Quickies…

Leaving the house today, Jacey told me, “I will bring my Bible with me so I can read it in the store. That way I will not forget about God at the store.”

And that, folks, is how you know you’re doing something right.

~~~

Rylan is cutting his fourth tooth (bottom front two came in on the same night toward the beginning of October, top right was… November 16? Wednesday night either the week before or after Thanksgiving, now working on top left). He’s cruising all over the place, but he gets stuck UP–he doesn’t know how to let go of the couch/fireplace/toy he’s hanging onto and sit down. So he just cries until he falls or you come rescue him, whatever comes first.

~~~

If I leave the room to do something and both kids are in the room and Rylan fusses, Jacey will follow me and let me know, “Rylan is really sad that you left him. So will you come back so he can be happy?”

~~~

I got several great ideas from friends for “mama dolls,” but the mama doll didn’t make it on Jacey’s list for Santa, after all. So we’re off the hook there.

~~~

So do you have to teach kids modesty, or do they pick up on it themselves? Because, at some point, “I’m so pretty.” “That was really sweet of me!” and “That was a really pretty song I just made up.” won’t be so cute anymore!

To grandmother’s house

Jacey just had her first stay in Bonham without us. It’s the longest she’s ever been away from us: three nights. She and Cousin Haden came up on Saturday (Daddy and Uncle Jared drove Jacey and Haden halfway on Saturday and Nunu and Papaw came halfway to pick them up); Tuesday, Haden went home, and Daddy, Rylan, and I came up here.

She didn’t even miss us.

And I’m torn over this.

I’m thrilled that she loves her grandparents and that she doesn’t need us around all the time. It shows that she’s growing up and becoming self-confident and independent. We’ve done a good job of helping her adjust from the  needy mama’s girl she was a year ago to the big girl she is today.

But she didn’t even miss us!

Oh, she was happy to see us. She gave us kisses and hugs. She asked for me to put her to bed last night rather than Nunu. But she could’ve stayed a lot longer than three days without us. In fact, given the choice, I’m not sure she’d ever come home!

A while ago, she spent Saturday night with Mimi and Gramps. I went to pick her up from Bible class on Sunday morning and I said, “Did you miss us?”

“Yeah!” she said. “Can I keep spending the night with Mimi and Gramps?”

I know grandparents’ houses are fun. I know there are fewer rules and more sweets and more attention from the grown-ups than at home. And, this time, she had Haden here, too, and he’s way more fun than a baby brother! After all, he plays back… and doesn’t pull her hair. (I hope.)

But, as a parent, you still kind of want to know that you’re first. I was wondering–when would she prefer Mama and Daddy to grandparents? When would it be enough, and she’d be ready to come home? I suppose whenever the trip stretched out long enough that the rules had to go in effect there just like at home. What about if she was sick? Would she prefer Mama’s care to a grandma’s? Is that the only time she might prefer us to them?

Anyway, this was a huge milestone. I’m glad she can spend time without us. I’m glad I survived time without her! (It helped that I was sick with allergies and busy getting ready to come up here for Thanksgiving.)

But I kind of wish she’d missed us. Just a little bit.

Ah, well. Maybe next time.

Songbird

Music has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up in the church of Christ, you learn to sing from a very young age–you sing in worship service, sans choir or instruments, three times a week; Bible class is twice a week with kids’ songs. It only makes sense, then, that singing bleeds over into your every day life.

Growing up, I remember singing all. the. time. Sitting in the car, singing as a family–one of us would sing the ABC’s, one would sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and one would sing Baa Baa Black Sheep. It’s hard, when you’re eight, to keep singing your song while listening to those other ones! My mom made up silly songs all the time. My sister and I made up our own words to songs (“Rain, rain, come and play; lightning, thunder, sun go away!”); we put on shows with our friends where we danced and sang to Disney or pop songs (and, Saudi friends, I also have to mention “I’m dreaming of a sandy Christmas!”). (Oh and then I just remembered, “Just around the rubber band! Twang!” Good times.)

