Category: Tired Mommy’s Tales

25 months of sunshine

Posted on by Sarah Marshall

My “little” Munch is 25 months old today.  It might be un-cool to still be thinking in terms of months of age once your 2 years old but I’m gonna go with it anyway.

25 months

Some quick Brooke highlights at 25 months old…

She’s SO talkative!!  I can’t believe we had a speech therapy evaluation for this child because she’s become a chatterbox!!  She also loves to sing!!  Around her birthday we sang “Opie cee you” to everyone in the household, including Sheed, close to a gazillion times.  We always sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star at bedtime and thanks to Barney, “If All The Raindrops”, “Mister Sun” and “I Love You” are also favorites.

She’s on a transportation kick.  She loves things that go…we took our first train ride a couple weeks ago and loved it!!  She’s started noticing the buses, both school & METRO, and even tried to catch up to one to ride it one day when we were in Midtown.  Another favorite, “hairplanes” and “heli-cack-cack-ters”.  It can take about 3 times longer to get from the front door to the car if there is one of either in the sky because we have to look up and announce it at every step.

Potty training is…..going.  Brooke either resists actually staying on the potty until she’s done or gets REALLY comfortable and refuses to get up.  Very rarely to we find a middle ground.  When she wants to be, she can be very successful at it and when she’s feeling stubborn, she’s not.  There’s no rush though so we’re just going with the flow.  HA!  No pun intended!

She’s blowing us away with how well she’s picking up shapes, colors, counting, and her ABCs.  And when I say shapes, I’m talking hexagons, ovals, crescents, not just circle and square.  I found a Shape game app for my iPhone and she loves earning stickers by choosing the right shape.  She has a couple Melissa & Doug puzzles, these and this one, and she flies through them.

We still love cooking and baking together.  She makes some awesome scrambled eggs, is an expert at stirring pancake batter, loves creating new recipes with salt & pepper.  Baking bread in the breadmaker is probably the easiest kitchen project we do…its mostly dry ingredients so even if there’s mess its super easy to clean up.

She’s just so much fun.  Sure she makes me want to tear my hair out sometimes but she mostly just warms my heart.  I’m having such a good time watching her grow and just can’t wait to see as she continues developing into her own little person.

So what do we DO?

Posted on by Sarah Marshall

If you’re on Facebook I’m sure you’ve seen many of your friends share the video made by Ellen Degeneres regarding the rise in teenage bullying and suicides.  I agreed with her message and clicked the “Share” button with no hesitation.  Looking through my newsfeed, many of my friends did as well. 

But now what??  As much as I’d like to think it will, sharing a video on Facebook isn’t going to halt this vicious cycle.  What tangible actions do we take to keep more precious kids protected?  To keep more kids from having so little self-respect that they have to break down others to make themselves feel good about themselves?  What resources are out there to help these kids?

It would be easy for me to shrug and say “My daughter’s 2.  I don’t have to worry about this yet.”  But I am worried.  If nothing changes, what will the schoolyard be like in 10-12 years?  Will bullies find another vessel to spew their hate?  I don’t want to sit by and find out then.

The easy answer is everyone parent their kids.  Teach them to respect others.  Make them feel supported and that they can come to you if they are being bullied.  But that message must be falling on deaf ears if children are still dying.  Somebody is not holding up their end of the bargain and I’m not waitng for my kid to be picked on to the point they see no point in living to do something about it.

So again I ask…now that we’ve “shared” Ellen’s video, what are we going to do now?