Odds and Ends

From June 12

An update, in list form:

• Maia's having one successful potty trip per day, on average, over the last few days. We dialed back a bit on the intensity and focus on potty training, and it seems to have helped the situation. She's now pretty good at having her BMs end up in the potty much of the time, which is AWESOME! She's very proud of herself, and a lot of her anxiety seems to have lifted. So, we're still making progress!
• I've started my official training routine for the Detroit Free Press half marathon, which is in mid-October. The schedule starts off pretty mellow, but ramps up quickly enough. According to my schedule (courtesy of Jeff Galloway), I'm going to be running 8 miles by mid-August, and then 14 miles two weeks before the race (which is, of course, 13.1 miles). It sounds intimidating, but I'm doing 5K-ish distances now, so I just need to stick with it. Paying the entry fee for the run will help!
• Maia's in a pattern right now of getting upset when I have to go to work in the evenings. I've worked the last two nights in a row, and both times she's been very clingy, asked to go with me to my destination, asked me to read books with her here at home, etc. We're wondering if this new Mama-centric clingy behavior is related to her recent spike in anxiety (the last blog post). We're guessing yes.
  
• Brian's had two software-group talks in the last two weeks (one in Flint, tonight in Southfield), and his big national talk is in Tennessee at the end of the month. There's a lot of collective pride in our family over this new addition to Brian's professional life.
• My doula business continues to roll along, despite the lousy economy. I attended a birth in late May, will attend another sometime in the next 4-5 weeks, and then another in August. That will be 12 births for me, I think, by the end of the summer. Sweet!
  
• We're feeling a lot of luck these days in work-related life. We were thrilled to finally pay off my car last month (got the title in the mail last week! Joy!), and we're finally, after two and a half years, starting to actually save money on a monthly basis rather than digging into the savings stockpile that we built up from 2004-2006. I had a few people tell me that this was actually possible when I resigned from my 40-hr/week job before Maia's birth, and I had difficulty believing it. But here we are, actually starting to live it. We know how lucky we are, and we're still profoundly cautious--in this economy, it could all disappear in a heartbeat. We know that for sure.
• We've added to Maia's bedtime routine: nightly read-alouds from a chapter book. We've started with Milne's Winnie the Pooh, and Maia seems quite enamored of this new tradition. Being read to every night by my parents for years (literally--it really was years) is one of my most distinct childhood memories. Thanks to Mom and Dad, I heard the James Herriot stories, Mark Twain's novels, Black Beauty, and countless other books well before I could read them myself. (I still have images from Tom Sawyer in my head to this day, and I don't think I've ever actually read that book myself.) So, we've decided to keep the tradition going with Maia. We sit out in the hallway with a small reading light, and Maia's bedroom door is slightly ajar, and she gets cuddled under her covers and listens to the story. I don't know how much she can actually process at this point, but it's not about content right now . . . it's about routine and together time and the pure, unadulterated joy of reading novels. :)

So there are some of our recent developments. Life is good, summer is here, and it's only a month until we go up north!