It was unthinkable, then, that my children would grow up without songs in their lives. It was Aunt Chelle who first took the Daisy Sour Cream jingle and customized it for Jacey Dae. When she was a baby, she could be at her fussiest, and she’d still stop and smile for “Jacey, Jacey, sweetie pea, bright and happy naturally…”

But as she got older, she didn’t really sing with us. She was speaking, but not singing. It made me a little bit sad.

I was so excited to hear her start to sing voluntarily after preschool started last year! You couldn’t understand anything she was saying, but you could catch enough words or notes to know what it was, assuming you already knew the song.

And now? Since speech class has started and she’s gotten more confident in what comes out of her mouth, she has become the singer I always expected her to be. She sings Bible class songs. She sometimes sings along in worship. She sings to her brother. She sings to herself. She even makes up songs!

Her made-up songs are always the same, and it is so sweet. They are always to the tune of the chorus of “Jesus Loves Me.” Usually, “Yes, there’s a mama! Yes, there’s a mama. Yes, there’s a mama! And we love them.” Then repeat, with “Dada,” “Jacey,” or “Baby.” Or any other family member’s name.

One time, she decided to sing one of these made-up songs, so she went back to the piano and pulled down the sheet music that was back there. She brought it up to the front of the living room and proceeded to sing her song, pointing to notes as she went. (And, in case you were wondering, it was the sheet music to Khatchaturian’s Toccata. Definitely not Jesus Loves Me.)

My favorite time she sang? I wasn’t even there. Apparently, she was at the store with Mimi and Aunt Chelle, and she started singing the theme to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Yes! She is so my child!

Any time we’re in the car and Rylan starts to cry, she sings to him. And it’s always, always, always Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. And, if he’s not already too worked up, it usually makes him stop crying, too!

But then there was tonight. After going to dinner with Mimi and Gramps at Red Robin, where Gramps was singing her the jingle for the restaurant (“Red Robin, yum!”), we were headed home after church and Rylan was crying in the backseat. “Jacey, can you sing to Rylan?” we asked. And, yes, you know what’s coming.

“Wed Wobin, yum! Wed Wobin, yum! Wed Wobin, yum!” she sang. Fast, with no break between the words.

Not quite what we had in mind…

But at least she’s singing!

Sleep training

The time has come: Rylan needs to put himself to sleep. With Jacey, we made it to eight months before we started having real sleep problems; up to that point, I would nurse her to sleep (I know, I know, bad habit, and it paid off in spades), we’d lay her down, and that was that. Then, when she was eight months old, she started waking up every. Half. Hour. No matter what. So I finally talked to the doctor, and we ended up sleep training.

With Rylan, I was determined, absolutely determined, that we wouldn’t get to that point. “Put the baby down sleepy but awake,” all the “experts” say. Well, there WAS no sleepy but awake period! He was awake, and then he was asleep. Period. Whether it was through nursing or rocking or even just laying by himself on the floor, he was either awake or asleep, but never in that middle-ground land that you’re supposed to watch for.

I talked to the doctor about it at his 4 month check-up, and she said there would be more sleepy times as he got a little older. So I kept rocking him to sleep. We’d lay him down, and he’d sleep all night, waking up once to eat.

And then, around 4 1/2 months, we moved him to his own room. He started waking up twice a night again because he wasn’t in his cradle in our room like he was used to. And I started to notice that he wasn’t being put to sleep once a night, either–we’d lay him down, he’d sleep for five minutes or thirty minutes or two hours, and he’d wake up. And we’d have to re-put him down, rocking him to sleep again. We got to where he was doing this four or five times a night, and it would take two or three hours from when we put him down the first time for him to be asleep for good.

So, sleep training.

Here’s our routine: we get ready for bed, then come to the living room to nurse one last time, then go back to his room and read one book and one Bible story. He gets his bear/blanket that Jacey brought him in the hospital, and we say a prayer. Then I turn off his light, put him up on my shoulder, and rock him and sing two songs. Then kisses and I love you and bed.

