Back to a dull roar

My apologies for the delay in posting new entries. The last 2 weeks have been pretty stressful and nothing I really wanted to document. The child care situation I referred to in the last post ended almost as quickly as it started. It was just a poor match between us and this particular lady. Each day that Dillon was there, the situation got worse. Never was it a matter of Dillon not being cared for, but just one where all parties were unhappy. She has a fairly small space that the kids spent their day in, which did not work well for Dillon who wants to roam. Besides the unfortunate falling apart of yet another child care situation was the fact that my normally very social baby has suddenly become very scared of me leaving her somewhere. We went to our playgroup that we’ve been going to for the last month or so and she cried and wouldn’t let me put her down. It took her a good 15-20 minutes before she believed that I wasn’t leaving her. Never before did the thought even seem to cross her mind.

It has all worked out, though. Courtney, the girl that has done most of our babysitting in the past was available to come to the house the 2 days a week that I am working. She gets Dillon dressed, takes her places, plays outside with her, and takes a nap with her (after rocking her to sleep, thank you!). Dillon, in turn, looks very happy when I come home. She also just spontaneously says Courtney’s name on the days Courtney isn’t here. Hopefully this will last for a while.

So on to the cute things she is doing. She’s still a total chatterbox! She’s starting to put together more 3 word sentences. “There’s a circle” is a fairly distinct one. Its funny how many people will stop us in the grocery store to comment on how god her vocabulary it—because she & I have been chatting the whole way through the store! She’s also really into poop right now. She’ll tell me that the baby has pooped, so I’ll get her a wipe. She’ll make this big production about lifting the baby’s legs (and all babies are subject to this special treatment), wiping the baby’s bum and then putting a diaper of some sort on the baby. We also have to talk about how everything poops. She’s particularly fascinated with the fact that Satchmo poops. She’ll go on & on about it for most of a morning if she happens to notice him pooping outside.

We went to the park this afternoon so she could play on the swings. It’s definitely getting to be fall—the high today was around 47 degrees, though it isn’t supposed to continue being that cold. I didn’t dress either of us warmly enough, so we both had cold hands when we left the park 45 minutes after we got there. But not before watching a squirrel puttering around. She kept calling it a mouse and asking to pet it. I explained that it is a wild animal and we don’t pet wild animals—only look at them. She seemed OK with this, though we did follow it around for a while from a safe distance. And true to form, there was the inevitable question of “Squirrel poop?”

Thankfully not right then, it didn’t!