop-filled diapers to change and Violet has not the slightest hint of diaper rash.  Let's just say that WE KNOW when she finally has a bowel movement so she never has a chance to sit in a dirty diaper.  In less scatological and more doleful news of Violet, she has started to have crying jags in the evenings.  She started last week and they have escalated through this week, with just one evening's break here or there.  It's kind of upsetting to see her cry so much and be nearly inconsolable.  I guess that's not quite accurate because if we put her down, she wails with even more misery and force, so I suppose we are consoling her at some level.  It's forcing me to be more creative in thinking of comforting mechanisms because with Grace, I always just stuck her on a boob and she was happy; if sometimes she wasn't honestly hungry, she would do some comfort nursing and calm down.  Anyway, I've pulled out the baby/parenting books and started to think of other routines and coping mechanisms to try.  Violet's colic-style crying is confined to the evening hours so I'm sure it's nothing medically or physically wrong with her--  poor little thing is just overly tired or overly stimulated or flipping out or whatever.

In happier news, I got a smashing haircut last week.  Hooray!  One day when Grace was at school, I convinced my mom to accompany me to the salon and hold Violet while they chop chop chopped my hair off.  It's a lot shorter and lovely and chic and I'm very happy with it; I'll work on getting a picture to post.  Actually, now that my hair is shorter and not pink, I need to get new pictures for my profiles on everything from Facebook to Twitter and everything; those pictures are not quite accurate anymore.  Also last week, I started running again.  We had some beautiful days and I was feeling so squashy and lumpy and lethargic that it sounded like a lovely thing to do.  It went quite well and I managed to go running 3 times last week.  I have a lot of weight I'd like to lose so I feel pretty motivated to start in with the exercise and healthful eating and whatnot.  I don't feel comfortable putting Violet in the childcare at the YMCA for another month or so, leaving me with options of getting outside or doing something at the house.  The icy weather this week threw a bit of a wrench in my new exercise plans, but I plan to get back to it.  I have such a love/hate relationship with running.  Well, let's be honest-- it's mostly hate.  But it's one of those exercises that I want to like, and that I sometimes do like, but sometimes I turn on it and cannot stand the monotonous putting one foot in front of the other.  Having children has changed my attitude toward exercise and running and whatnot.  I remember hearing people talk about exercise as something you do for yourself, i.e. some "me" time, and mostly this has made me think that those people need to discover such things as books, movies, TV, the internet, and the like to make their "me" time actually enjoyable.  I kind of get it now, though; going running feels like getting away from the demanding job of caring for two tiny people for a little while and doing something just for me.  Let's hope this thought lasts...

The icy weather came even to Texas this week and has caused us to hole up in our house and play the hermit.  Grace's preschool was cancelled on Wednesday so we stayed in and watched the icicles melt, after staying in the house on Tuesday while the ice actually came down.  Then today we stayed home too because I didn't have any errands I particularly needed to do and it seemed too cold to go for a walk.  The end result is that Grace, Violet, and I have not left the house for 3 days.  Violet and I are fine with this, but Grace finally fell victim to cabin fever the middle of this afternoon.  She went kind of crazy, running and yelling and being insane all over the house.  Life had been quite pleasant and relaxing and comfortable with the two girls up until that point, but then Grace lost her ability to be entertained by anything in the house and succumbed to slightly claustrophobic madness. Mental note: 3 days is her limit.