We lay him on his back even though he’s a tummy sleeper, because when he’s upset on his tummy he creeps and he’d get stuck in the corner of his crib. But he doesn’t sleep well on his back, so we roll him to his belly later on, when he jumps and starts to wake himself up.

Until he falls asleep, when he cries, we go back to let him know he’s not alone. With Jacey, we followed the doctor’s packet’s instructions of 15-minute intervals. With Rylan being younger, that just felt like too long, so we did the whole increasing intervals thing–we started out going in to comfort at 3 minutes the first night, then 5 minutes, then 7, then 10, then 15. Every successive night, we started one step later down the line. (Really, the shorter intervals were because I couldn’t stand the crying and not doing anything about it; I wanted to ease him into being alone and us into listening to him cry!)

Here’s how it went:

1st night: screamed bloody murder for just over an hour before he fell asleep.

2nd night: screamed for 47 minutes.

3rd night: cried for 7 minutes. 7 minutes!

4th night: cried for about half an hour? Kept starting to fall asleep, then jerking awake. We decided to give putting him on his tummy, awake, a try. He fell asleep before Kellen got back to the living room. We have a belly-sleeping baby for sure.

5th night: started out on belly. This just made it easier for him to play, then easier to move when he started fussing. Had to roll him over to his back, then he cried for about 20 minutes before rolling over and falling asleep on his side, hugging his bear with both arms.

6th night: HORRIBLE. Screamed bloody murder for an hour. We wondered if he was sick or hurting. Finally rolled over and fell asleep on his side.

7th night: didn’t even cry. Protested once or twice, but not one cry. We gave him Tylenol first… maybe he was hurting on night 6? In which case, I’m the worst mother ever for letting him scream like that.

8th night: barely cried. Woke up, we rolled him over to his belly, barely fussed again. Yay!

I HATE sleep training. It feels like the least natural thing in the world, for me to sit down the hall and listen to my baby scream. Give me a little girl who’s tired and whiney, and I can be as stern and don’t-you-whine-at-me as I need to be. Give me a baby who can’t tell me what’s wrong and can’t understand when I tell him why I’m not there, and I want nothing more than to hold and comfort and bounce and kiss and murmur and be there. But my son needs to be able to sleep without me being there for him. But he doesn’t understand that, and it just doesn’t feel right to me to not be there. And on and on go my conflicting feelings.

This bothers me to the point that, if we had a king-size bed, I would lobby with Kellen for co-sleeping with our children. At least until they were old enough to understand when I told them they got to move to a big kid room. But in our queen-size bed, with Kellen who thrashes all over the bed in his sleep, I feel like I have to hug any children or small dogs right up next to me all night to keep them safe, so I don’t sleep well. I wake up if the kid next to me moves because he or she bumps me; I wake up if the dad on the other side of the kid moves to be sure that the kid is not under the dad. I’ve found our dog under him before, so this is a real concern!

And so, despite how wrong it feels, we sleep train. I know, I know–it’s good for them, and it never hurt a baby to cry, and all those other things you feel like you should say to comfort me. I’ve heard them before, and I say them to myself. It doesn’t help much, because the truth of the matter is, I just feel that, if my baby is crying, I need to comfort him.

So I spend sleep training curled in a ball on the couch, gritting my teeth and straining my muscles with the stress of not moving.

But, in the end, when all is said and done, Rylan can now put himself to sleep.

Thank goodness.

You win some, you lose some…

Our day yesterday, in poop:

Jacey potties in the morning and scares herself pooping. Yay!!

She immediately seems to need to poop more but vehemently refuses to try. Sigh.

At dinner at Red Lobster, she is forced to try multiple times, loudly protesting, to no avail. Sigh.

She poops in her panties. Still at Red Lobster. Boo.

When she goes to get cleaned up, she poops in the potty. Yay!!

When we get home, she potties again, and accidentally poops. Yay!!

Then we put on the new Pull-Ups we bought as a reward for the morning poop. She goes to put up her stickers from her poo-poo chart and toots loudly. “Mama, we need change my new Pull-Up,” she says. Boo.

