Skip to main content

My Maddie

I often say that my career has prepared me pretty well for parenting: five years of Starbucks taught me how to live off of no sleep; working in the prison taught me how to appreciate my freedom; working with mental health patients taught me how to deal with schizophrenia, violent outbursts and periods of mania and managing has taught me how to have difficult conversations and to use positive reinforcement. Maddie, however, has taught me the most important lesson of all, which is how to love unconditionally, even when she is exhibiting all of the aforementioned lessons. 

Toddlers, my friends, they sure are something.

Luckily, they are also hilarious little humans. This morning after getting dressed (which is either the most awesome or the very worst most terrible thing ever, depending on the day, or minute) Maddie dug around in her toy box pulling out a pair of bright orange star sunnies and a metal Curious George radio. She then proclaimed "mama, I going to school" and gave me a kiss, a hug, and an uggamugga (if you don't know Daniel Tiger, it is like an Eskimo kiss). She asked that I "stay put" and left towards the front door, only to come back a minute later to tell me "I can't find school, so I go to the zoo instead".

Sounds like a logical alternative to me.

This little girl of ours is turning into such a funny, passionate and smart person. She continues to have a ridiculous amount of energy and loves to the max - people, animals, intimate objects like her bath toy boats that she has to kiss goodbye at the end of tubbie time. She is starting to understand empathy and that her actions have a real effect on people, though the face pulling and screaming bouts are not quite being understood as the very worst thing she can do to mama at the end of a long day. She is very interested in letters and the alphabet song and points out "H for Hannah" and "D for Dada" whenever she sees them in a puzzle or book. She flips through her photo book to point out her Aunt Megan and her Gramma and her Jane and is so very excited to go on a plane to see Gramma and Grandpa Bob in a couple of weeks. 

My Maddie is growing and changing and evolving every minute of the day and I am just so glad to get to be her mama and be along for the ride. 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Day in the Life: Food Edition

If you haven't figured it out from this here blog, my life is pretty darn busy but I crave routine and do a pretty good job at sticking to a "regular" schedule, even if it does start at 5am and end sometime after 10pm. One of my most consistent things in life is definitely my eating. I love to eat, and love trying new foods and new restaurants but during the week I am the most boring person ever because I literally eat the same things at the same time every single day. At dinner, we get buck wild, but between 5 and 5, I am like a senior citizen. Here is a day in the life of what I am munching on: 5:00am (or whenever I stop hitting snooze) : one cup of coffee brewed at home with a hefty splash of half and half. I recently switched to the "light cream" store brand but that is as low on the fat as I will go - milk just does not do it for me like cream does. Post-run/workout (around 6:45) : second cup of coffee with cream Commute breakfast (between 7:1

Monday night and half a bottle of riesling.

You may be asking yourself now, "why the hell does Stef need a blog, she spends too much damn time on myspace/facebook/perezhilton as it is". Well, I have one because I need one. I get writers cramp too bad to keep a journal, and I can drink and type with much more ease. But really, I think this will be a good way to organize my thoughts, and keep my scattered friends better posted on my life. When your closest friends span from Seattle to Spain, it can be hard to keep them up to the minute on the important things in life - like what I'm doing on any given Monday night. (The answer tonight is sitting on the couch watching the Red Sox, while Matty reads the Augusten Burroughs book I just finished, having just ate a super yummy "smothered pork chop" dish that said Matty made, and applying for jobs at the Crime and Justice Institute). I really just plan on rambling on about my life, and sharing things that I think you ought to know like if Matty and I went for a bi

Quarantine Diaries//The Good Stuff

Welllllll, I guess this is what I get for never getting around to writing that blog about the Disney Cruise we went on, because we are going straight from talking about sober January to um, a very different situation in...what month is it again? Let's get to it. Mondays in quarantine tend to be hard for me; not that I was a big fan of them before, but something about being stuck at home to work, school, parent, exercise, eat (you know all those things we used to do outside the home) just makes Mondays suck extra. While Friday is like a celebration of another week down, maybe another week closer to being on the other side of this, here comes Monday feeling like a daunting reminder that we are still very deep in this.  I have so many thoughts, so many feelings and so many emotions, and coming here to write things down is going to be a part of my routine again, because someday I want to look back at this and be proud of how we handled things, happy about being through it and th