The Domino Effect

dominoes

Are you sick of hearing about what I did on my Virginia vacation yet? I hope not, cause here comes yet another tale. In this exciting chapter, you will hear about how I embraced my Inner Senior Citizen.

I became an avid Domino player. That’s right, yours truly, generally known for being super nerdy hip, young, and dazzlingly stylish, succumbed to peer pressure from my parental units and embraced this old folks home favorite. And what’s worse, I dragged my uber-cool husband down with me.

My mom and I played on a team against my dad and Bobby, and we tooooootally whooped ’em. It was legen…wait for it…DARY! In the world of familial domino-playing, that is. It was on like Donkey Kong! My mother and I seriously laid the girl power smackdown on those dudes, while high-fiving each other and ruthlessly taunting our competition. It was like, totally a “Girls Rule, Boys Drool” moment. Although, in the nursing home, where this game is usually played, I think both genders drool equally.

But anyways. We played every night we were there, and this week I have been having Domino withdrawal. I am thiiiiiiis close to running out and getting a set for Bobby and I. Dominoes in hand, I can then start cruising long-term care facilities for people to play against us.

Protect your Grandmas, people! Or I’m gonna force them to play Dominoes against me. And I plan to show NO mercy.

But to save you, my friends, from a similar dotted-tile related fate, I’ll give you one piece of advice: do not accept an invitation to play games with two people whose most exciting upcoming life events are going on Social Security and/or Medicare in the next 30 days. I beg of you, don’t do it! It’s too late for me, but YOU – you have your whole life ahead of you!

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Photo by Great Beyond on Flickr

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Enamored

mischievous

Last week on vacation I did something I didn’t even know I could do. I fell in love with my daughter all over again.

Sophie will be three in November, and she has both enthralled and confounded me for much of her life. She is just so different from her easygoing brother, and really, so different in personality from most kids I know. She has tried my patience, stretched my mothering skills, and made my heart burst with pride.

sunshine girl

Sophie has been slower to develop her language skills than Joshua was, and that has been frustrating for all of us. But this last week on vacation, she really started to talk more. And I love her little voice! I love what she has to say. Since she’s no longer frustrated by being unable to communicate, she’s showing a whole new layer of sweetness.

And, oh, it’s so amazing. Being able to talk with my daughter has brought me so much joy. And I am just overwhelmed by it.

Rock!

I often joke with my friends that I “talk smack” about Sophie – because she has given me some very trying moments. Plenty of which I have read about on this blog. And yesterday, when she was throwing fits at the pool, I may or may not have told Cortney that I was going to look into boarding school for three-year-olds. BUT. Let me set the record straight: I am hopelessly in love with this little girl, and abundantly blessed with the task of being her mama.

Love you Sophie girl.

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Changed

“It’s like I’m walking on snowshoes,” I said groggily to my husband one night. Joshua was six weeks old, and we’d just moved him out of the bassinet in our bedroom and into his crib in the nursery. When I’d walk down the short hallway in the middle of the night to nurse him, I felt I could only shuffle. My feet felt weird. “It’s like I’m walking on snowshoes,” was the only way I could think to describe it, even though I’d never actually walked on snowshoes before. In addition to the “weird” feeling in my feet, the pain and tingling in my knees and on the tops of my feet that I’d had during pregnancy (and attributed to weight gain) hadn’t gone away yet.

Exhausted and exasperated, I went to my family doctor. She had me stand up and take my shoes and socks off.

“Have your feet always been flat?” She asked.

“Uh, I don’t think so.” I replied.

“Well, they are really flat. Looks like your arches probably fell while you were pregnant. That’s what’s been causing all your pain and tingling.”

Oh, flat. Flat like snowshoes, would you say?

It was then and there in that doctor’s office that I came to the realization that after having a child, I would never be the same. It would not just be the long scar at the bottom of my abdomen that would mark me as having given birth. There were many things about me that would be irreversibly altered.

My first baby melted my heart and flattened my feet. My second melted my heart and curled my hair.

They have both made me so much better than I was.

How have your children changed you?

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