Go to change Pull-Up- no poop! Just gas, apparently. Yay!!

~~~

You just wish your day could have been as fun as mine.

4-month and 3-year check-ups

Jacey and Rylan had their well child check-ups this week, and I’ve got two big, healthy kiddos. Here’s the run-down:

Rylan
Height: 26.5″ (92%)
Weight: 15 lb 5 oz (57%)
Head circumference: 16.8″ (58%)

Jacey Dae
Height: 39.25″ (92%)
Weight: 36 lb (92%)

So Rylan is really tall and skinny. Jacey was, too, but she never had that big a difference between her percentiles. At 4 months, Jacey was the same height as Rylan, but she was a whole pound bigger than him at 16 lb 6 oz. (Since I missed it, at 2 months Rylan was 23.5″ which was the 61%, 12 lb 4 oz which was 52%, and had a head circumference of 15.75″ which was 41%. Jacey, on the other hand, was 24″ and 14 lb 15 oz. She was waaaayy bigger than him at that age; he’s gaining on her!)

Both kids look good! I had a few questions for Dr. Haney, like what does it mean when Rylan’s soft spot goes so concave it could hold water? (Short answer- nothing, as long as he’s still having wet diapers and isn’t fussy.) And what was with his kidneys being dilated and then the VCUG being normal? (Some babies just go through a stage of development where there’s a narrowing that causes the dilation but it grows out on its own.)

My main concerns were about Jacey, though–first and foremost, does she need speech therapy? And the answer, as I’ve thought for a year now that it would be, is yes. She has a huge vocabulary, and she puts nice long sentences together, but she doesn’t say as many different sounds as she should. At our family reunion down in Aransas Pass a few weeks ago, my dad’s cousin, who was a speech therapist before she retired, talked to Jacey. She noticed that most of her words start with a D sound, and she said it’s not unusual, especially for a first child who has both her parents and one set of grandparents around almost constantly to listen to and understand her. But if she keeps it up, she’ll need braces, because every D sound is pushing her teeth forward with her tongue! So please let’s get that fixed. (Even though she’ll probably need braces anyway, because so many kids need braces that I don’t know why straight teeth are even considered desirable anyway.) So I’ve called the school district and left them a message to see if they have a program that will help her, and if not, I have a list of other speech therapists to call. I’m kind of relieved. I’m ready for other people to be able to understand her most of the time, and I’m ready to be able to understand her all the time. Right now I’m at about 90%, and she and I both get very frustrated by that last 10%!

We also talked a good deal about potty training. At some point, Jacey got it in her hand that pooping hurts. Whether because of diaper rash or because of having to push through constipation, something hurt, and now she’s scared to go. She has some problems with wetting her panties, but usually that’s just because she gets distracted while she’s playing, and that’s not abnormal for kids her age. Annoying, but understandable. But pooping? She’s only done that in the potty twice, and she doesn’t even like to go in a diaper. She only goes once every three days or so, which makes her get constipated and makes it harder for her to go every time, so then it DOES hurt, and it’s just a terrible cycle. So Dr. Haney said we need to give her a cup of apple juice, and if that doesn’t work a cup of prune juice, and if that doesn’t work a laxative, every day for probably a month. A month! To make her unable to constipate herself, so she won’t be scared to go any more. Yay.

So there we go. Our check-ups. Oh–Rylan had to get two shots plus an oral vaccine. At 2 months, he got 3 shots plus the oral, and oh. my. goodness. It was TERRIBLE. He screamed uncontrollably for I don’t remember how long. My dad went and bought us Tylenol (I didn’t have any of the infant stuff yet), and Rylan wouldn’t even let him hold him. It had to be me. And he still cried. So this time I gave him the medicine before the shots, and it was much better. He still got a little fussy, but no uncontrollable screaming. Thank goodness.

And now that’s all. The next time we go to the doctor–I hope–will be when Rylan is 6 months old!

Big sister

Writing a birth story is emotional and time-consuming. I’ll write about the actual birth, I promise, but here’s something quicker and easier to write that I can do NOW while I let the birth story keep percolating.

Jacey Dae has been amazing us lately with how big she is. She is so smart–she knows so much more than we realize!–and she’s been so loving with Rylan. Examples, anyone?

===

Today, Rylan was asleep in his cradle in our room. Kellen went in to put away some laundry and Jacey followed him. She ran over to Rylan’s cradle, started rocking it gently, and began to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to him, all on her own. She whispered it so she wouldn’t wake him up. Precious!!

