Two Years Ago…

All this fall, I have been vividly remembering not last year when the babies were infants, but two years ago. When I had a young toddler the exact same age Elsie and Delia are now, while also finding out I was pregnant, dealing with crippling nausea, then the overwhelming news that it was twins! And then still more nausea, ha ha! And then packing up our stuff and showing our house, selling it and househunting, finally moving and three days later the the drama of preterm labor, bedrest, and finally (FINALLY) babies!

Whew! Mostly I am just glad to have made it through, that was all a very harrowing time. Though it is definitely bittersweet to think of little babytoddler Emma. Ooof. I still felt like such a new mom, and she was really a challenge then, needy, hard to get to sleep, stubborn, mama-centric, etc. Its hard for me to peel away what was truly her personality and challenges versus my own issues at the time; in fact its pretty much impossible!

But she adapted so incredibly well, given the circumstances. We weaned (and she started helping herself to snacks)! She started sleeping in her own bed! She somehow dealt with endless hours of me lying horizontal on the couch, happily playing with little people, reading books, pouring water back and forth in cups on the table next to the couch, and of course, my savior at the time, Sesame Street. I remember feeling SO bad that she didn’t get out of the house much, that she wasn’t getting enough exercise or time with peers. Looking back, I see how lucky I was that she was generally happy just hanging out, and amazingly calm and mellow for a young toddler. Elsie and Delia have So Much Energy at this age! Climbing everywhere, needing to run and jump and GET OUT. Thank goodness I am healthy and mobile able to oblige!

The nursing thing is also on my mind a lot, because we are still going strong now, and with Emma we were winding down to only a couple of sessions, finished for good the first week in January. That was so HARD! She took it way better than me, I was somewhat of a wreck about it for quite awhile. But with Elsie and Delia, it is so easy, I am so happy to be able to follow their lead, to continue with a good thing while it lasts. I need to dedicate a separate post to this topic, really, but the gist of it is that we love extended nursing and have no plans to stop in the near future. Yahoo!

And here are a few of my favorite Emma pics from October through December of 2007 (and one from last week of E & D for comparison). For some reason, she always looks way more like Delia than Elsie to me — I think its face/cheek shape. Sniff sniff. What a cutie!