~~~

As we were driving home from school yesterday, a grey Honda Odyssey passed us. Jacey looked over at it and said, “Mama! Like my van!” That’s definitely some sort of developmental milestone there–that she knows what our van looks like from the outside even while she’s in it, and that she knows other vans can look the same but not BE the same.

~~~

Rylan is still “her baby.” She did agree today that he was my baby and Kellen’s baby, too, but he’s Jacey’s first and foremost. If he peeps, she says, “Mama, my baby cry!” She loves to bring him things (“My baby need this,” holding out a blanket, a burp rag, a toy, a pacifier, the Boppy pillow, or any number or other things to him) or get me things for him or take his dirty laundry to his hamper. She’ll do anything for him. She’s finally getting to be not scared when he cries, but she still does anything she can to make him stop crying–usually, trying to give him his pacifier (but she won’t hold it still long enough for him to start sucking on it) or singing him a song at the top of her lungs.

~~~

Things we’ve discovered in the past few weeks that Jacey knows that we never consciously taught her: how to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Stars and her ABC’s (in Jaceyspeak, so you can’t really understand any of it), what a police car is, how to turn the water hose off and on (no idea how she got that one), what a wheel on a truck is (passing an 18-wheeler on the freeway, she said, “Mama, big truck! Look, wheel!”).

~~~

I went to change Rylan’s diaper today. Of course, he cried–I use the diaper change as a way of waking him up when he falls asleep while eating, and it displeases him greatly. Jacey said, “Mama, I check on my baby,” and climbed up on my bed so she could watch him as I changed him on the changing station I’ve set up on my dresser. Then, “I check his poo poo, too.” After I got the diaper off, she said, “His poo poo okay.” What she was checking for, I don’t know! Then we came back to the living room and she sat down to draw. “Draw Baby Rylan!” she told me. How sweet, I thought. And then, “Draw his poo poo, too.” Ah. Nice.

~~~

Some of Jacey’s new vocabulary: “Follow me, guys!” “Yeah, thanks” and “No, thanks.” “Ewwww…” (said while holding her nose, often about Rylan’s diapers or spit up.)  Not so new but ever-present: “By myself.” (We’re working on changing that one to “I’ll do it, please.” Because she can be not-so-sweetly adamant about her independence.)

===

Jacey Dae is indescribably precious to me. Not that should come as a surprise to anyone–a mother’s love can’t be put into words, and she is the girl who made me a mother, who taught me how to love. It’s sweeter than I can say, watching her grow up and become a big sister. I’m so proud of her for how she’s handling this. So far, we’ve had less of an adjustment than I thought we would–she just loves her brother.

And I love watching her love him.

13

I’ve been blogging ahead for a while now (at this point I’m writing one day before it posts, so not too far ahead, but one day I wrote four or five posts and was way ahead for a while there) so I missed blogging about this one milestone: single-digit weeks left in this pregnancy! As of Thursday, which is yesterday as I write or two days ago when this posts, I am 31 weeks pregnant. I have 9 weeks left. All those nesting things I mentioned in the last post? That makes those seem so much more important, and so much more stressful, because I have SINGLE DIGIT WEEKS to get them done in! In fact, really, I guess, you could say it’s just 8 weeks and some number of days now. Yikes! So mentally ready to meet this little boy! And so physically unready! It’s coming so soon!

——

A couple of days ago we were at the house of some family friends, Donna and Ross, to pick up a big girl dresser for Jacey Dae. While Kellen was out in the garage with Ross, getting stuff out of the attic, Jacey was climbing up and down the stairs inside. She got to the top, and I told her to hang on and come back down.

“Ohtay, Mama,” she said. Gripping the banister, she stepped down one step. “Duh,” she said.

Another step. “Doo.”

One more. “Dee.”

And then I realized–she’s counting! How cool, I thought, that she’s picking up on all the counting we do at home and school, to the point that she’ll start counting all by herself. So I started counting after her. “Three,” I said, smiling.

“Doh.” “Four.”

“Di.” “Five.”

“Dis,” she said, and I thought, wow, I usually don’t count past 5 at home! Who knew she could keep going? “Six,” I repeated.

“De-den.” “Seven,” I said, even more impressed.

“Day.” This was the landing. She turned the corner and kept going. “Di. De. De-den.” I wasn’t sure past 7 if she knew what she was saying or not, because her vowel sounds, while differentiated from one another, still didn’t quite match up with how I hear the numbers. But eleven? It had two syllables, and it definitely rhymed with how she said seven. She actually knew what she was doing!

I was shocked. And then even more: “Delf,” she said, or something like it–the right vowel sound and a v/f sound at the end. And then “Deh-dee.”

WHAT?! My daughter can count to 13! And I had no idea! I don’t really work on counting or the alphabet with her at home very much. A little bit, of course, and we read books and do puzzles with numbers and the alphabet in them, but I don’t really expect that she’s learning it. I know that makes me sound like the world’s best mother, but I always figured, as long as she couldn’t say the words back to me (because I still think she’s a little behind in her speech as compared to the other kids in her preschool class), it’s probably going in one ear and out the other, and even if she does say them back to me, I won’t know if she’s right or not.

Well, that’ll teach me to doubt my toddler’s learning capabilities.

When Kellen came in with Ross, I asked Jacey to show Dada what she could do. She immediately got shy with Ross watching, but I helped her get started, and she made it up to 13 again before I had to tell her the last three numbers. “Since when can she count to 13?!” he asked me. Well, at least I’m not the only one who underestimated her!

So, because I never count that high with her at home, I know some learning is happening somewhere, either at school or from Sesame Street. It’s funny–I never knew how proud I would be at hearing 13 little numbers come from a little mouth!

Christmas-y pics

So here’s the blogging cycle I’m stuck in lately: We do something fun. I think, “I WILL blog about this. But first I need to get the pictures off the camera, go through them, pick out the ones I want to put on the blog, resize them, then write the post and post the pictures. But I WILL do it.” And then I don’t get the pictures off (in my head I blame Kellen for this… I go to all the trouble of cataloguing our lives here; the least he can do is get the pictures off the camera for me! But of course I don’t ask him to do it… so I can’t really complain that he doesn’t do what he doesn’t know I wish he would) and it’s been so long since the fun thing happened that I don’t want to blog about it anymore because it just feels silly to post about Halloween in December, so I figure I’ll skip THESE few fun things but be sure to blog about THAT really big thing so at least I remember a little about this month of my child’s life. And I’m okay with that. Until the pictures finally come off the camera and I go through them, and I just can’t resist sharing the best ones with my current readers and my future self who will look back at this journal someday to remember what life was like ‘way back when. So I think, fine, one picture and a really quick blog post, then on to the BIG thing I can’t not describe in detail. But then, 30 pictures later, I give up and decide to blog about all of the things in detail after all. And I just have several posts in a row about stuff that happened a month ago, then stay silent for the next month while the cycle builds up again.

I have decided, for the duration of my pregnancy and the first few months of the baby’s life, to be okay with this cycle. Because clearly I’m not going to break it. Hopefully, when my life and hormones have returned back to somewhat-normal, I can make myself post more regularly, and closer to the events as they occur.

And, it not, well, I guess I’ll still be glad to see the pictures when I look back in future years, even if they were posted weeks late!

So here is my about-a-month-late post about Christmasy things.

Christmas tree fascination

For the first time ever, Jacey helped us decorate the Christmas tree. It wasn’t a very pretty tree that way… all the breakable ornaments on the top half, and the bottom half full of non-breakables hung four to a branch and backwards, to boot. But it was adorable. Clearly decorated by a child, and a monument to this once-in-a-lifetime first in my daughter’s life.

She LOVED helping. In fact, I picked some not-favorite and/or sturdier breakable ornaments and let her hang them on the bottom half, because I just couldn’t tell her, “no more.” Once she was done decorating, for the rest of the month, she’d go and look at her favorite ornaments, or pull off the ones with pictures of her to show to our guests, or lay under the tree (until Mama finally got around to wrapping some presents and filling up all that space down there!).

She’s definitely the best present I’ve ever had under my tree!

Sometimes, when the lure of the ornaments was too much, we’d have to tell her, “No touching the ornaments! You can look, but don’t touch.” Or they all would have been rearranged on the tree every day, which I guess wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, except that some would definitely have ended up broken or lost.

One of the low-hung ornaments was a gift from one of my flute students–a pretty little flute. And Jacey Dae, of all children, knows what a flute is. So she would get down there and try to play it. She’d put her mouth on it and hoot for all she was worth, then giggle like mad. And if she wasn’t allowed to touch it… well, she’d have to play it without touching it, then, wouldn’t she?

I guess she assumed that, if it didn’t come off the tree, she wasn’t really touching it! (See the backwards ornament-shaped book sharing space with the rocking horse? The whole bottom of the tree looked like that!)

Not-at-all Christmasy, but happened during December so here’s the picture now

One day, when Jacey ran back to her room and was quiet for far too long, Kellen and I snuck back to check on her. And this is what we found.

My precious little girl, all tucked up in her chair with a blanket, reading her book of Bible stories to herself. It makes me so proud of her, to know that, at two, she’s already learning to love the Lord! For now, it’s just stories and almost-wordless prayers (in fact, to prove she doesn’t quite get it yet, her favorite character on the front of her Bible book is Goliath, and she begs for his story all the time), but it’s the beginning of something really good.

Yellow Brick Road Christmas program

On the last day of preschool before Christmas break, ‘way back on December 9, Jacey Dae was in her first ever program. And it was precious.

I actually didn’t get to watch her much, because I teach the three-year-olds and the twos and threes performed together, so I was busy reminding my kids of the hand motions and coaxing them to sing louder. But every time I glanced down the row of kids at my sweet one, she was just grinning.

Everybody that knew her was shocked. We all thought she’d get up there, see all the strangers’ faces, and fall apart. I assumed she would spend the program in Ms. Natalie’s arms on the floor, or maybe even in Mimi’s, watching her friends up on stage. But, somehow, she was fabulous! She even remembered to do a few of the hand motions, and she loved jingling her bells.

That was the best part for everyone, I think!

After the program, Santa Claus gave each kid a little present and then took pictures with them. Jacey wasn’t too excited about that… until Santa pulled down his white beard and she saw Gramps’ mustache underneath! Then he was just fine. And she somehow seemed to understand that Gramps was just Santa’s helper, and not the real thing, because, afterwards, she would tell us that Santa Claus at the program was Gramps, but if we mentioned Santa bringing presents on Christmas, she never said a word about Gramps in connection with him then.

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So there you go. Three little mini-posts that could have been posted on their own, but I shoved them all together into one mega-post just to get them down. And there’s more to come!

Our little pray-er

Jacey said her first prayer all by herself tonight! We’ve tried to get her to say prayers before, but she never would, I think because her language skills still aren’t up to it and she knows it.

Last night, I got her to whisper what may or may not have been a prayer.

Tonight, we asked her if she would say our night-night prayer by herself, and she said yes! So I reminded her to start with “Dear God,” and to finish with “Amen” when she’s done. “Who are you going to pray for?” we asked. She told us Mama, Dada, and Jacey, very decisively. (She usually wants to pray for Baby Ben, a little boy at our church, but I guess she decided her first solo prayer should be for her family. Sorry, Baby Ben!)

We all bowed our heads. “Dee Dah,” Jacey said. “Dada, Mama.” Long pause while she thought. “Dada, Daedee.” Very long pause.

Dada whispered a reminder to her–”Amen?” he suggested.

“Mehmeh,” she said.

And we’re so proud.